The steroid scandal has embarrassed Major League Baseball for years, tarnishing the reputations of its most popular players and exposing the ownership and labor management as hyppocrites.  At least, though, MLB didn’t steal from the poor to buy the steroids.  Baseball faces a much worse scandal in its international farm-league system, a pay-for-play scandal of its own that corrupts the game, too:

As Major League Baseball endures an embarrassing steroids scandal that has tarnished another big star, a separate, quieter drama is unfolding far from spring training sites: Allegations that team employees pocketed bonus money from Dominican prospects.

At least eight employees of MLB teams have been let go, including a high-ranking White Sox executive and three Sox scouts. The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox also fired scouts.

In the last four months, MLB’s Office of Investigations has set up shop in the Dominican Republic, hired five Spanish-speaking investigators and pledged cooperation with the Dominican Sports Ministry to improve oversight of how teenage Dominican prospects are scouted and signed. …

It’s all part of a crackdown on what investigators describe as a kickback scheme in which scouts and others take a cut of bonus money given to young Latin American prospects. The FBI launched its own investigation last year, but no one has been charged criminally.

Put simply, advancement in the farm system depended on cash bribes to scouts rather than talent and hard work.  Bear in mind that most of the players in the Dominican Republic (and in Venezuela, where MLB has expanded the probe) live in poverty, with their bonus cash being the first substantial amount of money they receive.  Instead of protecting them from the kind of predators that naturally follow windfalls like that, MLB employed them instead, and apparently not in just a couple of isolated incidents.

Occasionally, newspapers and sporting magazines will do in-depth reports on the challenges these recruits face when they receive so much attention and money.  They usually include the difficulties and pressure of managing so much cash, and how the money disappears quickly.  Now we know why.

In the US, the draft system removes the motivation for such corruption.  Even if baseball went back to the old scout system here in the US, though, the prospects would have the background to see through extortion attempts and make them public.  Maybe the league should apply the draft system where it can really work to prevent abuse.