The Eastern Stars (30 page)

Alexander, a young man in Consuelo, said, “I know Sammy Sosa. I know some of his family. In ’98 he built a big mansion in Santo Domingo. First he built a normal house in San Pedro, but once he built the mansion in Santo Domingo, we didn’t see him anymore.”

Sammy’s grandmother, Rosa Julia Sosa, still lived in a three-room cinder-block house in Consuelo. When the New York
Daily News
went to interview her in 1999, she complained that she hadn’t seen him in two years and asked the reporter for money.

After his retirement in 2007, Sosa abandoned his mansion in the capital for La Romana, where George Bell—who abandoned his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce—also lived. Joaquín Andújar, who also left his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce, left San Pedro entirely for Santo Domingo in 2008. San Pedro was finding it difficult to attract its wealthy ex-ballplayers.

La Romana and San Pedro, while both eastern sugar towns, were very different. Although both had considerable poverty, the river in La Romana was filled not with nineteen-foot fishing boats but with fifty-foot yachts. Bell built a new home at the guarded and gated La Romana resort of Casa de Campo, which had white stucco villas and seven thousand acres designed by Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta. Impossible for the casual visitor or neighborhood Dominican to enter, this private compound of mostly foreigners was the ultimate in wealthy exclusion. Perhaps of even greater interest to Bell, it had two golf courses planned by the celebrated course designer Pete Dye.

Bell played golf every Saturday and Sunday. Not surprising for a man who became a star because of his hand-eye coordination and smooth swing, he was a good golfer. So was Babe Ruth. Bell had a four handicap. “I could do better,” he said. “But as soon as you are good, no one plays with you, and it’s no fun.”

In middle age, Bell was still large, muscular, broad-shouldered, and fit—a tough-looking man with the handle of a handgun sticking up from the back of his blue-jeans waistband. He explained that he carried a gun because he didn’t “want anyone messing with me.” It was hard to believe anyone would, but he was a very wealthy man in a crime-ridden and impoverished land.

Bell, who had made about $2 million a year as a player, invested his money. He owned a construction company that built condominiums and a farm that used to produce dairy and then became a lemon plantation. For a while he rented it to his old team, the Blue Jays, as an academy, but they moved and he had trouble finding another team. That business was becoming very competitive. He lived a quiet life playing golf, fishing for marlin, and running his businesses.

“I don’t really spend my time with other baseball players,” he said. “I like to be alone. I was like that when I was playing, too. I don’t like to stay out late, don’t like to drink because I feel terrible the next day. I went to Alfredo’s disco for the inauguration and never went back. I don’t want to be out on the Malecón. I like to be home by nine o’clock. I don’t like people bothering me.”

Although his friend with the disco on the Malecón, Alfredo Griffin, was very different, he was one of the few baseball players with whom Bell maintained a friendship. Together they organized an annual charity golf tournament.

Mayor Tony Echavaría said of the local baseball stars, “Some make a lot of noise when they do things; others do it very quietly.”

Most of the ex-players, whether they had money or not, had charitable foundations. Supporting youth programs was a favorite activity. Rico Carty had played baseball before ballplayers became fabulously wealthy, but he had a large house and a good car and lived better than most Macorisanos. And he had the Rico Carty Foundation, which was located in a beat-up downtown building. Inside the dank and dark offices, no phones were ringing and no one was working. They were playing dominoes—a tough-looking group of men. The furniture was flimsy and the doors were blackened from fingerprints. The scene was reminiscent of the local party offices under Balaguer where patronage was dispensed to supporters and punishment to opponents. One of the domino players, a burly, overweight black man with a shaved head and enormous hands, was Rico Carty.

Carty explained that the Rico Carty Foundation needed money.

What does the foundation do?

“Helps poor people,” he explained. “Gives them medicine, things like that.”

He wanted to be paid $500 to be interviewed. “It’s not for me,” he protested without prodding. “It’s for the foundation.”

He was offered more than $500 worth of medicine, but he insisted on cash and looked sad and disappointed when he realized he wasn’t going to get it. “I’ve given a hundred interviews,” he said in a cranky tone, “and what do I have to show for it?”

