(si) Edgar Mercedes has made a fortune taking bets. So when the bookie saw 13-year-old Michel Inoa throw 78 mph off a mound in 2005 he knew that the lanky, 6-foot-3 right-hander was worth the wager. He's workable. He's workable, Mercedes kept saying to himself as he thought of the adjustments he would make to Inoa's delivery: the flick of his wrist, the angle of his waist. Mercedes, whose own career as a catcher had been derailed by injuries, had found the next best thing to being a professional ballplayer -- developing them. Now, after three years under Mercedes' tutelage, Inoa and Mercedes sidled up to one another for a photo-op at the press conference that the Oakland Athletics hosted on July 2 to announce that they had just bestowed a record .25 million signing bonus upon the 16-year-old Inoa. The amount nearly doubled the largest bonus ever issued to a Latin American amateur not from Cuba and signaled the increasing dependence that major league teams have on Latino prospects. But just as Inoa represents the face of a new generation of players, so too does Mercedes, 39, mark a new breed of buscones. Once marginalized, often poor, has-been (or never-were) baseball players looking to latch on to -- and profit from -- the island's national sport by training and then marketing promising prospects to major league teams, buscones have gone mainstream. Mercedes is emblematic of the new buscon: educated, wealthy and savvy. More agent than coach, more administrator than fungoes-hitter, he and other well-heeled Dominicans have seen the tremendous business opportunities in developing baseball players for profit. Using his financial muscle, Mercedes has established Born to Play, a baseball academy that lures some of the best amateur coaches, nutritionists and English teachers from the island with the promise of a steady, healthy paycheck. Amenities like these help attract top prospects, who pledge buscones such as Mercedes a percentage of their future signing bonuses. In 2006 Dominican president Leonel Fernandez signed legislation called the General Law of Sports, which included a section capping the amount that a buscon could claim from a player's signing bonus to 15 percent for a buscon who invests two years training a player and 10 percent for a year or less of work.

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