Young baseball players in Latin America with big dreams of coming to the United States to play in the big leagues have to do more than work on their batting and fielding these days--they may also have to prove that they are who they say they are. Baseball has been beset by a series of assumed identity scandals; for example, the
young baseball phenom, Esmailyn Gonzalez, received a $1.4-million bonus when he signed with the Washington Nationals in 2006. This February, the player who was misrepresenting himself as only 19 years old turned out to be a 23-year-old by the name of Carlos David Alvarez Lugo [Scientific American].
To combat the problem, Major League Baseball investigators have begun giving DNA tests to some prospects to determine whether they are actually related to the people they identify as their parents, and aren't just borrowing them along with the birth certificate of ...
