The Eastern Stars Part 2

After Trujillo took power in 1930, Pan Am began offering flights by seaplane from Santo Domingo. The planes would land in the Higuamo River and let pa.s.sengers out at the port, which was a short stroll to the cathedral, the town hall, the shops, and the park in this little pearl of a city. But by then San Pedro's fortunes were beginning to change.

By 1931 the value of goods shipped from the port of San Pedro was less than half of what it had been in 1926. The sugar boom was cooling off, and the Dominican Republic was the producer with the least access to foreign markets. But sugar production continued, increasing faster than demand on all three islands, and the Cuban government-and soon after, the U.S. government-began imposing restrictions on production aimed at preserving the price. Since the early 1930s, with the exception of a few brief bubbles, the value of sugar on the world market has steadily declined.

Neither was Trujillo good for San Pedro. While the city had its share of Trujillo supporters, it had come to the general's attention that he had a considerable number of opponents in the sugar city to the east. In any event, he did not want any compet.i.tors with Santo Domingo, the capital, which he regarded as "his" city. In fact, he changed the capital's name to Ciudad Trujillo: Trujillo City. He had come to power on August 16, 1930. A few weeks later, on September 3, Hurricane San Zenn destroyed Santo Domingo. Trujillo saw this as his opportunity to rebuild the city in his image. San Pedro was forgotten as sugar faded and the dictator who completely controlled the economy diverted all resources to the city that now bore his name.

But San Pedro de Macors had one thing left. During the half-century sugar boom, among all the firsts of the small eastern town on the Higuamo, there was this: in 1886, Dominican baseball began to be played in the sugar mills of San Pedro.

The Spanish-American War is generally credited for launching America's great imperialist adventure in the Spanish Caribbean, because the U.S. in effect replaced Spain as the colonial power in Cuba and Puerto Rico. But American businessmen had long been interested in the two islands, and sugar producers began operating in Cuba back in the time when baseball was just getting started in the U.S., in the 1830s and 1840s. And these same Cubans came to San Pedro. It is ironic that when the sugar producers built housing for workers and named them bateys after the Taino ball fields, they did not know that these bateys would be one of the greatest wellsprings of ballplaying talent ever known.

CHAPTER THREE.

The Question of First Baseball is a game that loves facts but sp.a.w.ns myths. It is often stated that the first baseball game was organized in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, by Abner Doubleday, who invented the baseball diamond and codified the rules. This was the conclusion of a commission established in 1908 to once and for all determine the sport's ambiguous origin. It was led by sporting-goods entrepreneur Al Spalding. Abner Doubleday, a Civil War general, in 1839 was a cadet at West Point, which was a long journey to Cooperstown, a town that has no record of Doubleday's having ever been there. There is no record that Doubleday himself ever said anything about his connection with baseball, and most historians-including those at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, where it is a founding myth-discount the story. What is known is that baseball came out of English sports, possibly including cricket, which goes back to at least the sixteenth century, with roots centuries earlier. Rounders, another English game, was almost certainly a precursor of baseball in America. There were many eighteenth-century variations on both the game and its name. There was town-ball, round-ball, and a game called base, and it is still being argued which of these or which combination was the origin of baseball.

The only fact in the Abner Doubleday story that seems to be true is the date: 1839. Somewhere around then these games had evolved into something recognizable as baseball. It was originally a sport for city people, and in 1845 a Manhattan book dealer, Alexander Cartwright, wrote a rule book for his local club, the Knickerbockers, who would later change their name to the Yankees. Cartwright's rules became the rules of baseball, and he traveled around the country establishing baseball clubs in various cities. By 1857 there were sixteen clubs in New York City alone. The Civil War helped spread the sport throughout the United States. But it was sugar-that is, American sugar executives-who brought it to the Caribbean during the Dance of the Millions.

The American presence in Cuba predates baseball and even sugar interests. When America was a British colony, there was a considerable British presence in Cuba. In 1762 the British even took over Havana for several months. While the Dominican Republic seemed a distant, unknown place to Americans, Cuba was regarded as nearby and familiar. In 1817, when the Spanish declared Cuban ports open to international trade, American business stepped in. Cubans became familiar with Americans and American culture. American companies won contracts for development, especially in Havana, where both the gas street lighting and the granite cobblestone pavement were American. There were American consulates throughout the island.

