Dynamic Baseball Training Program

strike zone | September 28, 2015 | Baseball, Tips | No Comments

Video: MLB Off Season Workout in baseball.

Guillén’s family got a lawyer to fight the suspension, and in the meantime he lived and trained without pay at the Nationals’ academy in Boca Chica, the epicenter of MLB’s training facilities in the country. There, he was notoriously hard on himself. Johnny DiPuglia, the Nationals’ international scouting director, said Guillén would even take himself out of games after making small mistakes like missing a sign from the third-base coach. “He had no education, none at all,” DiPuglia told me. “I didn’t think he had any teeth because he never smiled. And he always had watery eyes—there was always sadness in his eyes.”

DiPuglia made it his mission to cheer up the teenager, “to open up his heart.” He wouldn’t let Guillén pass without giving him a hug and a smile, and little by little, DiPuglia said, Guillén started to loosen up, becoming a better teammate and a happier kid. Later, when other talent brokers approached Guillén claiming that they could get him a better deal with a different team, Guillén turned them away because he felt that he owed it to the Nationals for sticking with him. After MLB finally authorized his contract at the beginning of 2011, the Nationals told him they’d be sending him to play for their rookie league team in Florida. He was to leave in mid-April.

When the headaches first came on, they were barely bad enough to mention. On April 1, Guillén headed home to La Canela to get his travel documents in order. His family brought him to a clinic in nearby San Cristóbal. When he returned to the academy and missed a couple of games, DiPuglia called him out—in the Dominican Republic, nobody rides the bench because of a headache. When the pain got worse, DiPuglia sent Guillén to the trainer’s room, where he was given some tea and an aspirin.

The next day, on April 6, the Nationals sent Guillén back to La Canela. He had a slight fever when he left the academy. On April 7, Michael Morla, a longtime local trainer who also acted as Guillén’s agent, was at the field in La Canela when he saw Guillén, a damp towel wrapped around his head, lurching toward the community’s health post, adjacent to the field. Morla approached Guillén’s family, urging them to take him to Santo Domingo for care: “The boy is bad!”

Guillén’s aunt and uncle rushed him to the Clínica Abreu, the capital’s best private hospital. But because his contract hadn’t been finalized he didn’t have health insurance, and he was refused treatment when his family couldn’t come up with the $1,300 admission fee. His aunt and uncle moved him to a more affordable Cuban-Dominican clinic nearby, where he was admitted on April 8. The doctors diagnosed bacterial meningitis. Guillén later had surgery to drain brain fluid, but the disease had progressed too far. On April 15, the day he was to leave for the United States, Yewri Guillén died.

THE TRAGEDY WAS a blip on the sports world’s radar, a blurb on ESPN’s Spanish-language crawl. The handful of news reports hit all the same notes: MLB said that the team followed appropriate protocols and did all that it could; the Nationals vowed to promptly vaccinate all the players at their academy; everyone from the team’s medical director to the general manager expressed sorrow about the death.

“A 16-year-old doesn’t know how to play baseball,” Red Sox star David Ortiz told me. “I don’t care what they say.”
Here’s what those stories left out: There wasn’t a certified athletic trainer, let alone a doctor, to evaluate Guillén at the Nationals’ academy, a spartan training camp with cinder-block dorms. No one from the team accompanied him to Santo Domingo or intervened when he couldn’t get into the Clínica Abreu. (The club didn’t cover the costs of his treatment until after he was admitted to the Cuban-Dominican clinic.) And following Guillén’s death, the club required his parents to sign a release before handing over his signing bonus and life insurance money—a document also stating that they would never sue the team or its employees.

Guillén’s death is the worst-case scenario in a recruiting system that treats young Dominicans as second-class prospects, paying them far less than young Americans and sometimes denying them benefits that are standard in the US minor leagues, such as health insurance and professionally trained medical staff. MLB regulations allow teams to troll for talent on the cheap in the Dominican Republic: Unlike American kids, who must have completed high school to sign, Dominicans can be signed as young as 16, when their bodies and their skills are far less developed.

“A 16-year-old doesn’t know how to play baseball,” the Boston Red Sox’s David Ortiz, an eight-time All-Star who grew up in Santo Domingo, told me. “I don’t care what they say. When I signed at 16, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.”

Teams are not eager to talk about the disparity between MLB’s domestic and foreign rookie leagues, as I would learn firsthand when looking into Guillén’s death in his native country. Nor is it much of a concern to locals: The sport is ubiquitous and beloved, and given the Dominican Republic’s 40 percent poverty rate, the allure of the big leagues is powerful. Ortiz said Americans don’t understand the pressure on Dominican teenagers, including in some cases to lie about their age. “The thing that made me mad about the whole situation is that people want to look at us like we are criminals,” he said. “I would like to get in their face and ask them, if that was their only way out, what would they do?”