Most of the ex-players had their own ideas about helping their town. Tony Fernández had a six-hundred-acre farm on the outskirts of San Pedro that he used as a retreat for orphans, with dormitories, chapels, meeting rooms, and a baseball diamond. He also built an orphanage. Orphanages were his primary concern. He pushed the importance of education. But most of the male orphans he talked to about education were hoping to impress him with their baseball talent so they could someday get signed.

While Fernández focused on orphanages, Soriano built a baseball field in his old neighborhood by the Quisqueya sugar mill. It was like this all over the Dominican Republic. Pedro Martínez, who grew up near Santo Domingo, built churches—one Catholic and one Baptist—in the capital.

The public likes to make heroes out of athletes, and in San Pedro, heroes who will make their poor town prosper at last. But heroics is a lot to expect from someone snatched away without education at age sixteen and handed fame and wealth at a dizzying speed while living in a world of unworldly men devoted to perfecting a boy’s game. Since the public has exaggerated expectations for these ballplayers, they develop an exaggerated sense of their own importance that they find very difficult to fit into reality once they stop playing. Doug Glanville, an ex-major leaguer himself, wrote in
The New York Times
in April 2008, “Most baseball players develop a special kind of shell that forms around them as their careers unfold. It probably isn’t that different from an egg shell. It’s fragile, but no one is really allowed inside until the player is ready to share his secrets, or until something terrible happens causing the protective layer to crack. Inside the player justifies his need to be secluded. He perceives that the court of public opinion will either build him up or tear him down. . . . So he uses this barrier to protect himself from the fickle judgments of the peanut gallery and to make it through his world.”

For all their money, the best baseball players could hope for was to become what was known in the Dominican Republic as
gente de segundo
, the highest social class money can buy. It takes generations to be Dominican upper class. A lot of the big money in San Pedro still came from old sugar families like the Vicini Cabrals, possibly the wealthiest and most powerful family in the country. The dynasty was founded by an Italian immigrant, Juan Bautista Vicini, who came to San Pedro in the 1870s and was one of the early architects of the Dominican sugar boom. Cristóbal Colón was among the Vicini sugar mills. The Hazín family emigrated from Lebanon in the late nineteenth century, also got into sugar, solidified their position by close ties with Balaguer, and remained one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in eastern Dominican Republic; the Hazíns are based in San Pedro. The Barceló family started with Julián Barceló, who emigrated from Spain in 1905, and built a fortune mainly in agro-industry. They invested heavily in Juan Dolio beach hotels. Only about two dozen families own almost all of the large companies in the Dominican Republic. These are three of them. As a group they are even less known for their civic-mindedness than baseball players are.

As for baseball, Major League Baseball claimed it generated $76 million in business annually in the Dominican Republic, which would make it a leading Dominican industry comparable to tourism in the jobs and revenue it provided. Major League Baseball claimed that its Dominican players sent home $210 million in 2003 alone and that it spent $14.7 million on 30 academies that provided, directly and indirectly, 2,100 jobs, many of them in San Pedro.

Mayor Echavaría had a different way of looking at it. Even if major-league players spent money only on themselves and their immediate families, Echavaría argued, they were still investing in the town. “Sammy Sosa does a lot of things for San Pedro,” the mayor said. “When he first got his contract, he built a big house for his mother, and that is an investment in San Pedro. And he built 30/30. That’s an investment. Alfredo Griffin built Café Caribe, the disco on the Malecón. Most players invest here in real estate. It’s for their families, but it’s an investment. They mostly invest in goods and real estate.” To the mayor, even a shopping spree was a welcome investment.

But he thought the most important contribution of baseball to San Pedro was that “baseball gives an activity to the poorest children and it changes their lives and the lives of their families.”

George Bell wasn’t completely sure about the impact of baseball. Sitting at his desk in his small office crammed with fishing tackle, a large mounted marlin, and an array of golf trophies, he said, “They give too much money and it’s going to end up trouble: so much money and no education.” But when he, who dropped out of school at age seventeen to sign, was asked if he had any regrets about not finishing his education, he sat back in his chair, put his arms behind his head, and replied, “Not really. I’m very satisfied with what I did and what I’m doing.”

