"When I ask the New York Yankees to come here to look at a player, they never come," Betemit said. "But Lantigua always came."
No more. Pablo Lantigua, who for six years as a Red Sox scout in the Dominican Republic defied danger for his employers on Yawkey Way, took at least one chance too many - not for the Sox, but for himself.
In a wildly unregulated frontier where coaches, talent hunters, street agents, and assorted hustlers jockey to cash in on boys with multimillion-dollar baseball promise, Lantigua joined the jobless masses here when the Sox fired him amid an investigation into scouts pocketing kickbacks from signing bonuses to Latin American players.
The scandal broke amid a dramatic spike in the bonus money flowing into the Dominican Republic - about $33 million last year to a country half the size of Maine - and has compelled Major League Baseball to more vigorously police the way teams do business in Latin America.
Dominicans are not subject to baseball's amateur draft. They can be signed as free agents at 16 - the age of most 10th-graders in the United States - and the system is rife with irregularities and exploitation.
"I was the unlucky one," Lantigua told the Globe translator, Claudio Polonia, about his ouster.
Lantigua is one of six major league scouts who have been fired during the investigation - the Chicago White Sox have dismissed three, the Yankees two - and the number is expected to grow. Several individuals who deal with big league scouts in the Dominican Republic said kickbacks have become more common as signing bonuses have ballooned.
"More people are going to be fired," said Fausto Raynoso, a youth coach in the teeming capital of Santo Domingo. "It's something that has to be stopped."
A gift that proved costly
Lantigua said he was fired for accepting a gift from a "buscone," a talent hunter, who represents a Sox prospect. Lantigua did not specify the gift or identify the player or buscone, but Alberto Arias, who operates a youth baseball program in Santo Domingo, said Lantigua told him the transaction involved a player the Sox signed in the coastal city of Haina.
