Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez was sued in the middle of the 2019 season. This article proved what happened in the case against a Dominican investor.
When the rumors of a lawsuit against Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez in a Dominican court came to fruition, I attempted to find documentation on this happening.
It seemed that once again a Cuban ballplayer had failed to meet his contractual obligations with a Dominican investor ala Yoenis Céspedes and a few others.
But I found it rather strange that Alvarez, after signing with the Dodgers, would damage his reputation by getting caught up in a lawsuit.
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Doesn’t it seem strange that a court case arises out of the blue three years after Álvarez signs an MLB contract and in the same year that he was finally the unanimous Rookie of the Year in the American League?
This seemed a little too convenient for me.
I was able to get the actual contact via Juan De Lemos’s lawyer about the so-called breach. De Lemos clarified to me that actual litigation does exist against Alvarez in the form of Manuel Azcona, a Dominican investor.
De Lemos and Azcona are friends and business associates for a long time, so this smelled a little fishy to me.
Azcona is also a well-known investor in the Dominican Republic and his main method of revenue comes via his investments in young up and coming baseball talents.
This business involves the practice of taking a percentage in a player’s contracts in exchange for large cash advances among other things.
The 55-year-old Azcona, who was the representation for Yordan Alvarez and Eddy Julio Martínez since April of 2015, when the two natives of Las Tunas, Cuba, decided to leave the island in search of the dream of becoming Big League´s players.
The 64-year-old De Lemos who is also a Dominican national widely assured me that it was public knowledge that there was a judgment against Alvarez for breach of contract in a Dominican court and they were just waiting for an American court to commute the ruling against the Cuban star.
“We are going to pursue a lawsuit against a player who breached a contract”, said De Lemos in reference to Álvarez.
De Lemos has a long history of importing Cuban players to the Dominican Republic in search of Major League contracts.
People like De Lemos and Azcona present themselves as agents or investors when they are really “buscones.” These types of individuals sponsor unsuspecting players and then sign them to unscrupulous contracts that can in many cases rob them of up to 50% of their first signed contracts.
In concurrence with the few players I interviewed two years ago, between 2008-2009, De Lemos invested in numerous Cuban baseball players with another Dominican national named Tomas Collado.
These two gentlemen invested in various players, William Arcaya, Juan Carlos Moreno and Félix Pérez being a prime example of their investments.
How did Houston Astros slugger Yordan Alvarez breach his contract, was my first question to De Lemos?
He replied: “The contract has various clauses that Mr. Álvarez did not adhere to, therefore causing a breach of contract. He never paid Mr. Azcona one red cent.”
This is all De Lemos had to say about this topic. When I tried to contact De Lemos to ask him the last questions about the case, he declined to comment.