[BA]No Longer Accepting Visa

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No Longer Accepting Visa With visas for foreign minor league players getting cut off unexpectedly this year, organizations had to scramble to work around it -- and the problem could get worse By Will Lingo July 16, 2004 http://www.baseballamerica.com/online/features/040715visas.html Construction and landscaping workers in the Sun Belt. Ski resort workers in Colorado. Dishwashers and housekeepers from Cape Cod to Lake Tahoe. Australian lifeguards on Long Island. Horse breeders in Kentucky. Logging workers in Maine. Firefighting crews in the West. Brazilian soccer players at a summer camp in Maryland. And baseball players? A diverse collection, to be sure, but all these groups were affected by the sudden end of visas for temporary foreign workers this spring. Known as H-2B visas, they dried up after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services handed out 66,000 by mid-March, leaving baseball and a variety of other industries scrambling to adjust. "The visa situation is really unfortunate," Blue Jays scouting director Jon Lalonde said. "We had to discount Canadian players in the draft this year because they wouldn't be able to play in our system at all this summer. "The larger impact, however, has been with our Latin players. There were six players we were hoping to bring in from our Dominican Summer League team this year, but we weren't able to due to the visa restriction." Every other team is dealing with similar problems. Major league players aren't affected because they come under a visa classification for people in specialty occupations. Minor league players, however, are lumped in with non-agricultural, seasonal workers of every stripe. The current system has been in place since the early 1990s, but immigration officials had never observed the limit before. Last year, for instance, the government issued 78,000 H-2B visas. Because of post-Sept. 11 security concerns and a sudden surge in applications, though, the government held to the 66,000 cap for this fiscal year. Immigration's fiscal year begins in October, and by March visas were already at the limit, so officials stopped accepting applications. More than 10,000, most of which likely included requests for multiple employees, were returned. The effects were felt coast to coast. On Cape Cod, where employers usually hire 5,000-6,000 workers on H-2B visas each year, businesses held a protest concert to try to get the visa limit lifted. Baseball hasn't resorted to those measures yet, but teams have felt a pinch. First, Latin American players who are ready to come to the United States haven't been able to get in. The Cubs, for example, wanted to bring 25-year-old lefthander Raul Valdez to the U.S. but had to leave him in the Dominican instead. He's pitching in the Rookie-level Dominican Summer League and overmatched teenagers by striking out 20 in seven innings in one outing. Normally he wouldn't even be able to play in the DSL, but Major League Baseball relaxed age and service time restrictions for short-season leagues to cope with the problem. "The visa problems have made us keep guys like Valdez in the Dominican who need to be here, and it's been a big challenge getting guys for our(Rookie-level) Arizona League and (short-season) Boise teams," Cubs farm director Oneri Fleita said. The struggle for affiliated teams to fill out minor league rosters has had a trickle-down effect on independent leagues, which have seen more of their players signed by affiliated clubs and have lost one of their usual sources of talent, released players. "It's drying up the surplus of talent that normally becomes available as players are signed out of the draft," Atlantic League commissioner Joe Klein said. The draft was also affected by the visa limit, forcing teams to change the way they assessed foreign players who were eligible for the draft. For example, teams drafted 37 Canadians this year, which is a bit below normal, and have signed just four -- a significant dropoff. The Athletics signed one of them, righthander Steven Carter, out of Coastal Carolina as a 26th-rounder. They weren't able to get a work visa for him, but because they have a short-season affiliate in Vancouver, B.C., he went there. He can play in home games only, though he hadn't played yet because of elbow trouble. "We felt it was best to go ahead and get him into the system and have him start learning what's expected of him in this organization," A's scouting director Eric Kubota said. "We're lucky that with Vancouver, we have a team in Canada where we could send him. In fact, we've been approached by at least one team about loaning us players to have them only play home games too, but we said no. " The Angels ran into a similar problem with third baseman Freddy Sandoval, a Mexican citizen who was an eighth-round pick out of the University of San Diego. Sandoval reports to the Angels complex in Mesa, Ariz., every day at 7:30 a.m. He stretches with the rest of the Rookie-level Arizona League team, hits off a tee and in the cage, takes infield and then does his strength and conditioning work. "I get to do everything with the team," he said. "I just can't play in the actual games." Sandoval, 21, agreed to a contract, though he can't sign it yet, and took the Angels up on their offer to work in Mesa while paying his own living expenses. He said he hopes to play in the Mexican Pacific League this winter, while waiting for resolution to the visa problem. "It's not as bad as it seems," he said. "I'd just like to be out there playing. But there's nothing I can do, nothing they can do. The only thing we can do is be