And so by the 1860s, when baseball was becoming established as the American national pastime, the Cubans were learning about it and started playing it. The Spanish may have inadvertently tied the independence movement to baseball in a self-fulfilling prophecy when in 1868, at the start of the Ten Years' War, they banned the game, suspecting that it was somehow a pro-independence conspiracy. There was no clear tie, at least until the ban, but affluent young men were becoming independentistas , and they were also taking up baseball, which the Spanish saw as an incursion by Americans and also an excuse for the rebels to arm themselves with wooden clubs.

The failed 1868 -1878 war cemented Cubans to the American sport not only because the Spanish had made the accusation but because pro-independence Cubans, including Jose Mart, fled to the United States, where baseball was becoming a craze. The Cubans learned the game and even organized Cuban and Cuba-versus-U.S. games. Mart himself was seen at a Key West game in which the Cubans beat the Americans. Mart, always aware that after the Spanish were defeated the Americans would be the next problem, reportedly claimed the victory was a good omen for the cause of independence.

Cuban baseball, like American baseball, has a mythical first game. In Matanzas in 1866 according to one story, the crew of an American ship decided to teach the game to the Cuban dockworkers who were loading sugar. In another version an American ship tied up for repairs and taught the men fixing their ship. In some of the versions the Americans were trying to sell the Cubans baseball equipment. But there is also another story that says the first game was not even in Matanzas but in Havana, from where two affluent young Habaneros named Ernesto and Nemesio Guillot had been sent off to Spring Hill College, a prep school in Mobile, Alabama. They came home in 1864 with bats, b.a.l.l.s, and Cartwright's rule book and trained a team in the affluent Vedado section of Havana, making this neighborhood, according to some baseball historians such as Peter Bjarkman, the true birthplace of Cuban baseball-not the always cited Matanzas of two years later. The Guillot story, unlike the Matanzas versions, is unromantic enough to be true.

According to official history, the first organized game between Cuban club players was on a ball field in Matanzas that still exists called Palmar del Junco on December 27, 1874. Unlike Abner Doubleday's game in Cooperstown, it is well doc.u.mented that this game between a Matanzas team and the Habana Base Ball Club did take place. But it is not clear that it was the first organized game between clubs. Historian Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra suggests that it may simply have been the first game to have been written about in the press. Historians like the story of Cuban baseball beginning in Matanzas because it was a port where American ships docked, and Cubans, like Dominicans, have always been drawn to the idea of baseball being a contest in which the locals stood up to the Americans.

But the 1874 game at Palmar del Junco was between Cubans. Havana won by the astonishing score of 51 to 9. Hitting skills developed earlier than fielding skills, and early games often had such scores. Emilio Sabourn, one of the revered martyrs of Cuban independence, played left field for Havana that day and hit eight home runs. Sabourn was one of the early promoters of not only Cuban baseball but also Cuban independence. He founded and managed one of the three Havana clubs that played fourteen series between 1878 and 1892. His club won nine of them. But the worst fears of the Spanish were confirmed when it was discovered that the money Sabourn had raised by organizing baseball games was sent to the independence movement. In 1895 he was arrested and baseball was once again banned. Sabourn was shipped to an infamous military prison in Ceuta, on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The left fielder, sometimes called the "father of Cuban baseball," died there two years later.

In the 1890s, Spain was fading from the three islands and America was taking hold, and so soccer, the once popular Spanish sport, fell out of favor and was replaced by the American sport, baseball.

As in Cuba and the United States, it is not clear where baseball began in the Dominican Republic. Certainly, in the late 1870s baseball-loving Cuban independentistas and American baseball enthusiasts met to develop a sugar industry in San Pedro de Macors. In San Pedro it is said that the first Dominican game was played there in 1886. But many historians and people in Santo Domingo refute this. Sugar makers were not the only Cubans to come to the Dominican Republic, and San Pedro was not their only destination. At the same time that sugar makers were building San Pedro, Ignacio Aloma and his brother Ubaldo came to Santo Domingo. They were ironworkers who built balconies and grillwork. In 1891 they formed two baseball clubs with Cuban and American players and even a few Dominicans. The two teams were known to Dominican fans by their colors, the Rojos and the Azules. Another Cuban started two teams in La Vega, in the north near the Cibao, and they were also known as the Reds and the Blues. In Cuba there were also red and blue teams, but the labels were particularly meaningful in the Dominican Republic, where politics for many decades had revolved around the Red and Blue parties.

