The Dominican Republic’s dedicated and longstanding love for baseball has birthed generations of MLB stars. The first Dominican baseball player in Major League Baseball, Ozzie Virgil Sr., paved the way for sluggers with undeniable legacies such as David “Big Papi” Ortiz, Luis Castillo, and Albert Pujols, as well as for current players such as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Juan Soto.
In pursuit of the dream that these legends achieved, every year thousands of young baseball players in the Dominican must choose between their education and dedicating their upbringing to the sport. La Fundación: Baseball’s Island is a new documentary highlighting an organization dedicated to creating a positive impact on the DR to MLB pipeline. It follows the nonprofit Baseball Island Foundation and the young Dominican athletes it is aiming to protect. La Fundación’s director, Isaac Weinberg, the foundation’s founder, Jay Quinn, and program graduate Leonardo De Los Santos Alcántara sat down with SPORT Magazine, discussing the DR’s love for the sport and the major challenges facing the next generations of Dominican baseball stars.
Quinn created the foundation after decades of a career in baseball. After traveling to the DR for freelance work with MLB, he witnessed first hand how young players can easily fall victim to a system of exploitation and overcommitment.
“This is a generalization, but there are so few opportunities in the Dominican Republic to make enough money to live a different life if you're not born into some money,” Quinn says. “With Major League Baseball raining down millions of dollars every year signing kids, it's a lot of temptation. It really creates an environment where kids and families are looking at a major league signing bonus as winning the lottery. Unfortunately, the odds are about the same, but there's very few things down there with the same kind of upside as baseball.”
Through his work with the foundation, Quinn acknowledges the predatory trends underlying youth baseball in the DR and hopes to encourage a much less harmful approach to supporting young players.
“Instead of the typical, you know, ‘Let's fight over the kids who are 11 and 12 who are looking like they may be prospects one day, who are going to make some money and let's get a piece of it,’ it was, ‘There's so much talent on the island and so many kids who are great and overlooked and can do something special with baseball, but they're not in a position to do it alone,” Quinn says
His nonprofit provides a range of services for the players who are a part of the foundation. The foundation’s “Full-Time Incentive Program” gives student athletes access to training and specialized coaching on the condition that they remain enrolled as students. The fully-funded program offers English lessons, vocational training, assistance with student visas and college placement, and MLB academy prep, alongside nutrition and sports psychology assistance.
“Staying in school equals free baseball turned into free baseball strength training, a meal program sponsored by the MLBPA Players Trust, and a college scholarship sponsored by Dale Murphy's Foundation. It's become something really special,” Quinn says.
Quinn’s career as a college baseball coach connected him with Weinberg, a former collegiate baseball player himself. Weinberg first came to the Dominican Republic on vacation, but learned about Quinn’s foundation and knew he wanted to center it in his next film.
“The same as most Americans, when I first started off I was doing a whole lot of research on my end just before I got down there on the education stuff and the challenges these kids have to go through just to play baseball and continue to play,” Weinberg says.
La Fundación captures the diverse array of challenges Quinn’s foundation helps athletes navigate, from a labyrinthine path through bureaucracy to a U.S. student visa to the frequent trials of MLB’s international complexes. Weinberg shared that he’s constantly hearing about new issues facing kids who otherwise would have no help finding their way to a successful career.
“Everything throws me for a loop,” Weinberg says. “I feel like Jay tells me something new each day, ‘Hey, this kid's got this thing going on’ … In his program, there's about 40-45 kids. They all have some crazy stories, something that you would never hear about an American baseball player, right? Kids who are, you know, immigrating from other countries, kids who dropped out of school when they were really young because they thought baseball was gonna be their path.”
Graduates of the foundation’s program are finding new ways to explore their appreciation for baseball that, in the traditional training path, they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. Alcántara earned his personal training certificate through vocational training offered by the foundation.
“(The documentary is) so important because it doesn't matter how much work we do if nobody sees what we're doing, there's not gonna be, be support for what we're trying to get done in the Dominican Republic,” Alcántara says.