A relative scandal in the international free agent world, where a would-have-been San Diego Padres prospect has had his verbal agreement revoked after MLB discovered he was five years older than he claimed to be.
The report from Jorge Castillo and Alden Gonzalez:
A pre-arranged $4 million bonus for the prospect means he was viewed by the Padres as a massive talent … perhaps in large part because he was actually 19 years old, rather than the 14 years old they thought he was. He was set to sign with the Padres in January 2027(!), but now that deal is off the table.
Recall, players in international free agency cannot sign until they are at least 16 years old, but pre-arranged deals have the players (and their trainers) committed years in advance. It’s plainly against the rules, but it’s been the openly-tolerated system for decades now. So openly-tolerated, apparently, that MLB can be the body that finds out a prospect is five years older than claimed, and the deal gets pulled by the MLB team that theoretically never should have had a firm deal in place to begin with. It’s still an ugly business, but it’s one the MLB Players Association fought to keep in place during the last Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations because, in principle, it allows players to choose their own organization and can net them more money than a draft. In principle. Just how much choice a 13-year-old player actually has in any of that, or how much of the money he actually gets, probably varies wildly from case to case. More on how corrupt the system can be, and how there’s been an uptick in age falsification, in the ESPN report.
I suppose the potential league-wide takeaways here are …
1.) Despite things being much, much better than they were a couple decades ago, age-related shenanigans in the international market are still a factor in signings;
2.) “Deals” years in advance with players under the actual signing age limit are still being treated like deals by MLB teams, and there still isn’t any movement to bare these kinds of wink-wink agreements (outside of that one lawsuit that … did that ever go anywhere? I never heard anything and certainly no changes to the system); and
3.) MLB has yet another example to cite when trying to implement an international draft in the next CBA.
(I felt like I couldn’t go without mentioning the Padres’ success in recent years with exceptionally precocious young international prospects Ethan Salas and Leodalis De Vries, each of whom reached full-season ball at just 17(!) years old. But I also need to be clear that there is no reported indication of any age issues there, nor am I suggesting anything of the sort. It just felt tone deaf to be writing about a Padres issue like this and not mention two extreme outliers like that in the same organization. So it gets a parenthetical here at the end.)
