We Should All Agree That a $1.8 Million MLB “Pre-Agreement” for an 11-Year-Old Is Gross

The insular world of Baseball Twitter has been in something of hubbub, in the past week. The cause of the consternation: news from an influential international market/Latin American baseball reporter, Wilber Sánchez, that the Philadelphia Phillies have reportedly reached a $1.8 million “pre-agreement” with a promising young player, emphasis on “young.” The player in question, Venezuela’s David Basabe, is only 11 years old, and would become the youngest player to ever secure a pre-agreement with a Major League Baseball franchise. It’s yet another new precedent in the baseball world’s predatory hunt for young talent, although MLB is of course hardly the only professional sports league where children are sought out and scouted, effectively forced into lifetimes of performance they’re far too young to have actually decided to professionally pursue. The whole dynamic is, in a word, gross—but it’s also effectively a lie at the same time. Despite the headlines, there’s no guarantees that an 11-year-old like David Basabe will ever see a dime for his efforts. He’ll simply be made to sacrifice the rest of his childhood on the altar of parents’ ambitions, in the hopes of a distant, potential payout. Welcome to professional sports, junior!

It’s important, first of all, to get a grip on what an MLB “pre-agreement” constitutes, as many members of the online baseball fandom world reacting to this news have done so under the assumption that the Phillies are immediately paying this money to the family of the 11-year-old David Basabe, in return for him eventually signing with the organization when he turns 16. That, at least, would be a windfall for the family. But this is not the case, as MLB teams are prohibited from actually paying these families before the players come of age. The reality is in fact worse in many ways than what people theorize: A pre-agreement is instead a legally non-binding verbal agreement, a handshake deal that the team is interested in eventually signing that player after they turn 16, during the window that is the international signing period. There’s nothing to actually enforce such a deal: either side can walk away from it when the player comes of age. The team is, in other words, not actually on the hook here—they’ve effectively promised to set aside $1.8 million of their limited international signing bonus pool for the year 2031 for Basabe, but that’s on the condition that he lives up to everything that the team and scouts expect of him.

Or in other words: securing a pre-agreement is effectively a family signing their child’s remaining childhood away, without so much as a guarantee of any return at all. You might call it the sports’ world’s equivalent to indentured servitude. Such agreements are frequently used throughout the Latin American baseball world to target promising players from countries like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Colombia, although an agreement for an 11-year-old is a new precedent for MLB. It’s a huge, speculative bet on something with a very high probability of not panning out.

It’s also patently absurd. Look at this absurd quote that was proffered with the initial report from Wilber Sánchez, on Basabe’s baseball prowess: “He is the shortstop with the best offensive tools in the 2031 class. His combination of coordination, bat speed, and physical projection places him in a distinct category within his generation.”

It should go without saying that we have absolutely no idea who will ultimately possess “the best offensive tools in the 2031 class,” because the people who will be in that class are currently in sixth grade, and stand less than five feet tall. We are talking about “athletes” who haven’t yet gone through puberty! When I was a teenager, I umpired little league games, and although there were some kids in those games who were heads and tails superior players to the other children surrounding them, the idea that one can look at those kids and extrapolate their skills to when they’re in their mid-20s is ludicrous. The person with the “best offensive tools” in the 2031 class will almost certainly be some random individual whose name we don’t yet know, some kid who grows a foot and a half and puts on 100 pounds by the time they’re in high school. There are so, so many ways that the skilled 11-year-old you’re targeting ends up as a non-viable baseball player at the major league level. What if he doesn’t grow as much as expected? What if his peers lap him in skill? What if he stops wanting to play baseball, and instead wants to do literally anything else with his life?

The latter, sadly, probably doesn’t matter much to someone in the position of a David Basabe, which is one of the main factors that makes this kind of practice so distinctly gross. Securing this kind of pre-agreement for a life-changing amount of money, that can only be accessed five years later if everything goes just right, cannot help but incentivize the parents to dedicate everything to making sure their child eventually secures that payday. The incentive for overtraining, for abuse, for doping, all goes through the roof. Practically anything can be justified, in order to not break that tenuous and non-binding handshake deal. How many kids fall out of love with their sport over those years, but have no choice but to continue torturing their growing bodies out of family loyalty and a lack of any other way to support themselves?

Even if you’ve done nothing to void your agreement, you never know if an MLB club will just up and terminate their entire slate. In early 2026, that’s what the New York Yankees reportedly did, with Wilber Sánchez again reporting that the MLB team had canceled all of its existing pre-agreements with international players following the team’s reorganization of the international scouting department after firing its longtime director Donny Rowland. Imagine working toward that kind of impossible goal for years, only to be told that the MLB team you’re counting on as a savior has nuked its whole international scouting program and is starting over fresh.

For the record, I realize that this is a dynamic that is arguably even more problematic in other corners of the sports world, such as soccer in particular, where players as young as six are sometimes scouted in Europe and sent to academies where they relentlessly train in their sport/vocation. This is the case for some players currently considered among the best in the world such as FC Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal, and the possibility of finding another Yamal is what drives teams to scout and sign players in ever-more-predatory fashion. In the U.S., the current record looks to be soccer player Da’vian Kimbrough, who at 13 years old inked a deal with the United Soccer League’s Sacramento Republic FC, making his professional debut on the field shortly thereafter.

As a baseball fan, however, I take particular umbrage to watching this kind of aggressive recruitment continue to infiltrate my own favorite sport, especially given that the players we ultimately hear about who secured pre-agreements no doubt constitute a tiny percentage of all the ones who made such a deal, sacrificed years of their lives, and then were never heard from again. It shouldn’t need to be said that an 11-year-old has no business being asked to commit to how they’re going to spend the remaining years of their childhood. Their undeveloped brains can barely be trusted to know what they’ll want from life a day, or a week from now. Childhood, and especially the early teenage years, are meant to be a time when we begin to form a genuine self-impression of who we are as individuals, and our aspirations for our lives. To be told to give that all up, in the hopes of a doubtful future payoff from an MLB team, carries an air of tragedy that I don’t want to see anywhere near the game of baseball.