The Eastern Stars (9 page)

The games in Santo Domingo, Santiago, and San Pedro drew huge crowds and were avidly covered by sportswriters, who always used pseudonyms to protect themselves from the ire of fans. For a few years it was an amateur passion, what is known by Dominicans as baseball’s romantic era. But the clubs could make so much money at these packed stadiums that inevitably the romance was soon overtaken by commerce, and baseball became a professional sport. Players sought the highest salary in a circuit that included not only the four Dominican teams but the teams of Cuba and Puerto Rico and a few other Latin American countries as well as the Negro League in the United States. And players from these foreign teams, especially the Negro League, the Cuban League, and the Puerto Rican League, also came to the Dominican Republic to play.

The most famous player of the Dominican League was Juan Esteban Vargas, known as Tetelo Vargas. Born in Santo Domingo in 1906, he was a phenomenally fast runner nicknamed “the Dominican Deer.” He broke a world record rounding a baseball diamond in 13:25 seconds. There is an unconfirmed rumor that he once beat Olympic track star Jesse Owens in a sprint. Vargas played all three outfield positions, shortstop, and second base, and was a great hitter with a strong throwing arm. He played for Escogido, for the Negro League in New York, for Puerto Rico, for Mexico, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for Colombia, for Canada, and finally, past the age of retirement, for the Estrellas in San Pedro. This was the world of Dominican ballplayers. Vargas was never allowed in the major leagues because he was black, but in Puerto Rico in the 1940s he played in a tournament against the Yankees during their spring training and batted .500, getting seven hits in fourteen at-bats. In 1953, playing for the Estrellas at the age of forty-seven, he was the Dominican League batting champion with an average of .353.

With professional careers like Tetelo Vargas’s the cane workers of San Pedro had even more motivation to play their sugar-mill games hard and well and maybe someday leave the mill for Estrellas or the other teams or even the Negro League.

Trujillo was not a baseball fan, but that did not mean he wasn’t interested in controlling it. His son Ramfis and other family members and many of his generals liked the game. Besides, his concept of governance was to own everything, so that the profits went to himself and the rest he could distribute as he pleased to those who said, “
Gracias, Presidente.
”

When sugar prices started to rise in the late 1940s, he took over mills to get the profits. By the mid-1950s he controlled two-thirds of the sugar production in the country, mainly for his personal profit. Among his assets were the San Pedro mills of Porvenir, Quisqueya, Santa Fe, and Consuelo.

But even before taking over sugar, when he first came to power and sugar did not look profitable, Trujillo took over baseball. It was at this time that some of the best players came to the Dominican Republic. Top players of the Negro League came to the Dominican capital—in fact, some of the best players in the world, including Josh Gibson, who came with a Venezuelan team in 1933. Gibson, one of the best catchers and hitters of all time, was called the black Babe Ruth, and some said he was a better hitter than Ruth. He had the best lifetime batting average in the history of the Negro League, possibly as high as .384. Batting averages show how difficult it is to get a hit in professional baseball. A batter who got a hit every time he went to bat would have a 1.000 batting average. In reality, any professional who can get a hit once out of every three times at bat—an average of .333—is considered an excellent hitter. Anyone who hits over .300 is considered formidable. Gibson had a .467 batting average for 1933, a hit almost every other time at bat.

The Santo Domingo teams, bankrolled by the dictator, started bringing in foreign talent such as Cuban pitcher Luis Tiant, Sr., the left-handed father of the right-handed pitcher of the same name. Fewer and fewer positions were left for Dominicans unless they were remarkable players such as Tetelo Vargas. Dominican teams recruited whoever they could get to win.

Until then, the San Pedro team had not won a championship. Unlike the Santo Domingo teams, who usually won, San Pedro did not draw foreign stars. They were not even drawing a great deal on the tremendous talent at their sugar mills, because they played during the
zafra
. The home team was mostly made up of upper-class gentlemen players, some of them doctors—something else San Pedro was known for—and they generally lost. San Pedro wanted to compete too. Instead of playing on the local team, a group of prominent Macorisanos, centered around a judge originally from Santo Domingo, Federico Nina Santana, decided to organize, with the judge financing it. He spent money buying top players and was willing to lose money to see San Pedro win. This is when the team was given its name, Estrellas del Oriente, and later Estrellas Orientales, Eastern Stars
.
Before, it had been El Macorís
.
The Eastern Stars were mostly from Cuba. They took on the Cubans and Puerto Ricans of Licey and Escogido and beat them both, winning the 1936 championship.

By 1936, Licey and Escogido were used to bringing the championship to the capital, with an occasional strong showing from Santiago. Losing to San Pedro came as a shock. And the Estrellas in San Pedro kept buying even more talent, giving them every hope of winning the championship again in 1937. Although Trujillo did not care about baseball, he did not like seeing the city that now bore his name lose. The general had no feelings for Licey or Escogido, both of whom lost their stadiums in Hurricane San Zenón. But Trujillo felt that Trujillo City should have a baseball team, and that team had better win.

Trujillo’s brother José was a baseball fanatic—an emotionally unstable one who once lost his temper in a game and hit an American player. José and his sister had been the money behind Licey. Dr. José E. Aybar, a dentist, who had run Licey since 1929, had an endless source of money from the Trujillos to conduct a bidding war with Escogido over Cuba’s greatest talent. Now the dictator decided that there would be only one team in his city, that they would buy the greatest players on the market, and that they would beat San Pedro de Macorís for the championship. Dr. Aybar was put in charge of the Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo.