In the 1880s, when the big new ingenios were being put into operation in San Pedro, experienced baseball players were not easily found. The normal way to establish a baseball club in both the U.S. and in Cuba was to find athletic young men and teach them the game. And it occurred to the Americans, the Cubans, and the Puerto Ricans that in their mills they had the potential for ball clubs. They began teaching the game to sugar workers. Each mill could have its own club and they could play each other. Soon they would have an eight-club league just in the San Pedro sugar industry.

In Santo Domingo, baseball was a game for the wealthy elite. As in Havana, upper-cla.s.s Dominicans sent their sons to schools in the U.S. and they came back playing baseball. This was very different from the sugar-mill sport of San Pedro.

A few years after the games began in 1886, the ingenios started importing Eastern Caribbean cocolos. The cocolos kept not only their own language-English with a West Indian lilt-but their own culture. They drank dark, strong, smooth rum that was steeped in the small fruit of the tropical plant guavaberry, known to science as Myrciaria floribunda. They made soup with the broad-leaved callaloo and served meat or fish with little hard-boiled flour dumplings or a cornmeal mush called fungi. They danced to their own music with their own drums, and on their holidays dressed up with costumes and masks to perform ritual dances of David and Goliath or Wild Indians.

They also had their own sports, and the most popular of these was cricket. Historians argue about the role of cricket in developing baseball in the United States, but there can be no argument about the important role of cricket in developing baseball in San Pedro. The sugar companies simply had to give the cocolos round bats and a new set of rules. They already knew the concepts of hitting, catching, baserunning, pitching, making outs, and scoring runs.

Cricket and then baseball were diversions in very hard lives. In a land once called Mosquito, malaria was rampant. So was leprosy, the disease that killed the poet Gastn Deligne. With the bad water supply of the bateys, dysentery was a frequent problem. The diet of most of the workers did not include sufficient nutrition for the twelve-hour shifts during the zafra. Serious injuries from the machinery in the mills or machetes in the field were frequent. If an injury such as loss of a limb meant that the laborer was no longer eligible for work, he received no compensation.

Coming from a different world and with a limited but better education, cocolos knew about things that Dominicans had never heard of, such as labor struggles and black people organizing. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887 and a forerunner of the Black Power movement, was organizing black people all over the English-speaking world, and he did not forget about the cocolos of San Pedro de Macors. In 1919, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement a.s.sociation sent an organizer. Within months they had their own building in San Pedro, and within a year San Pedro was the center of an important Dominican chapter of the Garvey movement with more than a thousand members. Garvey promoted the idea of black people reuniting in Africa, and many of the cocolos talked about how they would soon be leaving the sugar mills and going to the continent of their ancestors. During the 1921 zafra, cocolos went on a strike that was quickly crushed.

The cocolos were a well-organized society, and one of the keys to that organization was a network of cricket clubs. They made their own white uniforms. But the mills were more interested in baseball. They sometimes even paid cricket players for baseball. No one paid for cricket. By the 1920s baseball had largely replaced cricket, and many of the fields where they had played it became baseball diamonds.

During the zafra, sugar workers only worked and slept, but the other six months of the year, the dead season, they had time for baseball. This free time corresponded more with the American summer baseball schedule than the winter schedule that became traditional in the rest of the Dominican Republic and the other Caribbean islands. The mills would each sponsor a team with uniforms and equipment and they would play regionales against the other mill teams. Some mills, especially Consuelo, would have so many gifted players that the team couldn't use them all and would send a few to other mills. Several, such as Alfredo "Chico" Contn, went to play in Cuba or Puerto Rico or even the Dominican Winter League, once it started. But none of these tremendously talented players was going to the major leagues because the leagues did not hire black players.

The sugar-mill players of San Pedro were even separate from La Vega and Santo Domingo players as well as Cubans and Puerto Ricans, because all those other Caribbeans played in the winter during the zafra. But the San Pedro teams had the advantage of constant U.S. contact, since the sugar companies were always bringing in new Americans. In the years since the game had been introduced to the Caribbean, both the rules and the equipment had been rapidly changing. In 1873 it was ruled that catching a fly ball in a hat, a common practice until then, would award the hitter a single and the ball could not be put back into play. In the 1880s the number of b.a.l.l.s for a walk gradually was reduced from nine to four, and the number of strikes to an out was changed from four to three. In the 1890s the distance between the pitching mound and home plate was increased from fifty feet to sixty feet. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the first two foul b.a.l.l.s started being counted as strikes, greatly reducing the number of pitches in an at-bat. Every decade the game was considerably different, and Dominican players needed contact with the U.S. in order to keep playing current American baseball.

