Baseball recruiting as migrant‑labor pipeline

Major League Baseball recruiting in the Dominican Republic operates as an institutionalized labor pipeline: youth academies, local trainers and informal lenders form networks that accelerate early signings, create debt relationships, and transmit health and education costs onto families. Investigative reporting and direct testimony reveal recurring abuses (early exploitation, steroid access, predatory lending and poor training conditions) that are structurally tied to how MLB sources talent overseas. — This reframes Dominican baseball from a cultural export to a cross‑border labor and public‑health policy issue, implicating MLB, national regulators, and migration policy.