Oneri Fleita noticed something odd on his first visit to the Cubs’ spring training camp. During his seven years as a minor-league player, coach, and manager in the Baltimore Orioles organization, Fleita had become accustomed to a multitude of Spanish-speaking ballplayers. Indeed, the most talented kid on the field often came from Latin America. So in 1995, after taking a job in the Cubs system, he was confused by the club’s Mesa, Arizona, complex. “I didn’t say anything to anybody, but I walked around wondering, ‘Where are the Latins?’”
Not so in the free market of Latin America. There are virtually no organized amateur leagues, so the scouts and bird dogs have to go out and find the players. There’s no draft, so everyone is a free agent hankering to make a deal.
One of the last clubs to set up shop in the Dominican Republic, the Cubs were at a huge disadvantage. Fleita wasn’t even based overseas. He lived in Atlanta, and his full-time job was tracking young players in Georgia and northern Florida. But he felt good about his relationship with Serra, and after two visits to the island decided that his bosses in Chicago should see conditions there firsthand. “That way,” Fleita recalls, “I could justify the investment in facilities and equipment that I felt were necessary to put us on the map. We needed everything from bats and balls to a cook.”
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Five years later, the Cubs have one of the best minor-league organizations in the game. Last spring, Baseball America predicted that a “deep and well rounded” talent pool would turn Chicago’s lovable losers into pennant contenders by 2004, thanks in large part to a “strong Latin American program starting to deliver high-ceiling prospects.” Of the organization’s 200 minor leaguers, nearly 45 percent are from Latin America–all of them either Dominicans or Venezuelans.
Fleita became player-development director in 2000, taking charge of the entire Cubs minor-league operation, and he no longer makes those monthly trips to the Caribbean. Serra runs the Latin American scouting operation on a day-to-day basis, Hector Ortega reports to Serra from Venezuela, and the Cubs pay ten part-time scouts.
A source in the baseball commissioner’s office estimates that major-league teams collectively spend about $20 million a year in the Dominican Republic–not much more than the Cubs pay Sammy Sosa for a single season. Fleita won’t say what the Cubs spend. The biggest expenses are the signing bonuses, which average about $20,000. Mark Prior, the second overall pick in the 2001 draft, signed for $4 million out of the University of Southern California and was guaranteed a huge four-year salary. Zambrano signed for a $120,000 bonus, and all Cruz got was a $3,500 contract.
“This franchise’s chief problem over the last half century has been a reliance on a patchwork-quilt approach for finding players via trades and free agency,” says MacPhail, the Cubs’ president. MacPhail, 49, comes from a line of baseball executives. In the 1920s his grandfather, Larry MacPhail, worked for the Saint Louis Cardinals under Branch Rickey, who created the farm system in the 30s. Rickey recommended MacPhail for the general manager’s job in Cincinnati, and MacPhail later ran the Dodgers and Yankees. Andy’s father, Lee, was director of player development for the Yankee teams that dominated baseball in the 1950s and later president of the American League. Andy grew up thinking of the farm system as a franchise’s “primary artery for talent.” He won two World Series in Minnesota before becoming the Tribune Company’s point man at Wrigley. He says that since 1994, the Cubs have increased spending on their farm system sevenfold, mainly to sign expensive draft picks like Prior and Kerry Wood.