Communities at the mills, especially the cocolos, were knit extremely tightly, and within their world these games were closely followed and considered important. They were, after all, the closest thing these people had to a leisure activity. Baseball took on great meaning for the players and the fans, and the quality of their Cuban and American instruction from the cadre of the sugar companies was thought to be excellent. During the early decades when baseball was spreading in the Dominican Republic, the baseball played in the mills in San Pedro is remembered as the best Dominican baseball of the time. There is no way to verify this, and baseball has a way of fostering uncertain myths, but this was the beginning of the legend of San Pedro baseball. To baseball fans who ask, "Why San Pedro de Macors?" the answer is not the water but the sugar.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Who's on First While San Pedro was hosting regular hard-fought contests between the mills, Santo Domingo was developing their own league. For fifteen years there were two teams, red and blue: Ozama Club, named after the river on whose western bank the city was first built; and Nuevo Club. There were other teams, but these were the two with uniforms and an official schedule. They got their baseball knowledge from Dominicans who had spent time in the U.S.

Lulu Perez, who led Nuevo Club, learned the new curveball from the Americans and taught it to his ace pitcher. A curveball is a difficult pitch to master. It is accomplished by pressing the middle finger against the seam of the baseball and snapping the wrist as the ball is released. This sends the ball spinning so that it seemingly goes straight but at the last moment veers off course. A good curveball appears to be going right at the batter and, just as he ducks or prepares to step back, drops into the strike zone and a strike is called. What makes it even more difficult is that a good curveball drops from head level to the strike zone or from the strike zone to below the knees, just before reaching the plate. Very few batters can hit a good curveball. But it is a dangerous pitch to throw. If it doesn't have enough motion, it will either be a ball or fly predictably through the strike zone-a very easy pitch to hit because it is not a fast pitch.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were still only a few good curveb.a.l.l.s, which of course meant that batters had little experience against the pitch that was invented in the 1870s by Candy c.u.mmings. Even today it is rare to find a good curveball from a young Dominican pitcher who has not played in the U.S. In fact, good curveb.a.l.l.s are fairly rare in general. But in the early years of the twentieth century, Lulu Perez taught Nuevo Club ace Enrique Hernndez how to throw one, and he did it so well that no one in Santo Domingo could hit it. Because Hernndez claimed to have some Taino blood, fans started calling him Indio Bravo. At a time of undeveloped outfield defense, it was pitching that kept the score from going into double digits. When Indio Bravo pitched, Nuevo Club was undefeatable.

In 1906 a group of young Santo Domingo players met in a house in the old part of Santo Domingo, the Colonial Zone, once ruled by Columbus and today favored by tourists. Their subject was how to beat Indio Bravo. They built a baseball club designed to take on the Nuevo Club and they called it Club Licey, after another river, this one in the Cibao. At first uniformed in gray, they soon switched to white with blue stripes and ever after they were nicknamed the Azules. Licey fans still celebrate the November anniversary, but more than the founding of the Licey team it was the beginning of the modern Dominican Winter Baseball League that has become the centerpiece of Dominican baseball.

Originally it was a Santo Domingo compet.i.tion in which the other baseball regions, the north and San Pedro, were not involved. But Licey began traveling outside the capital to find other compet.i.tion. To play in the north, the entire team would have to travel long hours on dirt roads and even organize mule trains through mountain trails. On the other hand, San Pedro de Macors had its long-standing commercial advantage: it was only a short ship's crossing from Santo Domingo. In 1911, Macorisanos put together a team with local Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, and cocolos to face Licey. In the first encounter in 1911, pitching dominated with twenty-one strikeouts. But the baserunning kept it lively with twenty-two stolen bases. To the shock and disappointment of Macorisanos, Licey won.

