2024 DSL Red Sox

JM3

JM3

often quoted
SoSH Member
Dec 14, 2019
15,269
I haven't gotten around to starting this thread because I decided to wait on doing profiles on the new guys until they had some playing time under their belts.

But this Jen McCaffrey piece in The Athletic feels like a good jumping off point for the thread.

View: https://twitter.com/jcmccaffrey/status/1768244390940553288


Going to take some excerpts that are interesting to me, but the whole thing is a really good read.

The day before the Red Sox-Rays exhibition series began, we met at 8 a.m. at the team hotel in a congested, but high-end area of Santo Domingo. The Red Sox Academy is only 25 miles west of the city center, but the drive takes about an hour. Streets are clogged with cars, motorbikes whip in and out of traffic and street vendors squeeze in between vehicles selling everything from strawberries to bottled water. It’s more important to have a horn than brakes when driving in the D.R., Romero said he was once told, only seemingly half-joking.
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This building is the main check-in area for any visitor to the complex, but it also houses the dormitories on the second level. Roughly 80 players live at the complex with four players to a room, sharing two bunk beds, along with communal bathrooms, similar to a college dormitory.
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In 2015, Romero pushed the Red Sox to add a second DSL team. Only about two-thirds of major-league clubs have a second DSL team and the Red Sox were one of the first to do so.

“I kept fighting, ‘Let’s treat this like one of our affiliates, this is one of our affiliates.’ It used to just be an afterthought,” he said.
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“Technology-wise we are very close to Fort Myers,” Mejia added, noting the use of KinaTrax, HitTrax and Trajekt installed in 2019-20 as tools for tracking player progress.
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This building houses everything from staff offices to classrooms for players to learn English, life skills and earn their GED, to the mental skills offices, video scouting rooms and conference rooms for player signings and staff meetings.

There is as much of an educational component as there is a baseball component here. Most of the players are 16 or 17, so taking care of them away from the field is an important part of academy life, too.
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Players are taught a variety of skills from how to open a bank account to how to cash a check or get their license or order food at a restaurant. There’s even a day where they take the players to the airport to show them around and how to check in since many of them, particularly the Dominican natives, have never taken a flight.

“We bear the responsibility of making sure we do everything we can, use the resources we have to properly nourish them, and properly educate them,” Romero said. “We know unfortunately a majority of them won’t make it (to the big leagues), but they can still be productive people, go out and get a job somewhere else because they still have their education, they speak more English now, and hopefully they were able to save some money, with what they sign for. We educate them on that, too, just being smart with their money, the concept of savings.”
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“I’m very proud of the systems we have in place,” Romero said. “I think we are constantly trying to learn, modernize, teach our staff more, so I look at it more as process-based than results-based.

“I think having Devers, Bello and hopefully Rafaela and other guys, that’s great,” he added. “But that’s a byproduct of doing things right from our scouting process to player development process at the academy to our education and behavioral skills strategies and putting an emphasis on those things. Those are the priorities for me, and if we do those things, all those other successes, the guys that get to the big leagues, the guys that get on prospect rankings, that’ll take care of itself.”
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JimD

JimD

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 29, 2001
8,696
Fantastic work by Jen and The Athletic. It's really great to see that our Sox are running a class operation in the D.R. Money well spent in not only a baseball sense but also in improving lives.
 
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