 

A
t the gate at Tetelo Vargas Stadium, the rut between the street and the parking lot is so deep that it takes great care to drive a car in without scraping its nose. But the stadium itself was one of the best-maintained properties in San Pedro and looked even newer than it was.

Most days of the year there was either some kind of a game or practice going on, with a good possibility that some kid on that field was a future major-league player. Which was why, although the stadium might have seemed empty, there were always a few serious-looking older men in the seats, some with folders or papers, sometimes one behind home plate with a speed gun to measure pitches: scouts for the major leagues.

If you had good hand-eye coordination, if you could run fast, if you could throw a ball hard, if you were extremely tall or left-handed or, even better, both, you had a chance of rescuing your entire family and becoming a millionaire. Why wouldn’t you try?

Once July 2 approached, anyone with a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old boy in the family had the hope of a better life.

San Pedro is not about baseball for everyone. For some it is still the city of Gastón Deligne and Pedro Mir. When merengue star Juan Luis Guerra wrote his popular song about San Pedro, “Guavaberry,” he did not even mention baseball. He sang about the Malecón, watching the sunset, meeting women, and drinking guavaberry. And it is true that it is very pleasant at the end of the day on the Malecón, looking past the rocks and the palm trees, watching the last rays of a hot sun light the bright turquoise sea, glowing against the backdrop of a dark-blue sky. It’s even better while sipping guavaberry.

Macorisanos know this and appreciate it. But most of them need to be rescued. And there is only one way that will happen.

Asked that chronic San Pedro question, Why does this town produce so many baseball players? José Canó said, “Because we don’t have anything else here and we aren’t tall enough for basketball.”

 

 

 

Since 1962, Macorisanos have been entering the ranks of Major League Baseball with such frequency that between 1980 and 2008 there were only two years when at least one new Macorisano didn’t debut as a major leaguer. The dates of birth and even in some cases the names given here are the official data and may not reflect the true ages and names of players.

Amado Ruperto Samuel debuted in the major leagues on April 10, 1962, for the Milwaukee Braves, and played his final game on July 11, 1964, for the New York Mets, playing a total of three seasons in the majors. He was born on December 6, 1938, in Santa Fe and played shortstop, second base, and third base.

Manuel Emilio Rivera Jiménez debuted in the major leagues on April 11, 1962, for the Kansas City Athletics and played his final game on May 27, 1969, for the Chicago Cubs. He was born on November 19, 1938, in San Pedro de Macorís. He played 214 games as a left fielder and 22 games as a right fielder. After playing for the Athletics, the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him in the minor-league draft on November 29, 1966. He was traded to the Cubs on January 15, 1969, and he ended his seven-season career playing for the Cubs. In 1962 his batting average was .301, the highest in the American League. In his best year, 1968, it went up to .303.

Pedro Olivares González debuted in the major leagues on April 11, 1963, for the New York Yankees and played his final game on September 27, 1967. He was born on December 12, 1937, in Angelina. He was primarily a second baseman. The Yankees signed him prior to the 1958 season. He finished his major-league career playing for the Indians. He was known for his defense, making 31 errors in five seasons.

Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty was born on September 1, 1939, in Consuelo. He primarily played outfield. The Milwaukee Braves signed him as a free agent on October 24, 1959. He debuted in the major leagues on September 15, 1963, for the Milwaukee Braves (the future Atlanta Braves) and played his final game on September 23, 1979, with the Toronto Blue Jays. From 1972 through 1978, he was traded by the Braves to the Texas Rangers, purchased by the Chicago Cubs, purchased by the Oakland Athletics, purchased by the Cleveland Indians, drafted by the Blue Jays, traded to the Indians, traded back to the Blue Jays, traded to the Athletics, and purchased by the Blue Jays. He played a total of fifteen seasons in the major leagues and his best season was in 1970, playing for the Braves: he was given the batting title of the National League with a .366 batting average, 25 home runs, and 101 RBIs. For his career, he had 278 doubles, 890 RBIs, and 204 home runs. He had a batting average of .300 or higher in 1964 (.330), 1965 (.310), 1966 (.326), 1969 (.342), 1970 (.366), 1974 (.363), 1975 (.308), and 1976 (.310).