But back in the capital, Licey was unable to match Nuevo Club, which won the first championship in 1912. Indio Bravo was impossible to get a hit off of, even after an unbalanced Licey fan tried to slow him down by stabbing him in his throwing arm.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic, like most military occupations, was deeply unpopular. In San Pedro an angry Dominican opened fire on U.S. Marine officers and killed one as the troops were arriving at the port. After the U.S. invasion the interest in baseball increased, not because of a love of things American, but from a strong desire to beat the Americans at their own game. And the Americans provided knowledgeable and equipped opponents. The Americans, who showed little respect for things Dominican, were impressed with the baseball players. One Dominican pitcher, Felito Guerra, was so respected, he was offered a contract to pitch in the U.S. He would have been the first Dominican major leaguer but instead became a national hero when he refused to go, to protest the occupation.

Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama had all been occupied by the U.S., and because of that exposure all three became better baseball-playing countries. Now the Dominican Republic followed the same pattern. After the Dominican invasion, the U.S. occupied Nicaragua and their game greatly improved also. It seemed that baseball was the one thing a small Latin American nation could gain from a U.S. invasion.

Licey built up their team with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Americans. Their star pitcher was a Cuban called El Diamante Negro. But Nuevo Club was still holding its own because they had Indio Bravo, who was still accomplishing Homeric feats. After the U.S. occupation, Nuevo Club took on the U.S. Navy cruiser Washington and Indio Bravo struck out twenty-one Navy batters. But he got into a dispute with his ball club and went over to Licey, making them undefeatable. The demoralized Nuevo Club disintegrated.

The Licey Tigers had become the dominant club. By 1921 northern baseball had shifted from La Vega to the capital of the Cibao, Santiago de los Cabelleros. It took the Licey team five days to get there and two days to rest. They then won all eight games against Santiago.

But this same year a new Santo Domingo team, Escogido, was formed for the purpose of taking on Licey. They made their color red because Licey was blue. Because Licey had stripes on their uniform they called themselves Los Tigres, the Tigers, so Escogido became the Lions. In 1928, Santiago named its team Sandino after Augusto Cesar Sandino. The year before, three years after leaving the Dominican Republic, the U.S. invaded and occupied Nicaragua and Sandino became a folk hero throughout Latin America for his armed resistence to U.S. occupation. But once Trujillo-a product of U.S. military anti-insurgency efforts-came to power, the name Sandino was no longer allowed and, conforming to the Santo Domingo teams, the Santiago team became the guilas, the Eagles, and then the guilas Cibaeas, the Cibao Eagles. Only San Pedro de Macors did not have an animal. True to their tradition as the city of poets, they called their team Las Estrellas del Oriente, the Stars of the East. But they needed an animal, too, to give fans an image to use in the spectacle that erupts in Dominican stadiums. And so they declared their mascot to be an elephant so that fans could trumpet like elephants when the Estrellas scored a home run. Noise is important in Dominican culture.

These four teams-the Tigres del Licey, the Leones del Escogido, the guilas Cibaeas, and the Estrellas Orientales-from these three towns became the core of Dominican professional baseball. They played long seasons against one another, with grueling final contests for the Dominican championship.

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 pa.s.sion, 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 a.s.sets 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-cla.s.s 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 Macors. 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 Zenn. But Trujillo felt that Trujillo City should have a baseball team, and that team had better win.

Trujillo's brother Jose was a baseball fanatic-an emotionally unstable one who once lost his temper in a game and hit an American player. Jose and his sister had been the money behind Licey. Dr. Jose 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 Macors 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 Macors. Even Santo Domingo's leading baseball historian, Cuqui Crdova, 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 t.i.tle. The next year guilas beat Licey and then in 1953 Licey beat guilas, establishing a compet.i.tion 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 guilas, with guilas having one more championship than its compet.i.tor 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 Lenidas Trujillo Martnez. Ramfis's mother, Mara Martnez, had had him while she was married to a Cuban who insisted that he was not the father of the baby. Mara 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 Ada-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 a.s.sa.s.sinated, 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 Joaqun Balaguer for renovations in 1993, and next to it one to President Leonel Fernndez for renovations in 1999. One of the trappings of president was to get your name on the Tetelo Vargas Stadium.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The First Opening It 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 Macors.

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s without comments from press and fans, but they did manage to play in major-league games, though never for long or ill.u.s.trious careers. Some signed forms certifying the Spanishness of their background. In the 1920s, two Cubans, outfielder Jacinto "Jack" Calvo and pitcher Jose 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 Garca, 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 Garca 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 faade few other players could have mustered-not because of a stoic or pa.s.sive 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 Cla.s.s AA Southern a.s.sociation 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 cla.s.s, 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 superst.i.tions 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 t.i.tled La Isla al Reves, 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 invasin pacfica, 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 ill.u.s.trate his point, he included five pages of color photographs of families from his native region to show what fine Caucasian faces they had.

