Baxter, Miami Herald: Perez provides social conscience for Dominican prospects

"Shortly after Rafael Perez joined the New York Mets as director of international development in March 2005, he noticed the club's Dominican prospects seemed uncomfortable and out of sorts at the team's rookie league camp in Port St. Lucie.

And the problem, he quickly determined, wasn't on the field. It was in the cafeteria.

``Half the players and staff were Latin,'' he says ``and the menu had no Latin dishes.''

So Perez sent the Mets' chefs to a local restaurant to learn how to cook Dominican food and two weeks later rice, beans, yucca and fried plantains started appearing on the daily menu.

``We have to understand their background. And sometimes you have to go one step better to understand them,'' Perez says of the Mets' Latin players. ``If you have 30 percent Latin players, then your meals should reflect that and 30 percent of it should be geared to Latin players.''

But spicing up lunch isn't the only thing Perez has done to help ease the transition from the Dominican to the U.S. Since joining the team a year ago, Perez has also:

_Overseen the move of the Mets' Dominican training facility from the smog-choked Olympic Park in central Santo Domingo to a modern three-field complex hidden among laurel and mango trees not far from the Caribbean.

_Begun expanding a program in which the team brings as many as five of its top U.S. prospects to its Dominican academy each winter to train and bond with their future teammates.

_Proposed cultural diversity classes for coaches and players in the Mets' system.

_Followed the Cleveland Indians' example by joining a revolutionary educational program that will allow his players, most of whom dropped out of school to play ball, a chance to finish their elementary or high school studies at the Mets' expense.

``What Cleveland started two years ago was extremely important,'' Perez says. ``I believe that a better-educated player will develop and have a better chance at making it to the big leagues. Cleveland is a visionary. But at the same time it's the right thing to do. To me, there has to be a social conscience.''

Perez has been Major League Baseball's social conscience in the Dominican since 2000, when the commissioner's office appointed him to oversee operations of the 30 big-league clubs in Latin America. Family pressures led him to leave that job last winter but not before he went a long way toward cleaning up baseball's image on the island, forcing clubs to adhere to certain minimum standards at their developmental academies by establishing rules for everything from food and field conditions to the thickness of the mattresses in the dorms.

Now Perez wants to take Cleveland's vision a step further, teaching players basic administrative skills such as how to open a bank account and balance a checkbook.

``Forget the academies. Take the academies away,'' says Perez, a Dominican native who played baseball at South Alabama and worked as a global project manager for a financial software company before returning to baseball. ``You sign 100 players, 95 of them won't make it. That's just the reality.

``I'm not focusing on that 5 percent that are going to make it. I'm concentrating on those players that don't. Not all clubs are doing that. But I can tell you the Mets are going to do it.''

However, they won't be doing it long if Perez doesn't produce enough baseball players to justify the costs, which are nearly $800 a player for the school classes alone.

``All of this is to produce players,'' he says. ``Now, as a consequence is it also good for society? Yes. That's a positive. That's always a good second point. But if I wouldn't be able to prove that this is going to help produce better players, it would have been a tougher sell.''"

The thought of young kids having to play in smog & sleep on lumpy mattresses is not good. I'm glad someone is attending to these things.

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