Yankees looking to rise again by shooting gobs of money at 15 year old Latino boys

The signings of adolescent Latinos each July remains one of baseball's slimiest sides, a market so ripe for corruption that you wonder how some scouts bag men sleep at night. MLB teams pipelines can sign pay money for Latino boys on their 16th birthdays, which means they are courted - groomed by scouts pimps long before age 15. Nobody would allow this in the United States (though after the success of Bryce Harper, whose future was being engineered before his testicles dropped, that will surely change.) I've never understood how Bud Selig gets so jacked up about performance enhancing drugs - but seems to turn a blind eye toward the international talent system. 

Oh well, the rules are the rules, right?

A baseball analyst by the name of Kiley McDaniel has written a long, exhaustive article on how the Yankees in 2014 plan to obliterate past records for international spending, dropping up to $15 million on Latino kids - even if it means paying $10 million in luxury tax penalties. (MLB owners - great pillars of morality and conservatism, for the most part - always react swiftly to the crisis of too much money being paid on the help; they do it the old fashioned, socialistic way - by instituting huge taxes on each other. But lord help any local politician who attempts to tax an MLB franchise to pay for, say, schools. Moral outrage will rain from the skies. )

Signing Latino talent is apparently one of the last ways a rich team like the Yankees can use their financial clout. The Texas Rangers, for example, built their system doing this. (McDaniel says one reaction of Yankee fans will be, why did they wait so long?) He writes:

Effectively, the Yankees could spend over $20 million on what their scouts think are the top Latin American 15 year olds; a challenge no club has ever come close to trying before.

It's a long article. Read it. I still don't know how to feel. When your team is using an immoral system to its advantage, it's almost as hypocritical to scream indignation as it is to claim everything is hunky dory. At least Hal Steinbrenner is spending his money on talent instead of a new boat house. Maybe we'll develop some star players in five to 10 years. At least we are working a strategy.

But McDaniel warns that the Yankee spending explosion might cause MLB to institute an international draft - and punish the Yankees by taking away their first round picks.

One point is clear: The lords of baseball are determined to eventually turn MLB into the NFL and the New York Yankees into the San Diego Padres.