THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

depends on how close i was to being signed without the age change, and some other stuff, but short answer: yeah probably.

When my uncle was 15, he faked his age up to 18 so that he could fight in WWII. He was indeed poor, but then, so was everyone else; it was the Depression, after all. Of course, that was then. Today, with the average male obese, unable to fistfight (per US Army regs), and likely overestrogenized, the answer to If You Were Poor May You Fake Your Birthdate? has to be Yes. If a lack of dough were no excuse, any other excuse would do just as well, today.

It seems like older Latin prospects could be a major inefficiency for some team to exploit.  If teams tried to identify the best American prospects at 16 and paid less and less attention to anyone each year he doesn’t get signed, it’s hard to imagine them doing as well as they do in the draft.  You’ve also got a number of Major League successes who have falsified ages because they didn’t get signed at 16.  It just seems like having such a strong focus of resources on 16 year olds could leave a lot of value out there for a team that wants to try to identify and develop older international talent.

In a best case scenario, teams getting away from focusing so many resources on 16 year olds could also reduce the pressure on prospects to falsify their identities.

Hell yes.  I lie to my employer about my age for far lesser sums than that…

Of course, teams will eventually take such deception into account, but poor infomration makes for inefficiency in any market. The liars think they are taking advantage of rich American teams, but they are also harming fellow Dominicans (those who actually are 16.)

Absolutely.  I did it in HS/college 20+ years ago, when I was under 21, and would do so today, now that I’m 25.

A couple or reasons affect the bonuses between 16 and 17 years old here in DR: 1) Projection of the body of the kid, being a year younger helps scouts sell future athletic abilities to teams, and 2) These kids do not have fundamentals of the game, they are just taught by buscones to work for tryouts. MLB teams prefer younger ones so they can teach the fundamentals in the Dominican Summer League affiliates of the teams.

It is also important to know that none of those kids go to school here in the DR. So we are talking about kids without leverage to negotiate. The main reason the teams keep giving big bonuses is that we don’t have a draft. As soon as there is an international draft, bonuses should go down since the kid only options would be taking the bonus or trying for the next draft now being a 1 year older.