89 Dominican Players Made the MLB. Here's What Happened to Everyone Else.

No country on earth punches above its weight in baseball like the Dominican Republic. The DR covers about 18,700 square miles — roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined — and holds 11 million people. It has no MLB franchise, no billion-dollar stadium, no youth development budget that comes anywhere close to what a single American travel-ball circuit spends in a weekend. And yet, when the 2025 MLB season opened, 89 Dominican-born players were on active rosters — more than any other foreign nation. That is not a coincidence. That is a culture.

The Stars

Juan Soto redefined plate discipline for a generation. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. arrived carrying one of baseball's most iconic surnames and made it his own. Rafael Devers is the kind of hitter who makes pitching coaches lose sleep. Fernando Tatís Jr. plays shortstop like he's auditioning for a film reel. Manny Machado has been one of the most consistent corner infielders in baseball for over a decade.

On the mound: Sandy Alcántara won the 2022 NL Cy Young Award. Luis Castillo is a frontline ace in Seattle. Framber Valdez anchors Houston's rotation with one of the best sinker-curveball combinations in the sport. And the next wave — Julio Rodríguez, Elly De La Cruz, Jhoan Durán — is already here.

Where the Talent Comes From

San Pedro de Macorís — "the shortstop factory of the world." Santo Domingo and Santiago are the other gravitational centers. But talent isn't geography. It's culture. Spend a Sunday morning in Barahona — four hours from the airport tourists use, far from the resorts — and you'll understand. Kids in the street playing vitilla with a broomstick and a bottle cap. The commitment is absolute, the swings are already correct. The game is not a hobby in the DR. It is a shared religion.

The System Behind the Pipeline

Here's how Dominican baseball actually operates at the youth level. A boy shows talent at 10 or 11. An unregulated private trainer — a buscón — approaches his family: "Your son has talent. I can get him in front of MLB scouts. Education can wait."

In communities where formal employment is scarce and a signing bonus can represent decades of household income, that pitch lands hard. The boy drops out. He trains full-time. The buscón takes 25–50% of the signing bonus if the boy signs. If he doesn't — which happens to roughly 98% of boys who enter the system — the buscón moves on. The boy comes home at 17 or 18. No diploma. No plan. No options. UNICEF Dominican Republic has documented the educational dropout crisis that results from this system.

The math is brutal: approximately 40,000 boys are eligible to sign at 16 each year. Roughly 550–600 get contracts. Most begin in the Dominican Summer League. Fewer than 3% of signings ever play in a single MLB game. In 2024, a case reported by Diario Libre revealed that 14-year-old Ismael Ureña Pérez died after prolonged steroid abuse administered at a buscón's academy — triggering the DR's first-ever anti-PED law for minors.

Julio Zenón's Story

Julio Zenón was in the buscón pipeline. Dropped out of school, training full-time, betting everything on the 2% shot. His mother made a different choice. She removed him from that system and brought him to Vias RD — a program in Barahona that required school attendance, provided free baseball training, and didn't take a single peso if a kid got signed.

Julio graduated high school. He still plays baseball. And when a younger player named Aran Ramirez needed a tutor, Aran listed Julio — our graduate, still in Barahona, already giving back to the next kid coming up. Read more on our Baseball Via page and Stories from Barahona.

What Vias RD Is Actually Doing

I'm Brian Straley. I've known the DR since the late 1990s, when I served a mission in Santo Domingo West. I brought my glove expecting organized baseball and found kids playing with broomsticks and bottle caps. Twenty-five years later, I run Vias RD out of Barahona — the same corner of the southwest that's still producing dreamers and still getting its heart broken by a system that was never built to protect them.

We have 48 active student-athletes, three teams competing in the Barahona city league, and a rule that's simple and non-negotiable: you must be enrolled in school, maintain at least a 70% grade average, and commit in writing to graduate. Baseball is the hook. The diploma is the price of admission. See our full impact data or verify our 501(c)(3) status on Candid.

I don't care if we ever send a kid to Major League Baseball. If we can help these kids graduate, attend college or a trade program, and break generational poverty, then we've done something that truly matters. That's what we're building in Barahona. Not MLB dreams. Options.

If you want to support this work, donate to Vias RD, explore corporate sponsorship, or volunteer with us.