patient." Sandoval said he considered playing in the DSL but figures he's getting more out of his work with the coaching staff in Mesa. He also has been able to hit against Angels pitchers on rehab assignments. "It's better to be here," he said. "I get to face good pitching from guys ready to go back to Double-A and Triple-A teams." That's more than the club's ninth-round pick, shortstop Hainley Statia, can do. The Curacao native was eligible for the draft because he played as an exchange student at Trinity Christian Academy in Boynton Beach, Fla. (The Diamondbacks took his Trinity Christian teammate and fellow Curacao native, catcher Ulrich Snijders, in the 40th round but have not signed him.) Statia has signed but is stuck in Curacao for now. A few other players were using the DSL to stay active until they could play in the U.S., including Canadian righthander Adam Hawes, who signed with the Twins as a draft-and-follow in May, and Pirates 30th-rounder Issael Gonzalez, a second baseman who grew up in Quebec but was born in the Dominican. Again, Hawes would not be eligible to play in the DSL in normal times because he's not Latin American, but MLB has lifted that restriction as well. Brewers seventh-rounder Craig Langille, a righthander from Nova Scotia and the first Canadian selected, is taking a different approach. He's pitching for Swift Current of the Western Major Baseball League, a semi-pro league in western Canada that includes numerous American college players. The Mariners signed Canadian outfielder Sebastien Boucher, their seventh-round pick out of Bethune-Cookman, but had to place him on the restricted list after signing him. The Mariners plan to bring him to instructional league in September and work out his visa situation by next season, an approach that other clubs are also following. "You don't pay your players for instructs," Angels scouting director Eddie Bane said. "That's the way we understand it. But you never know how these things will work out." Bane said in the long run, these problems shouldn't affect anyone's career. So while some clubs steered away from foreign players in the draft because of the visa situation, the Angels did not. "We didn't move our board at all," he said. "None of these guys were going right to the big leagues, so there was no need to adjust our draft board just because they couldn't play this summer. " The Angels even went after Australian Aaron MacKenzie, who wasn't drafted after his senior year at Washington State. "I was pretty upset," he said. "I played four years of baseball here for that opportunity and if it had been any other year here, I would have had a better chance of getting drafted." MacKenzie, 23, found a way around the visa problem and was close to finalizing a contract with the Angels. He and Lacey Harberd, his girlfriend of four years and an Idaho native, had a wedding planned for Sept. 25, but elected to make things official at a courthouse on June 28 -- thus making him an American citizen. (They'll still have a ceremony for family and friends on the original date.) "We figured it would serve us both a lot better," he said. Fellow Australian Ben Rowe was pitching in the Pacific International League, a college summer circuit, while waiting to sign. Rowe's father and younger brother flew in from Perth to watch his final games pitching for Oregon State and to be with him on draft day. The senior righthander was a 24th-round pick of the Rangers in 2003 and has a 6-foot-4 frame and 90-mph fastball. But less than a week before the draft, he hadn't heard from any scouts and asked assistant coach Dan Spencer to investigate. Rowe found out about the visa situation, and scouts said he would likely slide completely out of the draft. "To have that happen was a bit of a letdown, a bummer," Rowe said. Rowe, 21, played in the Cape Cod and New England Collegiate leagues the last three summers but chose the PIL this year because of its proximity to Corvallis, Ore. He wanted area scouts who followed him during the school year to keep surveying him. He was 2-0, 2.40 for Bend and had plans to throw bullpen sessions for scouts from the Devil Rays, Red Sox and Royals. "This is just one of those things where you just roll with the punches and hope it works out in the end," Rowe said. "I just hope that when October rolls around one of these teams has a visa for me." But the visa difficulties of this year seem certain to get worse next year unless something changes. The shortage sneaked up on people this year. When October rolls around this time everyone who needs visas will know they'll be in short supply, so the crush could be even worse. Baseball officials are lobbying to either increase the limit or change minor leaguers to a different visa classification. Right now, however, there are just two bills in Congress, and neither has made it out of committee. One would raise the visa limit from 66,000 to 106,000, while another wouldn't count workers who received visas in previous years against the limit. But if the laws don't change, everyone involved expects next year will be even more difficult. "Hopefully the government will change its policies, but I'm going to recommend to our league that we start earlier. We'll recommend that our teams bypass the league and apply for visas in October and November," said Mike Marshall, director of baseball operations for the independent Northern League. "If you're not done by the first of the year, there's no chance." Additional reporting by J.J. Cooper, Will Kimmey, John Manuel and Allan Simpson -- If you're not have fun in baseball, you miss the point of everything -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 220.141.125.136