Dave Wilder? You are...Dave Wilder?

I’m not entirely sure how I missed this, being that I follow the pale hose pretty closely and read the blogosphere every day. But miss it I did.

Back on May 16, 2008, the Chicago White Sox canned scouting director Dave Wilder when the front office found out that he and two other scouts were being investigated by the feds for allegedly skimming off prospects in the Dominican Republic. Wilder cut his teeth with the Braves’ dynasty of the early ‘90s and was running both the west coast and Latin American scouting operations for the Sox. Generally recognized as one of baseball’s best and brightest, Wilder was in the running for the Red Sox GM position at one point and considered by many to be a lock for a GM role some day.

SouthsideSox.com offers the best description of what Wilder and his cronies were up to (allegedly). In a nut shell, Wilder would (allegedly) find really bad Dominican baseball players who weren’t represented by anyone. He would then offer these players $100K contracts—but also act as their agent, taking a percentage of the money he offered for himself as an “agent fee.” He also may have supplied players with fake birth certificates that lowered their ages by as much as five years (sic) and even dealt his clients PEDs.

And this wasn’t just some desperate scout with mouths to feed back home—this was the scouting director. Of the Chicago White Sox.

I tend to think of crimes as happening on a 100-point sliding scale. A “1” crime is something like sneaking out late one night to toilet paper your best friend’s house. A “100” crime is something so heinous it’s earned its own level of Hell.

So while not quite on the level of genocide, the Wilder scandal remains an inspiration precisely because it’s so low-class. Not only did it defraud third-world minors (stealing their money while pumping them full of hopes and dreams that will never be realized), you’ve also got an international drug-dealing angle plus the fact that Wilder defrauded the U.S. government with fake birth certificates—all while squandering his employer’s money and pocketing 15%. Not bad! I give it a 68, with the chance to improve on that score if it turns out anyone higher up in the Sox organization is involved.

There’s been no additional news on this for over a month. And really, it’s no surprise I missed the story when it broke—it was swept under the rug by both the Sox and MLB (as well as the local newspapers in Chi-town) almost as soon as it happened. It’s an ugly story that underscores just how vulnerable international prospects really are.