Aybar then went to New Orleans, reportedly with suitcases full of money, and bought the best talent of the Negro League, including Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, the high-kicking right-handed pitcher who threw breaking balls that were so unique, he gave them his own names, such as the bat dodger, the jump ball, and the two-hump blooper. Some baseball writers claim he was the greatest pitcher of all time. Aybar also got “Cool Papa” Bell, a small, wiry center fielder said by some—Tetelo Vargas fans may disagree—to be the fastest runner in the history of baseball. According to legend, he once scored from first base on a sacrifice bunt, a dribble off the plate designed to move the runner to second. But Dr. Aybar had Trujillo’s money behind him. Reportedly, Paige was handed $30,000 in cash, an enormous amount of money at the height of the Depression, to divide as he saw fit between himself and eight other players. Top players in the Negro League, which was supposed to be high-paying baseball, were earning less than a thousand dollars for an eight-week contract.

Word was spreading in the Negro League that the Dominican League paid better than their clubs. Nina also went shopping for players in the U.S. and brought four back to San Pedro. They arrived at the port by seaplane. Waiting for them was General Federico Fiallo, Trujillo’s military commander and a former pitcher for Licey in its 1906 opening season. Fiallo took the four players to Ciudad Trujillo to play for Trujillo’s team, and Nina had to return to the U.S. to find more recruits.

Throughout the thirty-six-game season, all three teams went on a spending spree to bring in more and more stars. The 1937 season is remembered as the best baseball ever seen in the Dominican Republic, some of the best in baseball history—an epic battle played out with some of the all-time greatest players. Determined to beat San Pedro, Ciudad Trujillo, with its Americans and Cubans and one Puerto Rican, ended up with only one Dominican player on its roster. For the American players it was a novel experience. When Ciudad Trujillo lost, the military would angrily fire weapons in the air. The police would arrest Negro League players and keep them in jail the night before a game to prevent them from going out on the town. Paige later wrote, “I started wishing I was home when all those soldiers started following us around everywhere we went and even stood out in front of our rooms at night.” During one game against San Pedro, the manager told them menacingly, “Take my advice and win.” By the seventh inning they were behind by one run. “You could see Trujillo lining up his army,” Paige said later. “They began to look like a firing squad.” Ciudad Trujillo scored two runs that inning to take a one-run lead and then Paige pitched two scoreless innings.

As sometimes happens today in the major leagues, Ciudad Trujillo spent the most money and they won. The capital erupted with loud merengue and dancing in the streets. More than elation over the victory, the players felt relief, because no one could be sure what the murderous and mentally unstable Trujillos might do if they lost. Paige said, “I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry.”

But it all cost too much money. The plan was to switch to winter baseball so they could raid U.S. teams in the off-season without upsetting American managers. Trujillo did not like to upset the Americans. But San Pedro had no money to bring back the American and Cuban stars, and without the threat from San Pedro, Trujillo wasn’t going to pay for a big-roster Ciudad Trujillo team. No one had any money left, and for more than ten years the league didn’t play professional ball at all. The best Dominican players went abroad. It was amateur ball that kept Dominican baseball alive. And it was widely recognized that the best amateur baseball in the country was in the cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. Even Santo Domingo’s leading baseball historian, Cuqui Córdova, acknowledged that in the 1940s most of the best Dominican players were poor sugar workers playing mill games in San Pedro.

After the
zafra
was over, some of the cane cutters had work weeding and hoeing the fields. But when Trujillo bought up the refineries, he eliminated this type of work and used chemicals to kill weeds. Then times were even harder in the San Pedro fields. But they could grow their food in gardens and they could keep themselves together by playing baseball.

In 1951 the Dominican League was reorganized as professional baseball again. Tetelo Vargas, now in his mid-forties, settled in San Pedro to play for the Estrellas; with his bat, it was a contending team. But that first year Licey beat Escogido for the title. The next year Águilas beat Licey and then in 1953 Licey beat Águilas, establishing a competition between those two teams that has dominated the league. The following year Estrellas won, beating Licey. By then baseball was integrated and there was no more Negro League. Dominican teams started hiring major-league players to play winter baseball. The Estrellas got Roger Maris, but they were not very impressed with him. Although Maris was a famously serious and hardworking player in the major leagues, Macorisanos complained that he did not play hard the way they did in San Pedro. That summer he went back to the Yankees and beat Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run season record.

Between 1951 and 2008, in the fifty-four championships—with time off for coups and invasions—thirty-nine have been won by either Licey or Águilas, with Águilas having one more championship than its competitor and the Eastern Stars winning only twice, in 1954 and 1968. They became a heartbreaking club, much like the twentieth-century Red Sox, with a history of collapsing just before victory. Twelve times they made it into the final series but lost.

In 1959, the Estrellas Orientales got a new home, a stadium on the edge of town by the rural road that led to the sugar fields. It was named for Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s murderous, baseball-loving son. There was originally some question of the paternity of Ramfis, whose real name was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez. Ramfis’s mother, María Martínez, had had him while she was married to a Cuban who insisted that he was not the father of the baby. María left him and became Trujillo’s third wife. From an early age a family resemblance became apparent, as young Ramfis—Trujillo gave him the nickname from a character in the Verdi opera
Aïda—
delighted in obliterating farm animals with a large-caliber pistol. Trujillo had proudly named Ramfis a colonel at the age of four. A lover of baseball and polo, he was also given to inflicting particularly barbaric forms of torture on people he believed to be his enemies.

It was a double insult for San Pedro to have its stadium named after this killer, both because of his brutality and because Ramfis had always been an outspoken fan of Escogido. After his father was assassinated, San Pedro changed the name of the stadium to Estadio Tetelo Vargas. But the masters of the republic continued to stake their claim to San Pedro’s baseball stadium. At the entrance is a plaque to Joaquín Balaguer for renovations in 1993, and next to it one to President Leonel Fernández for renovations in 1999. One of the trappings of president was to get your name on the Tetelo Vargas Stadium.