The Eastern Stars (10 page)

 

 

 

I
t was not the home team but Major League Baseball in the U.S. that made the world realize that this little sugar town produced great ballplayers. Three things happened in the mid-twentieth century that opened the major leagues to San Pedro de Macorís.

The first thing that happened was an end to the so-called color line in Major League Baseball, the segregation that had created the Negro League. Originally baseball was integrated, but a movement grew to exclude African-Americans. It was led by Cap Anson in the 1880s. Anson was one of the greatest players of his day, with a twenty-seven-year career—mostly for the Chicago White Stockings, who later became the Cubs—during which he became the first player with three thousand hits. He was so influential in baseball that his racism infected the entire game. On numerous occasions Anson refused to play because there were black players either on his team or the opposing one. Famously, in 1883 he objected to playing with the catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker, a well-educated son of a doctor and considered the first African-American major leaguer. Other players followed Anson. There was never a stated rule barring black players, but increasingly in the late nineteenth century they were not allowed to play. Some called it a “gentlemen’s agreement.” After the 1898 season, blacks were not even allowed in the minor leagues. Being the instigator of this injustice did not stop the National Hall of Fame from inducting Anson in 1939, one of the first nineteenth-century Hall of Famers.

Occasionally lighter-skinned players passed by claiming to be Latin or Indian, but they would be discovered and forced out. In 1916, Jimmy Claxton played two games for the Oakland Oaks as an American Indian. When it was revealed that he had some African blood, he was fired. The somewhat darker skin of such players as Alex Carrasquel from Venezuela, Hiram Bithorn from Puerto Rico, and several Cubans did not pass without comments from press and fans, but they did manage to play in major-league games, though never for long or illustrious careers. Some signed forms certifying the Spanishness of their background. In the 1920s, two Cubans, outfielder Jacinto “Jack” Calvo and pitcher José Acosta, pulled off the feat of playing for both major-league teams and Negro League teams.

For two decades there was no permanent organization for African-American professional baseball until 1920, when Rube Foster, a black former pitcher—not to be confused with the white Red Sox pitcher of the same name—founded the Negro National League. The Negro League was a separate major-league-quality baseball system. In addition to their U.S. season they played in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Venezuela. African-American players became part of the Latino world.

In 1920, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed the first commissioner of baseball. Theodore Roosevelt had appointed him judge to the Northern District of Illinois, where he distinguished himself by his trials against unionists, leftists, opponents of World War I, and black people. Many of his rulings were overturned on appeal. He was the judge who managed to get the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, banned from the sport; backed by bigoted white players and club owners, he managed to maintain segregation in baseball.

But race relations were changing in the 1940s. The military was becoming integrated, there was a nascent civil rights movement, and there was a wealth of talent in the Negro League—some of the best players in baseball, waiting for the team with the courage to tap them. Landis died in 1944, and the new commissioner, Happy Chandler, a Kentucky politician nicknamed for his comportment, was willing to allow integration. In 1945, Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager, held tryouts for black players. He said he was thinking of forming a black Brooklyn team. That same year he signed Jackie Robinson, an all-around athlete and talented infielder, sending him to the minor leagues with the stated intention of bringing him up to the Dodgers.

Rumors had been floating around for some time about giving Negro League players tryouts in the majors. It was widely thought that Satchel Paige would be given one of the first tryouts. Paige had grumbled about the idea of a tryout, but he was bitter for years that he did not get to be first. However, he probably would not have agreed to starting in the minor leagues because he was considered one of the best pitchers of his day.

There is some evidence that Rickey was considering a Cuban for the first black. A Latino might have seemed more acceptable to fans because, oddly, Americans were more willing to accept blacks if they were foreign. He was looking at Silvio García, a famous Cuban infielder who was also famous for his alcoholism and for his menacing statements about what he might do to white people who dared to bother him.

Robinson, though talented, was a rookie and not the best the Negro League had to offer. But he was good and he had something else Rickey was looking for. When he signed Robinson, Rickey told him that he wanted him to accept abuse stoically. That was something Paige or García would never have done. Paige was famous for his tantrums and antics on the mound. Robinson withstood verbal abuse and death threats with a calm façade few other players could have mustered—not because of a stoic or passive nature but because of a strong and disciplined character.

Robinson fascinated the press and the public. In 1947 he became the first Rookie of the Year, making it a coveted award forever after. Eleven weeks after Robinson signed with Brooklyn, Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians signed a Negro League outfielder named Larry Doby. Several years earlier Veeck had tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and sign numerous top black players, but after he told Landis of his intention, the club was suddenly sold to another bidder. Doby, who endured all that Robinson did, has been largely ignored by history because he was the second and not the first. This was why Satchel Paige had so wanted to be first. Doby was the first black player to hit a home run in a World Series, in 1948, which helped Cleveland win that Series. Satchel Paige was also signed, and helped the Indians win. Robinson was instrumental in helping Brooklyn win a World Series, but not until his final season, 1956, long after he became a legend.

