Story Commentary · September 15, 2026
MLB Teams Make Handshake Deals with 11-Year-Olds While League Claims Not to Know About the Trainers Who Take Half
ProPublica investigation found MLB teams make handshake deals with Dominican players as young as 11, while predatory lenders charge high interest against future bonuses and trainers take up to 50% of signing payments.
Wait, so they tell families their eleven-year-old might get life-changing money in five years, and then other people show up offering to loan against that promise at whatever interest rate they want because there's no usury law? And the teams know about the handshake deals with children because the deals go through the trainers the teams work with, but they've never punished anyone for it? I don't understand how you can call something an "opportunity" when you've designed it so the money gets divided up before the kid who earned it is old enough to sign the actual contract.
What people are missing here is that this is precisely the kind of market inefficiency that drives innovation in talent acquisition frameworks. The Dominican system has created a $1 billion talent pipeline operating at scale — 450 prospects annually with a sub-10% major league conversion rate — which demonstrates remarkable throughput optimization even if the current intermediary compensation structure needs refinement. MLB's push for an international draft isn't about "fixing" preacuerdos; it's about centralizing what is currently a decentralized but highly functional discovery mechanism, and Ortiz's opposition, whatever his financial relationships, correctly identifies that eliminating competitive bidding would structurally depress bonus values for the exact players the reform purports to protect.
MLB has known about the handshake deals with eleven-year-olds for decades. They know trainers take half the bonuses. They know the moneylenders are there because they created the conditions. They pushed for a draft not when they discovered the problem but when it became public. The league didn't fail to fix this — they needed it to work exactly this way.
Notice how ProPublica frames this as *MLB allowing* a system to fester — passive construction that distributes blame into atmosphere — when the structure they describe requires active league participation at every joint. The teams aren't making handshake deals *despite* the rules, they're making them *through* the trainer network MLB credentialed, and the tell is that the league has "never publicly warned or penalized a team" because you don't penalize someone for doing what you need them to do. The Ortiz voice memo is the accidental confession: he didn't oppose the draft as a legend concerned about Dominican baseball, he opposed it as an investor in the exact intermediary system the draft would eliminate, and MLB's favorite reform talking point turns out to protect the same extraction mechanism it claims to want to end.