Bad News Baseball: Yuma Scorpions’ American-Born Players Displaced By Imported Colombians
By Joe Guzzardi

With the major league baseball season a little more than one-third completed and with the All-Star Game voting underway, the biggest stories so far have taken place off the field.

Specifically:

Before the first Opening Day pitch was thrown, the Yankees wondered how they were going to fill those $2,500 boxes in its new stadium now that the Wall Street economy has melted down to bleachers-only level of affordability.
One of baseball’s highest visibility players, Yankee Alex Rodriguez, exposed during spring training as having used banned substances, e.g., steroids, missed several weeks from a hip injury. But when Rodriguez returned to the Yankee line-up, teammates and fans alike welcomed him as if he were a conquering hero.
And in what could be the most absurd incident in baseball’s long history of less-than-brilliant moves, another steroid abuser, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Manny Ramirez, is on the verge of being elected to the starting National League All-Star team. What’s remarkable is not only that the fans who vote for the All-Star players apparently don’t care if they are dopers—even more amazing is that Ramirez could be an All-Star starter even though he will have missed more games (50) because of his drug violation suspension than he will have played.
Meanwhile in Yuma, Arizona— literally 2,500 miles from the Bronx but figuratively ten million miles away baseball-wise—an astonishing development occurred two weeks ago that has negative implications for young, aspiring American baseball players for decades to come.

The Yuma Scorpions, a team in the Golden Baseball League, signed an affiliation agreement with the Colombian Professional Baseball League that resulted in the abrupt termination of the careers of many American hopefuls.

Golden Baseball League Chief Executive Officer Dave Kaval, [email him] a Stanford MBA, said the league still owns the Scorpions. Kaval described the Colombian league transaction as a standard affiliation agreement, on par with the ones major league teams have with their minor league affiliates.

According to Kaval, it’s the first affiliation contract with a foreign league for any American baseball team at any level.

Under the contract’s terms, promotions, concessions and other front-office business remain with the Scorpions and its president Mike Marshall.

But—importantly—the Colombian league handles on-the-field and player issues.

And, as the first matter of business, the Colombians fired the Scorpions’ manager, the coaches, trainers, clubhouse attendants, ground crew, and all the American players—a total of about 50— and replaced them with their own personnel including two umpires.

Presto—Colombian players displace Americans.

After the finalizing the agreement and two days before the season began, Kaval offered this analysis:

"I think for Yuma, one, you get higher quality baseball, which is great; two, it's really a groundbreaking kind of thing for independent baseball. Yuma isn't an independent team. They play in an independent league against independent teams, but they are affiliated. So that's really good because it provides additional stability, higher quality of play, additional excitement with an international accent. It's really a cool thing." [Scorpions To Be Affiliated With Colombian Pro League, by Edward Carifio, Yuma Sun, May 20, 2009]

While I’m sure the transaction provides “additional stabilityâ€