Trainers, lenders divert up to half of $1B paid to Dominican prospects

Ortiz opposed MLB international draft while tied to Dominican lender

The Dominican Republic, which has a population roughly that of Ohio’s, has sent more players to the major leagues than any country outside the United States for nearly half a century. Last year, 144 Dominican players reached the major leagues — about 10 percent of the league — and the country has produced Hall of Famers such as Pedro Martínez and Adrian Beltré. According to ProPublica, Major League Baseball has long allowed a “corrosive system to fester” that “rigs the game against young players in favor of opportunistic trainers and predatory moneylenders.”

The Dominican baseball factory is a volume business. Major-league teams pay signing bonuses to about 450 prospects each year. Fewer than 10 percent of those young players will ever see a single pitch in the majors, but in a country as impoverished as the Dominican Republic those bonuses — worth several times the country’s average annual income — could be life-changing for the players and their families. From 2012 through the beginning of 2026, major-league teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in signing bonuses, according to a ProPublica analysis. Up to half a billion dollars of that total is “almost immediately siphoned off” by trainers and moneylenders, the analysis found.

In the United States and Canada, young players must enter the major-league system through MLB’s annual draft. In the Dominican Republic, players go to the highest bidder. After MLB scouts began to recognize the country as a source of cheap talent, teams opened bare-bones training academies to develop young players. The buscones — local men relied on by teams to identify talent — eventually realized they could start their own academies. There are now hundreds of such facilities and, according to a national trade association, approximately 6,000 trainers.

In addition to coaching, the trainers who operate these academies generally provide room, board and equipment; education often falls by the wayside. In return, they receive a share — typically 35 to 50 percent — of a player’s signing bonus. Most bonuses are valued around $30,000, though they can reach six or seven figures.

Major-league rules bar teams from making official deals with players under the age of 16. But teams have long circumvented the ban through preacuerdos — unwritten early agreements, typically arranged through a player’s trainer, in which a team pledges to pay a certain amount once the player is of legal age to be signed. Players as young as 11 have been involved in such deals, ProPublica reported, meaning it can be years before a prospect receives his bonus.

The promised payouts have given rise to a cottage industry of prestamistas, or moneylenders, who persuade players’ families to sign away portions of their impending bonuses in exchange for loans with sky-high interest rates. The Dominican Republic repealed its usury laws 24 years ago, and high-interest lenders now advertise openly online. ProPublica found one WhatsApp ad that touted loans for “baseball players who have agreements.”

Belfi Rivera was 14 when he made a handshake deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks worth $1.8 million, payable after he turned 16. The Arizona Diamondbacks did not respond to a request for comment. Of that sum, $630,000 went to the trainer who brokered the deal. More than $950,000 went to someone with no hand in teaching Rivera how to play baseball: Santo Caraballo, a lender who had formed a business partnership with Red Sox legend and Hall of Famer David Ortiz.

In a statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said his business relationship with Caraballo “began to come to an end” more than 18 months ago. He added that he had ended his personal relationship with Caraballo “a year and a half to two years ago” after “noticing conduct by Mr. Caraballo that I considered inappropriate. I started distancing myself from him personally and placed the relevant matters in the hands of my legal advisors.”

ProPublica, however, documented a September 2025 video in which Ortiz and Caraballo filmed themselves heading for Puerto Rico on a private jet, drinking and dancing on their way to a Bad Bunny concert.

In a brief conversation, Caraballo told ProPublica that his business was not the biggest or “that lucrative.” He added that the risk in lending money to families is that “you never know if it will succeed or not because if the player doesn’t get signed, you don’t get paid.” Multiple attempts were made to reach him again, including sending him a summary of ProPublica’s findings. He never responded.

Before becoming a fixture in the prestamista sphere and partnering with Ortiz, Caraballo “played a shadowy role in salvaging the career” of rising MLB prospect Oneil Cruz, ProPublica reported. In 2020, while Cruz was a player in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ minor league system, he crashed his Jeep into the back of a motorcycle, killing three people. Prosecutors initially said the ballplayer had been drinking, and he faced the possibility of three years in prison. According to numerous interviews and court records, Caraballo was brought in by Cruz’s parents and negotiated payments to the victims’ families. In exchange, the families signed agreements withdrawing all claims against Cruz, who is currently the starting center fielder for the Pirates. The case against Cruz, who denied any wrongdoing, was dismissed. ProPublica made numerous attempts to reach Caraballo about his role, including sending him a summary of its findings. He never responded.

Cruz declined a request for an interview. His lawyer, Amauris Vásquez Disla, called the accident “a profound tragedy for all parties involved, especially the victims’ families.” He went on to say that the court “issued an order of dismissal based on the findings, a legally binding decision that was a lawful resolution of this matter.” A spokesperson for the Pittsburgh Pirates said the team and Cruz “addressed this matter more than six years ago based on the information available and the outcome of the legal proceedings.”

By 2021, records show, Caraballo and Ortiz had entered into a business partnership, with both men listed on corporation records of a Florida company called Big Papi Sports Group. The company was dissolved the following year; what, if anything, it did is not clear. Their financial and personal relationships, however, continued. Ortiz acknowledged to a ProPublica reporter that he had invested millions of dollars into Caraballo’s baseball business. He added that his business with Caraballo was limited to making loans to trainers, not kids. At Ortiz’s 2022 Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Caraballo sat with the retired player’s family.

Ortiz’s connection to Caraballo also raises questions about the Red Sox legend’s involvement in persuading major-league players to oppose an international draft.

For more than a decade, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has made the case in favor of a draft for prospects from Latin America. Last year, during a visit to the Dominican Republic, he acknowledged that preacuerdos were “problematic” and argued that “the best solution to early deals is a draft.” Manfred and supporters of an international draft say it would make early agreements impossible.

The players union has opposed such a draft, arguing that it would restrict a prospect’s ability to choose his employer and eliminate the bidding wars that drive up bonuses. The union has acknowledged that the Dominican system of early deals is troubled but has maintained for years that the problem lies in the league not enforcing its own rules.

During contract negotiations in 2022, the issue again became a major sticking point. According to people on both sides of the discussions, Ortiz got involved, sending a voice message to Dominican players and trainers declaring a “red alert.”

“If we allow the draft to happen here in the Dominican Republic, even your great-great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s, will be affected by it,” Ortiz said in the message, according to an audio copy obtained by ProPublica. “If we let them push that thing through here, we’ll be in deep trouble.”

In the recording, Ortiz shared the phone number for Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, and urged recipients to express their opposition. According to ProPublica, what he did not share was that he had a financial interest in preserving the current system.

When asked by phone whether his opposition to the draft had anything to do with his partnership with Caraballo, who profits from the current system, Ortiz did not answer and hung up shortly afterward, ProPublica reported. In a subsequent statement sent through his lawyer, Ortiz said his position regarding the international draft “was never motivated by personal interests.” The statement went on to say that his opposition “was based on my views regarding the development of Dominican players and the impact I believed such a system would have on baseball in our country.”

MLB is a formidable economic and political presence in the Dominican Republic, ProPublica reported. But outside of the league’s push for an international draft, it has done nothing that would put an end to or reform the early-agreement system. It has never publicly warned or penalized a team for making an early deal, and its attempts to educate families about moneylenders have been ineffectual. A spokesperson for MLB declined to comment and referred to past statements by league officials calling for an overhaul of the Dominican system.

“Major League Baseball knows how dirty the business is here,” said Piñao Ortiz, who served as the Dominican Republic’s commissioner of baseball from 1996 to 2000, “but it’s not doing anything to stop it.”