The third black player was Hank Thompson, signed by the St. Louis Browns twelve days after Doby. The fourth, Willard Brown, played his first game for the Browns two days after Thompson. Thompson then went to the Giants in 1951, joining Monte Irvin and Willie Mays in the first all-black outfield.

Major-league teams were acquiring tremendous talent from the Negro League and winning pennants and World Series with them. But there was still enormous resistance from owners, players, and fans. The minor-league Class AA Southern Association refused to hire black players and was eventually the target of a civil rights movement boycott. The organization finally died in 1961 but maintained segregation to the last. Tom Yawkey, owner of the Boston Red Sox—today a favorite team of many Dominican fans—refused to hire black players. He turned down both Jackie Robinson, who tried out in Fenway Park, and Willie Mays. By the 1960s, while integrated teams were prospering, the Red Sox stubbornly remained at the bottom with their all-white team.

With only fifteen percent of the population white, mostly from a privileged class, the Dominican Republic rarely produces white baseball players. But by the 1950s, Dominican players had a chance at the major leagues. If they could get there, they would find themselves in a strange country, very different from theirs, and face a very different kind of racism.

Dominicans are not strangers to racism. The Dominican—in fact pan-Caribbean—obsession with the calibrating of racial differences is profoundly racist.

But the Dominican ballplayer is confronted with something entirely different in the U.S. It is because Dominicans are so familiar with the notion of racism that they find the American variety so baffling. Dominicans did not worry about issues of segregation and integration. In the Dominican racist logic, it made no sense to have separate baseball teams or lunch counters because racial traits are not transmitted over lunch counters or on baseball diamonds.

Most Dominican parents are so mixed that the children could come out most any shade. There are rural superstitions about pregnant mothers consuming white foods to ensure light-colored babies. As citizens of a mulatto country, Dominicans’ skin color could easily get darker or lighter, depending on whom they mixed with. According to the theory, if they got whiter, they would be a happier, more prosperous country, because white people enjoy happy and prosperous countries. On the other hand, were the population to get darker, the Dominican Republic would eventually become a black country. If that happened, it would simply be absorbed into Haiti, a barbarous and impoverished land. Since the first Haitian invasion the main concern has always been the threat of a Haitian takeover.

Historically, the answer in the Dominican Republic was to keep adding white people to the mix and to get rid of the black people. The problem is that this keeps raising a difficult question: Who’s going to cut the cane? The Dominican Republic needed black people, so white people were needed to offset them. Sugar was the only industry exempt from Trujillo’s decree—designed to prevent the importation of neighboring blacks—that any company’s workforce had to be seventy percent Dominican.

Concern about whitening the race was continued after Trujillo’s death by his former puppet president, Balaguer, who in 1983 wrote a book titled
La Isla al Revés,
The Island in Reverse, that claimed the Haitians were still trying to invade though no longer using the military. He called it a “peaceful invasion,” an
invasión pacífica
, a favorite term of Trujillo’s. The new invasion, he wrote, was “biological” and he warned of the “fecundity” of black people, saying that they “multiply with a rapidity that is almost comparable to that of vegetable species.” To further illustrate his point, he included five pages of color photographs of families from his native region to show what fine Caucasian faces they had.

When José Francisco Peña Gómez—a popular politician with black skin and African features—ran for president in 1996, Balaguer insisted he had a secret plan to reunify the country with Haiti. Peña Gómez was a Dominican born of Dominican-born parents with one Haitian grand-parent, and yet he was frequently said to be Haitian.

Even as recently as 1997, President Leonel Fernández, who said he would be different, discovered that the Dominican Republic was threatened by a Haitian “mafia”; some 35,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry were subsequently deported.

But unlike the Americans, Dominicans do not see their society as divided between white people and black people, with anyone with any touch of African blood considered black. Dominicans are mostly mulattos, and in Dominican society mulattos are not considered black. In fact,
mulatto
is too vague a term for all of the variants—
morenos
,
indios
,
chabins
, people with African hair, commonly known as “bad hair,” and green eyes, people with “good hair” but bad noses—all recognized classifications that in America were considered black. Dominicans had not expected to be treated as though they were
haitianos
.

I
t was predictable that the first black Latin players would be Cuban. White Cubans had always been in the major leagues. Thirty-two Cubans had played in the majors before 1948, starting in 1871 with the first Latino major leaguer, Esteban Bellán, known in the majors as Steve Bellán, who was one of the founding forces in Cuban baseball. Cubans such as pitcher Dolf Luque, nicknamed “the Pride of Havana,” were mainstays of the majors during the white-only years. There was no gentlemen’s agreement on white-skinned Latinos.

In 1951, Minnie Miñoso from Havana, the speedy outfielder nicknamed “the Black Comet,” moved from the Negro League to the Cleveland Indians and then to the Chicago White Sox. Miñoso was the first black Latino player in the major leagues. The door was slowly opening for San Pedro.