SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — If Carlos Gonzalez isn’t crushing a fastball, he’s often singing a song or humming a tune. When CarGo ad-libs a concert in the Rockies’ clubhouse, he always draws an audience.
Franklin Morales, Jonathan Herrera and Jose Lopez are just a few of Gonzalez’s teammates who hang out near his virtual mic. While CarGo shouldn’t quit his day job, hearing him belt out reggaeton tunes is sweet music to the Rockies’ front office.
Players with Gonzalez’s Venezuelan roots, to say nothing of his chart-topping talent, weren’t typically wearing Rockies uniforms five years ago. The team’s 2006 opening-day lineup consisted of eight American players — all white, all but one a Rockies draft pick — and Luis Gonzalez, claimed from Cleveland in the Rule 5 draft.
These days, it’s a whole new world in the Rockies’ clubhouse and, not coincidentally, the National League West standings. Of the 25 players who will be introduced on opening day at Coors Field, as many as 11 will be Latino, seven from Venezuela alone.
“We’re multicultural . . . really, really multicultural,” Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd said. “We have all different races across the board. What’s beautiful about it is they interact so well. They have such a way of bringing it all together, and it’s because we have the right kind of guys.”
Having the right kind of guys is one thing. Having players talented enough to make the playoffs twice in the past four years is another matter altogether. The Rockies’ talent base has ascended to unprecedented heights, and it’s no secret why.
After paying lip service to international scouting in the early years of the franchise, the Rockies have become impact players in the grassroots of Latin American baseball. In fact, given the enormous stature of Gonzalez in Venezuela and Ubaldo Jimenez in the Dominican Republic, you could argue the Rockies have become the chic franchise in each country.
“You go around the Dominican right now and you see kids wearing Rockies hats,” O’Dowd said. “You wouldn’t have seen that 10 years ago. We’re very visible in the Dominican right now and, with Carlos’ success, we’re big in Venezuela. Ultimately, that helps us. That really creates a good situation for us.”
Dominican academy due
It has been a long time, too long, in the making, but the Rockies’ scouting efforts in Latin America are paying off. Gonzalez was acquired via a trade, but Jimenez, the first legitimate ace in franchise history, was signed out of the Dominican for $50,000 at age 17. Then there’s Jhoulys Chacin, who appears on the verge of breaking through to 15 wins in his second season. He was signed as a teenager in Venezuela for $20,000.
There are more. Herrera, overlooked in the Yankees’ Venezuelan academy because of his 5-foot-9 height, has become a solid utility player. Morales, yet another Venezuelan, can be lethal out of the bullpen against left-handed hitters. And Manuel Corpas, one of the few major- leaguers from Panama, was a major contributor out of the pen before elbow problems led to his release.
So how have the Rockies been able to tap into the seemingly bottomless barrel of talent in Latin America? There’s no magic formula in Venezuela or the Dominican, the most common stomping grounds for major- league scouts. It’s about hard work and a financial commitment.
“All we do is look for players,” said Rolando Fernandez, the Rockies’ senior director of international scouting. “We’re a club that projects a lot. Anybody can scout obvious talent. When I’m looking at a kid, I dream about what he’s going to look like five or seven years from now.”
Fernandez was looking over Jimenez’s shoulder in August of 2001 when he signed his first pro contract. The Rockies at the time were bit players in the Dominican market and wishful thinkers in Venezuela. But that’s ancient news.
Fernandez’s desk at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick is covered with blueprints for the Rockies’ Dominican training facility in Boca Chica. They have been leasing a facility once used by the Mariners, but hope to launch construction of their own complex in August.
The facility will be more than a bunch of diamonds and a dormitory. For the Rockies, it’s a symbol of their growing commitment and increased stature in Latin America.
Nowhere have they accelerated their efforts more than in Venezuela. The Rockies, with Gonzalez as their star, want to capitalize on their newfound visibility in the baseball-crazed country.
“It’s not just CarGo, it’s all the Venezuelans we have,” Fernandez said. “Now that they’re having success, there’s been an impact. We’re one of their teams now down there. It’s always the Yankees and Boston, but I think they’re looking at us too.”
Escalating effort and costs
Back in the day, Latin American prospects barely gave the Rockies a casual glance. Paul Egins, the team’s director of major-league operations, was a virtual one-man scouting department in the Dominican in the early ’90s.
Egins was able to sign future major-leaguers Neifi Perez and Juan Uribe, but the dark days of the Rockies’ Latin American efforts were marked more by players who fell through the cracks than ones who became fixtures at Coors Field. To wit: On the day Egins worked out Uribe, he also spotted Jose Guillen, but didn’t have the budget to sign him.
