Am very sure that on this particular sub-category of a lesser known & understood topic you are way off the mark. For many reasons, the most significant of which is that we are looking at thousands of 13 to 16 year old adolescents most of whom are growing up with poor health & dental care, low quality nutrition, inadequate education, always in poverty, little decent baseball instruction, in families with almost no awareness of modern, urban life in a nation like the United States in its new high tech affluence.
While it is true that the Dominican Republic is thoroughly scouted--- with nearly all MLB clubs having an extensive presence there--- the DR is less than ONE PERCENT of the population of Latin America, not to mention the few countries in Europe and the Middle East, Korea, Japan & Australia where baseball has established some presence as an attractive sports option.
It is clearly evident that baseball has a major undertaking to maker inroads against football, the world's major sport---and no other game is close at all. According to Forbes the four most valuable franchises in the world are soccer teams in England and Spain, with the NY Yankees, the highest valued American pro team, worth barely half of any of them. But Cuba & the Dominican are strong evidence that baseball can be successfully implanted: in both nations, and to a lesser extent in Venezuela, the game has flourished for nearly a century with minimal assistance & involvement of MLB & other American enthusiasts. A massive effort, with support from our government & ones in South America, Africa, India, China, could shorten the development time greatly from that of Cuba, DR, etc. The model might be postwar Japan, where baseball quickly became a huge success, and young Japanese avidly soon played the game at the highest level.
The opportunities are there: build on our presence in more populous Venezuela, where the Phillies have an immense opportunity as the sole MLB club still with a nearly nation-wide scope, very good existing facilities, the only academy still operating (not an accident that the top players the Phillies are signing post-July 2nd internationally are almost entirely Venezuelan, and IMO the projection ought to be that the Phillies will sign around twenty or more over the next 340 days---and NOT just in Day 1 or even Week !. More than half of our 40 to 50 Latin American signings over the next year will come in Venezuela---and my expectation is a bonanza. Already in the past several years our short-season teams in the GCL & PONY are winning because the quantity & quality of Latin kids, heavily from Venezuela, bolster the positions where fewer players are taken in the June draft (and in the DSL the Phillies teams are less successful & may have fewer real prospects than other MLB clubs that concentrate their efforts pretty much only in the DR---but even there we are one of only a few organizations with two facilities). Further, what most posters here overlook is that when you go shopping for 14 year old ballplayers it makes sense to grasp the wisdom of choosing to emphasize quantity over already evident quality.
the key fact is that there are thousands of super adolescent athletes in countries where baseball is yet to expand with the potential to provide hundreds of future major lesguers. Obviously, winning many of them away from soccer is a more difficult matter than competing with the NFL, NBA, or most difficult of all winning HS multi-sport athletes away from college hoops & football. But it can be done. and quicker than we realize, in large part because MLB---and the Phillies as much any other club---are drowning in cash from huge new local TV contracts, high attendance at obscenely high ticket prices.
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Apparently posters here have bought into the sales pitch that we have the NEW Phillies. IMO a bit more buyer's beware is prudent. These are, after all, the same old, same old Mainline Monied Morons, with a few changes of generation, and more crucially maybe a shift in ownership shares.
Perhaps Middleton means what he says---but until there is evident of money actually spent, for all we know the profits will continue to go into already crammed portfolios, only larger denomination bills.
Reminder: Bill Giles played the shell game of constantly changing GMs, managers, front office, cheap salaried players---and he did it for two decades until public funding brought a new ballpark & increased fan interest. MacPhail is of an age to soon join Pat Gillick on a St Petersburg park bench. and Klentak is an apparently very bright guy only his experience is mostly with computers.