Nearly a third of players in the major leagues are Latino. So why are clubs unwilling to mirror that trend when it comes to managers?

Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora had just become the first Puerto Rican to take a Major League Baseball team to the World Series when TBS’ Brian Anderson asked Cora what the achievement meant for him and the island where he was born.

“I still remember, it was around this time when we got the deal [to become Red Sox manager] done,” he said. “I didn’t talk about money, I didn’t talk about incentives, I didn’t talk about housing or cars and all that. All I wanted was a plane full of supplies for my hometown [Caguas, Puerto Rico].”

Cora was, of course referencing Hurricane Maria, which struck just before he was announced as the new Red Sox manager. Maria ravaged his homeland in 2017 and left nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans dead as a result of the storm, along with a seemingly unsatisfactory response from the federal government.

It was a powerful statement from someone who had been rumored as a strong managerial candidate for years before he got his chance with Boston. He played 14 seasons in MLB as serviceable utilityman and after that he stayed heavily involved in the game, serving as manager of the Criollos de Caguas Winter League team in Puerto Rico and as an assistant coach for the World Series-winning Houston Astros in 2017.

Cora now has the chance to become the second Latino to win a World Series – Ozzie Guillen became the first when he led the Chicago White Sox to the title in 2005. But the reality is, opportunities like this for Latinos in MLB are far and few in-between despite their dominant presence in the sport.

Thirty-one percent of MLB players are Latinos (and nearly 50% in the minor leagues) and yet year after year the lack of adequate representation among managers continues. This year, there were three managers of Latino descent (the Nationals’ Dave Martinez and and the White Sox’s Rick Renteria are the others) and that came less than two years after there was a period, where there were no Latino managers. Indeed, 2016 marked the first time since 1991 that the league had no Latino manager, a troubling figure considering the increasing number of players from the Latin American region since then.

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The decisions by MLB front offices to ignore the highly qualified Latinos available as managers is even more glaring considering how these teams have treated young talent from the region. The treatment ranges from unethical to potentially illegal. In a 2013 exposé, Mother Jones described the Dominican academies as the MLB’s “sweatshop system”. It detailed the death of teenager Yewri Guillén who died after reportedly suffering bacterial meningitis and going untreated while he was at the Nationals’ Dominican Republic academy, where Mother Jones alleged the team had no authorized medical staff. An MLB medical committee disputed the that and said Guillén suffered a “brain infection caused by an aggressive case of sinusitis”, according to ESPN.

Team’s fronts offices are willing to exploit young Latino players desperate to make it in the professional game too. CBS Sports’ Jonah Keri wrote about these unethical dynamics in October 2017. “This is what we’re doing when we celebrate our team landing a prized athlete from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic for millions less than that player’s true market value,” wrote Keri. “We praise our favorite team’s shrewd negotiating skills and think nothing of the teenager who doesn’t get to negotiate under fair, unfettered labor standards.” By setting a hard cap on the amount teams can pay international players, it makes it more likely that Latin American teenage players, without real collective bargaining power, are going to be lowballed when it comes to their salaries.

And earlier this month, Sports Illustrated reported that the United States Department of Justice was investigating “possible corruption tied to the recruitment of international players.” The investigation is said to investigating whether teams were involved in the process of transporting Cuban players to countries such as Mexico and Haiti where it would be much easier to get them to the United States.

Despite the influx of talent from these regions and the rules and laws MLB front offices are willing to break to sign Latino players, a dogged pursuit of Latino managers does not appear to be happening. At the beginning of 2017, there had been only a total of 17 Hispanic managers out of a nearly 700 openings according LaVidaBaseball.com. With the addition of Cora and Martinez last offseason that number is now at 19 – which is approximately 2% of vacancies in MLB history.

Teams want the talent on the field, but largely have not wanted Latinos leading the team as manager. It’s an odd decision given that Latino coaches are often bilingual and can communicate fluently with both English and Spanish speaking players. Cora and Guillen prove Latino coaches can lead teams to success, and a title for the Red Sox in the next week would emphasize that fact. Regardless of what happens in the World Series, Cora has brought joy back home.

“For everything we’re going through as a nation, as a country, for me to stand up here with this trophy, I know there’s a lot of people who are proud of me in Puerto Rico” he told Anderson while holding the ALCS trophy.





