Hours after parting ways with Yerik Perez, the head of Major League Baseball’s office in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the league named Nelson Tejada as the office’s interim director, according to a report by ESPN Deportes.
According to his profile on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, Tejada has served in MLB’s department of investigations since 2008, where he led investigations into age and identity fraud, performance enhancing drugs, gambling, and other issues, and has been the department’s director since March 2024.
Prior to joining MLB, Tejada worked for the Passaic County, N.J., Sheriff’s Department from 1986-2008, where he was assigned as a task force officer to the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1994-2006 and the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2006-08.
Tejada replace Yerik Perez, who headed the league’s office in Santo Domingo, the country’s capital, since 2019. ESPN Deportes’ Enrique Rojas reported that Perez and other employees in the Santo Domingo office separated from MLB yesterday.
“We have mutually agreed to the departure of several members of our staff in the Dominican Republic. We appreciate their service and wish them the best,” MLB told ESPN yesterday. The other staffers who have left MLB have not been identified.
A lawyer and law professor, Perez has been with MLB since 2009 according to his profile on the professional networking site LinkedIn, when he served as a baseball operations analyst. He later worked for the league’s Department of Investigation, where he investigated the use and possession of performance-enhancing substance and age and identity fraud according to a 2019 MLB press release announcing his promotion to run the league’s office in Santo Domingo.
Photo: A general view during a spring training game between the Minnesota Twins and the Detroit Tigers at Estadio Quisqueya Juan Marichal on March 7, 2020 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. (Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images)