The stories don’t end there. Fernandez once honed in on a raw-boned Venezuelan right-hander named Felix Hernandez, but couldn’t cobble together the money to sign him. If Jimenez isn’t the best Hispanic pitcher in the game, Hernandez, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, is.
“I’m sure other people say the same thing about us when they see Ubaldo and Chacin: ‘If I would have seen him, but I didn’t see him,’ ” Fernandez said. “You’re going to miss some players, no doubt about it. But you can’t be afraid of that. You’ve just got to keep working hard.
“It’s a different dynamic in Latin America, especially in Venezuela. It’s a very challenging market for a lot of reasons. Every team has enough money to sign players, but some are getting out because of the danger. It’s a difficult place.”
For years, major-league teams have flocked to the Dominican Republic in search of talent. But Venezuela, which, like the Dominican, isn’t subject to the June draft, presents a stressful challenge with its disparate terrain, sheer size — at 350,000-plus square miles, it’s roughly 18 times the size of the Dominican — and culture of violence and kidnapping.
How dangerous is it? The Rockies have increased their bare-bones staff of part-time scouts in Venezuela to two full-timers with plans to hire a third. According to Fernandez, each of the team’s full-time scouts has been robbed at gunpoint, once by a policeman who approached the scout as he attempted to fix a flat tire.
The Astros, the most successful team in the industry at mining Venezuelan talent — signing, among others, Johan Santana, Bobby Abreu and Richard Hidalgo — have dialed down their scouting efforts in the country, leaving a handful of teams with training facilities in the country.
The Rockies have an academy — “our Venezuelan operation,” Fernandez said — but it’s actually a house in Valencia that’s been converted into a makeshift dormitory. Prospects are sent there by scouts to be evaluated until Fernandez, who spends about a week out of every month in the country, decides whether to offer the player a contract.
Major-league clubs sign about 500 Dominican players a year, but the number of Venezuelans signing has risen exponentially from Fernandez’s estimate of 100 a decade or so ago to 250-300 per year. The number of players being signed isn’t all that’s rising. The cost of their signatures is escalating too.
Gone are the days when the Rockies could sign Perez for $5,000 or Herrera for $10,000. Today, agents are involved and signing bonuses typically land in the $50,000-$150,000 range, with elite prospects receiving upward of $3 million.
“When we first got started, there were maybe 10 or 15 teams involved,” Fernandez said. “Nowadays, everybody has an academy, everybody has an operation and everybody has increased their scouting budget. It’s a free-agent market. That’s what you have to do to compete.”
Vital link in talent pool
The Rockies’ international scouting budget was about $100,000 a decade ago. Today, that number is approaching the $2 million mark. The most the team has spent on an international free agent is $650,000 to sign Dominican infielder Carlos Martinez, who at 22 has yet to rise above low-A Asheville.
As an organization, the Rockies rank in the middle of the pack when it comes to how much they spend on international talent. According to Baseball America, Colorado was 16th among the 30 teams in 2010 bonuses, far below the $6.5 million spent by Seattle and considerably above the $300,000-plus spent by the Dodgers.
The Rockies’ estimated budget of $1.96 million is higher than many big-market clubs, including the Mets, Red Sox, Giants, Angels and White Sox.
How important has the influx of Latin American talent been to the Rockies? It’s been nothing short of vital given some of the team’s regrettable decisions and plain bad luck on draft day. Case in point: The emergence of Chacin from a 6-foot, 165-pound teenager into a potentially dominant starter has filled a void created when Greg Reynolds, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2006 draft, experienced a litany of arm problems.
“We all know how the draft works,” Fernandez said. “You don’t want to have to get all of your players in the draft. You’re going to have some gaps; somebody is going to get hurt. That’s why Latin America is extremely important.
“You can’t be there halfway. That doesn’t mean you have to have the most money. You have to have an operation that works, and that’s what we’re building.”
The process has begun, but it will never end.
“You’ve got to keep farming the mines to get players,” O’Dowd said. “It’s a cycle, and you’ve got to keep the cycle coming. You can’t stop. You can’t shut it off . . . ever.”
O’Dowd believes the team’s future is bright because, with Jimenez and Gonzalez serving as the faces of the franchise in Latin America, prospects figure to be open to signing with the Rockies, if the money is similar. Gonzalez, after conducting clinics in Venezuela during the winter, can vouch for that.
“It’s scary,” Gonzalez said. “Everybody looks up to me now. Kids would come up to me and they’d be wearing Rockies shirts or Rockies caps. It wasn’t like that before, but the Rockies are the team now in Venezuela.”
Jim Armstrong: 303-954-1269 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com
