ProPublica Investigation Finds MLB's Dominican Pipeline Runs on Illegal Deals With 11-Year-Olds and Predatory Loans

Major League Baseball loves to talk about the Dominican Republic as its greatest talent pipeline outside the United States. Last year, 144 Dominican-born players appeared in the majors, roughly 10% of the league, according to ProPublica. What that pipeline actually runs on, according to a new ProPublica investigation, is a system of illegal handshake deals, predatory loans, and kids as young as 11 negotiating their futures before they're old enough to sign a contract.

MLB rules bar teams from officially signing international amateurs until age 16. ProPublica reports teams routinely get around that with what are called preacuerdos, unwritten early agreements arranged through a player's trainer, or buscón, promising a bonus once the kid is old enough to sign for real. By the time some of these prospects put pen to paper, they've been training for the deal for years.

The money involved is real, and so is the exploitation, according to ProPublica's reporting. From 2012 through early 2026, MLB teams paid Dominican prospects $1.042 billion in signing bonuses. Trainers typically take 35% to 50% of that off the top. On top of that, ProPublica found families sometimes take out loans against future bonuses at interest rates that would be illegal under U.S. usury law. One player profiled in the investigation reportedly borrowed $2,500 at a 30% interest rate, charged every two weeks. Up to 35% of a player's eventual signing bonus can go to those lenders, per the report.

This isn't new information to MLB or federal investigators. USA Today reported that a whistleblower brought similar allegations to the FBI back in 2020, and the Department of Justice investigated the Dominican recruitment system in 2018, reportedly turning up documents showing multiple MLB teams involved in what one document called a "mafia"-like operation, according to Fortune's summary of the ProPublica findings. Commissioner Rob Manfred has for years argued an international draft would fix the early-deal problem by removing the incentive for teams to lock down prospects before they're eligible. It hasn't happened. The MLB Players Association has resisted an international draft in prior labor talks, and no such system is currently in place.

The scale of the washout makes the stakes personal. Of the roughly 450 Dominican prospects signed each year, fewer than two-thirds ever reach even the lowest levels of the U.S. minor leagues, and only about 10% of those who sign ever appear in a major league game, according to ProPublica. Kids spend their adolescence training instead of studying, chasing a bonus that, for most, never comes.

The fake grave case

While ProPublica's investigation was landing, a separate scandal broke that shows exactly how far the incentive to fudge a kid's age can go. ESPN's Alden Gonzalez reported that MLB suspended a Cleveland Guardians prospect who had agreed to a $2.8 million pre-deal in December 2025 under the name David Severino, believed at the time to be 13 or 14 years old.

According to ESPN, sourced identically by The Guardian and CBS Sports, the player's real name is Daury David Severino Damaso, and he is actually about two years older than the Guardians were told. His former trainer, Francisco Nieves, allegedly built an entire false identity for him, complete with a falsified birth certificate, fabricated medical and school records, a fraudulent death certificate claiming a supposed younger brother died of respiratory illness in 2012, and a fake tombstone planted at a gravesite in La Romana. The Guardians terminated the deal in May after MLB began investigating. Cleveland has not commented further, according to Fox News.

John Pereyra, a longtime Dominican trainer quoted by The Guardian, said he trained Severino for two years and had no idea about the fraud, though he acknowledged some suspicions when he learned the birth certificate had been filed late. He said he doesn't blame the family. "When you have a kid and you tell him, 'Look, your name is not Daury,' he will do it," Pereyra told ESPN, citing the desperation poverty creates. The fraud here was allegedly orchestrated by adults, with the player's parents' approval, in a system where a $2.8 million bonus can be the difference between generational poverty and generational security.

The suspension means Damaso now has to wait an extra year before he's eligible to sign as an international amateur, according to Fox News. It does nothing to address the underlying incentive structure that ProPublica says produces this kind of fraud in the first place: a system where informal deals get struck with children years before any of it is legal, and where nobody, not MLB, not the union, has fixed it despite knowing about it since at least 2018.

Separately, the commercialization pressure on youth sports isn't unique to the Dominican Republic. The Aspen Institute's Project Play found American families spent an average of $1,016 on a child's primary sport in 2024, up 46% since 2019, pouring roughly $40 billion a year into youth sports nationally, as noted by Sport & State's Matt Foley writing for the Daily Wire. That's a different problem, driven by American parental ambition rather than international bonus money, but it points to the same underlying dynamic: a sports economy increasingly willing to treat children as assets before they're old enough to consent to the deal.

MLB has not announced any policy changes in response to ProPublica's investigation, and no criminal charges have been filed against any trainer, lender, or team official named in the report. Whether Manfred's long-stalled push for an international draft gains new traction now that the practice's mechanics are documented in detail remains an open question.