SAN DIEGO — This week the Padres announced they signed a teenage catcher from Venezuela, Ethan Salas, who is Baseball America's top-ranked prospect in this year's international amateur class.
It's remarkably bold to guarantee $5.6 million to a 16-year-old ballplayer. So much can go wrong.
The return on investment, however, can be immense if one of these educated guesses pans out.
If Salas someday produces as an average big leaguer over a few Padres seasons, the club stands to recoup good value even accounting for his big league salaries. And if the bilingual lefty hitter become the star Padres scouts apparently project him to be, he'll return enormous "surplus value" on the initial several years of his big league career.
By 2035, we should know know how it turned out.
History in this one specific realm, it should be noted, isn't kind to the Padres. Few of the many hundreds of teens the franchise has signed out of Latin America over several decades went on to have just one average single season in San Diego. These particular meager results extend to the A.J. Preller era, which began in late 2014, and that's a little surprising, because Preller made a name for himself as an international scout with the Texas Rangers.
However, in light of recent trades, Preller and his scouts can point to valuable returns on several of these long-term investments.
See, Yu Darvish. And Blake Snell. Hello, Juan Soto and Austin Nola.
Because other teams coveted Padres prospects who were signed by his scouts out of the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Panama, Preller was able to trade for big leaguers who went on to support last year's run to the franchise's first League Championship Series since 1998.
Preller, as we've seen over and over, isn't sentimental about trading his "homegrown" players. So, while it was fun for Padres fans to see Salas pull on a brown-and-gold "SD" cap this week, it won't be surprising if he's donning another MLB team's cap in a year or two. That's just how it has gone.
There's another reason, small but not insignificant, that the Padres and several other clubs choose to spend heavily on select 16-year-olds in Latin America.
The folks who represent many players in these countries often decide which scouts get to see them perform in workouts and games. Sometimes, only the teams that are verified as legitimate bidders will be allowed to scout a player, even if he's as young as 13 or 14 years old.
Preller, to be sure, has established the Padres as credible bidders for pricier amateurs. He dropped $78 million on the international market — $11 million of which landed 17-year-old Cuban pitcher Adrian Morejon — in 2016. When Padres scouts want to see a prospect, they see a prospect.
"It's like the Padres can pre-qualify for a home loan, and so the agent shows them the home," an MLB scout said this week.
The Padres probably will have less opportunity to scout the pricier players in the next international amateur signing period, let alone sign them. That's because they'll have less money to spend. Under MLB rules, the team's signing of Xander Boegarts this offseason reduced its international pool money for a year.
But you can take this to the bank: Padres scouts will get a fair hearing from the folks who control the prospects.
"The teams that are aggressive in Latin America," said the scout, "are going to get more opportunity to look at kids because the trainers there know the teams."
(That goes for the Far East as well, where Preller's signings of professionals have established the Padres as a player for pros in Japan in South Korea. The team owns an edge in access to information, as compared to some other big league clubs.)
The Padres would love to rival the 2022 Houston Astros for turning international homegrowns into big league producers. Astros scouts signed five of the team's 13 World Series pitchers several years ago out of Latin America. Because most of them were a few years older than 16, their signing bonuses were well under $100,000. The quintet's total signing cost was a combined $180,000 — or, as Sports Illustrated reported, less than the cost of a year's supply of baseballs.
For Salas, there's Padres precedent that's encouraging.
Signed by Padres scouts out of Venezuela in 1980, one month before he turned 17, shortstop Ozzie Guillen would fashion a 16-year career in the big leagues, making three All-Star teams. Guillen never played for the Padres, who traded him to the White Sox in a package deal for ace pitcher LaMarr Hoyt. The trade didn't work out for the Padres, but as we've seen from Preller, it's advantageous to have prospects who are sought by other teams.
