Chin Music: Steroids and Age Fraud

Over the weekend 19-year-old Washington Nationals prospect Esmailyn Gonzalez was suddenly revealed to be neither 19 nor named Esmailyn Gonzalez. His actual name is Carlos Lugo and he’s 23 years old. That’s four years older than he was originally listed. Lugo got a 1.4 million dollar signing bonus when he was 16 (but really 20), a deal negotiated by Basilio Vizcaino, who according to MLB “helps prepare young players in hopes that they eventually sign big Major League deals and reward him with a percentage of a signing bonus.” So Vizcaino is a buscone, an agent, trainer, coach, scout hybrid of sorts who find players, trains them to the point of the Dominican word “ready” (that's some players, including a former signee discussing the process of readiness, you need to mostly know Spanish) which is taken from the American English word “ready.” The Dominican word means specifically ready to sign. To learn a little more about buscones check out my article from last month, or check out Stealing Lives by Arturo J. Marcano and David P. Fidler.

The fact of the matter is that in a lot of cases buscones put a lot of time and effort into supporting (as in feeding and housing) Dominican prospects while they train them to be “ready.” They certainly do deserve a sort of finders fee in those cases, but all too often the skimming of money intended for a player becomes exorbitant, far more than just a fee, it’s an abuse of the system.

What caught Major League Baseball’s attention in the Gonzalez/Lugo case was the close relationship between Vizcaino, Jose Rijo, who special assistant to Nationals GM Jim Bowden, and Jose Baez, who is in charge of Washington’s Dominican operations. Major League Baseball (and now the FBI) has been looking into the skimming of signing bonuses of Dominican players. Were the Nationals officials part of the conspiracy to misrepresent the player and in turn take a chunk of the signing bonus? We’ll have to let the investigators figure all that out.

The scam pulled off by Gonzalez/Lugo is pretty impressive though. Not only did he lie about his age, which is not that difficult, but he managed to completely change his name. This is a big step up from the simple age issues with birth certificates in the Dominican Republic (like when Miguel Tejada was caught lying about his age). Guess what though? It’s really not all that difficult to officially have the wrong age on your birth certificate in the Dominican Republic, whether done intentionally or by mistake. First of all, nearly one in four Dominicans do not have a birth certificate (for a brief primer on birth certificates, and to get a feel for an “average” Dominican town, check out this report I wrote in the fall). People are far more likely to not be born in a hospital. Officially getting a birth certificate is put off by parents for months and oftentimes years. It’s nothing like here where you aren’t leaving a hospital for home without one.

Even fourteen and fifteen year old students I had in the Dominican Republic would flip-flop on their age from day to day because they weren’t entirely sure what year they were born. Times and dates just aren’t that important where I lived. Meeting at five o’clock really meant sometime before five thirty, or even six. There were very few clocks (I can’t imagine how stuff worked before cell phones) and even fewer people know how to tell time on an analog clock. That’s just something to keep in mind with these age mix-ups.

While it gets more and more difficult to obtain a birth certificate as someone gets older, generally all that is needed is for the child’s mother (it has to be the mother) to go to the town hall closest to where the child was born, fill out, and obtain a birth certificate. What this also means is that the date can become mixed up, misremembered, or even falsified on purpose. Is this what Lugo did? Absolutely not. What he did was almost definitely involved fraud with a whole host of people helping out.

The fact of the matter is, from a baseball perspective, that the better and the younger you are, the better chance you have of getting out of life in a third world country.

That concept brings us to this whole “boli” saga with Alex Rodriguez and his Dominican trainer. Alex Rodriguez has been linked to Dominican trainer Angel Presinal, who himself is linked to steroids (as in he got caught in Canada with a bag full of stuff when he was travelling with Juan Gonzalez earlier this decade). Presinal has been banned from stadiums by MLB but still managed to follow the Yankees around from hotel to hotel in 2007. I don’t trust Alex Rodriguez’s story for a second, not even with his awkward speech “to my teammates…(awkward, awkward silence, I like how he looks next to him to kill more time, and how he looks like he's about to laugh).”


Experts came out saying they have no idea what in the world boli is. But that’s probably because they don’t know Dominican Spanish. Dominicans have words for things that other Spanish-speaking countries have never heard of, or that those countries just use differently (that is, properly). My favorite example of this is the word “poloche.” It means t-shirt. Say it slowly. Po-lo…che(rt). See how that works (and see how polo shirt doesn’t even mean t-shirt in English). Now I don’t know for a fact that boli is slang for steroid or even a specific kind of steroid (I’m still waiting to hear back from someone on island to confirm or deny that), but the name of the steroid doesn’t matter. Rodriguez tested positive for Primobolan. That’s a fact. Did I know any baseball players who used steroids? Not personally. But I also lived very far away from the baseball hotbeds in the south of the country.

That said, many drugs that you would otherwise need a prescription for in the U.S. are generally available for over the counter purchase in the Dominican Republic. Last fall I badly burned my hands (don’t click on that if you’ve just eaten). I didn’t go to the hospital, I went to a pharmacy. A Dominican pharmacy is the stuff of an FDA regulator’s nightmare. The gauze I ended up buying was just sitting on the counter, unwrapped and unprotected. There are a lot of drugs available for purchase, most of which I’d never heard of. Were some of them steroids or testosterone? Probably. Primobolan is illegal in the Dominican Republic, but so are a lot of other drugs, and that never stopped motoconchistas (people riding around on motorcycles who look for fares, and many sell drugs on the side because they’re always on the move, making detection and tracking them difficult) from offering to sell me recreational drugs pretty often.

Something I applaud are steps the U.S. government is willing to take in order to prevent Dominican players involved with steroids from entering the United States. Sure you can cheat and get signed, but you can’t come play. Americans are spoiled, generally a passport is all you need to travel anywhere in the world. For a lot of other places, including a Dominican looking to go to the United States, you need a passport and a visa. Friends of mine have found it impossible to even get a tourist visa (which allows for a temporary visit) to the United States. The only people who have been successful in securing any kind of visa were 1) someone who had a very nice Dominican job (read: the U.S. doesn’t have to worry about them outstaying their visa and looking for an American job) and 2) windsurfers and kiteboarders looking to go to the U.S. for competitions. Baseball players would fall under the second category; a visa granted for having a special skill. The government has said that it may withhold visas from anyone implicated in steroid use. A great first step in my opinion. While the FBI and Major League Baseball continue to investigate the Nationals and the mishandling of signing bonuses in the Dominican Republic, it’s nice to see that the U.S. government is willing to do what it can to at least try and keep the steroid drama out.

We all have to remember that the Dominican Republic is its own country. They’re going to do things the way they want, and right now the way it is, between birth certificates, pharmacies (plus the availability of drugs on the internet and drug dealing trainers), and buscone signing bonus abuses, Major League Baseball needs to get the Dominican government involved. It’s difficult for Major League Baseball to do a whole lot to change anything on their own from their little office in Santo Domingo. Based on the post-strike era though, you have to wonder if Major League Baseball really wants any of it to change.

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I would also like to take a moment to recognize, and most of all give my immense gratitude to my boss John Wylde, the head statistician for the Cape Cod Baseball League (among dozens of other things) who passed away on Monday. John taught me more about baseball and statistics in two years than I could have possibly learned on my own over a lifetime. The man did more for collegiate baseball over the last 25 years than anyone else could have dreamed of, even working through all of last year despite his terminal illness. It's even rumored that the name for Baseball America was even come up with in his living room. My condolences go out to his family.

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