Unreported World

Dominican Republic: Baseball Dreams (2012x11)

Air date: Nov 16, 2012

The Dominican Republic provides almost 20% of professional baseball players in the United States. In a country where many are very poor, the sport is one of the few routes out for young men. But the cost of failure at 18 years old can be devastating. In the United States, Major League teams can't sign a player until he has a high school diploma, usually at the age of 18 or 19. Dominican Republic law allows children to leave school at just 14 and sign when they're 16, so the US teams can sign them up earlier. As a consequence, the teams pay the most for players when they're 16. But these boys know they have a limited shelf life. In two years they will be worth a lot less and may have missed their chance to get signed at all. Everywhere reporter Seyi Rhodes and producer Daniel Bogado look, people are playing baseball. There are tens of thousands of young hopefuls but only around 350 get signed up by American teams each year. Of these only two per cent will make it to the Major Leagues. Rhodes and Bogado travel to the small seaside town of San Pedro de Macorís, which has produced more Major League players per capita than anywhere else in the world. They meet a bunch of boys living together and training before hopefully getting a try-out. One of them tells Rhodes how baseball was his only way out: 'My neighbourhood is poor; there is a lot of crime. They kill a lot of people there. In my family the majority are criminals. The only one who went into baseball is me.' Paterson Segura is only 16 but already throws as fast as a professional. He's been plucked from poverty and intensively trained into a product for US scouts. If he's chosen, he could fetch hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Paterson tells Rhodes that he dropped out of school two years earlier to focus on his baseball full time, against the wishes of the grandmother who raised him. He's very aware he's got a limited time now to make it before he's too old and misses out