When Jose Francisco Pea Gmez-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. Pea Gmez 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 Fernndez, 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 cla.s.sifications that in America were considered black. Dominicans had not expected to be treated as though they were haitianos.

It 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 Belln, known in the majors as Steve Belln, 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 Mioso 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. Mioso was the first black Latino player in the major leagues. The door was slowly opening for San Pedro.

In 1952, Sandy Amors moved from the Cuban League to the majors-a good story, since he was black but didn't speak a word of English, and so reporters never talked to him. A spectacular player in Cuba, he was a shy man who seemed lost in the English-speaking world of the 1950s major leagues. When he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers he had no home but lived on the yacht of Roy Campanella, the Dodgers' black catcher who had learned Spanish playing in the Mexican League. The unseen Amors had his one moment of fame, a spectacular catch of Yogi Berra's. .h.i.t by the low left-field wall of Yankee Stadium that turned into a double play, saving the 1955 World Series for the Dodgers.

In the 1950s, when there were few Spanish-speaking players and few black players in the majors, it was not going to be an easy move for Dominicans. The first Dominican to play major-league ball was Osvaldo Virgil. Virgil left his small village near the Haitian border a Dominican named Osvaldo Virgil and ended up in the major leagues a black man named Ozzie Virgil.

Dominicans were not being recruited in those days, and Ozzie probably would never have been found by Major League Baseball had his father not so vociferously opposed the Trujillo regime that the family had to flee to Puerto Rico. From there, like many Puerto Ricans of the time, the Virgils moved to the Bronx, where Ozzie played sandlot ball in his neighborhood-which happened to be near the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Later he played for the Marines. Virgil could do almost everything in baseball: he was a utility player-someone who filled in where needed-and in his nine years in the major leagues, he played every position except pitcher and center field.

The Giants at the time had hired Alejandro Pompez as a scout. Alex Pompez, born in Key West, Florida, of Cuban parents, had owned two Negro League franchises: the New York Cubans and the Cuban Stars. He was known for bringing Latinos into the Negro League, including Minnie Mioso and pitcher Martn Dihigo, regarded in Cuba as one of their all-time greatest players.

Pompez was out scouting in the Bronx. He was always looking for Latino players and had even expressed a desire to find some Dominicans when he stumbled on a very talented one right in the neighborhood. Virgil played his rookie year for the Giants in 1956 and later said that he was so nervous during his first major-league at-bat that he could not stop his legs from shaking. He batted four times and failed to get a single hit; he even made an error at third base. This was the official debut of Dominican Major League Baseball.

There was not a great public reaction to the first Dominican-at least not to his nationality. Everyone was too preoccupied with his skin color-especially in 1958, when Virgil was traded to the Detroit Tigers. The Detroit Free Press reported the trade with the headline "Tigers Call Up First Negro," and on the day of his first game another page-one headline announced, "Tigers' First Negro to Play 3rd Tonight." The Detroit News front-page story ran with the headline "Tigers' Decision to Play Negro Hailed by Race." Suddenly a man too light to be considered black in his native land was a symbol of racial integration in America. His historic significance as the first Dominican player was almost completely forgotten, despite the fact that at the time the major leagues had forty-six black players and no Dominicans but him. At that point the Tigers were the only major-league club other than the Red Sox that had not integrated, and so his race was the single most important fact about him. A June 9, 1958, editorial in the Free Press began "The Tigers now includes a Negro" and misspelled his name. The same paper thirty-nine years later ran a profile that revealed, "Ozzie Virgil doesn't think of himself in terms of black and white."

But even though Virgil was willing to accept his role in Detroit as a black icon, American blacks did not see him as one of their own. "They thought of me more as a Dominican Republic player instead of a Negro," he once complained to the Detroit Free Press.

The same year that Virgil started, the next Dominican, Felipe Alou, came to the U.S. to play minor-league baseball. His name was actually Felipe Rojas Alou. He went by the surname of Rojas Alou, with the traditional use of the father's name first, but the scout who recruited him did not understand the Spanish custom with names and a.s.sumed that Alou, his mother's name, was his last name and Rojas was simply a middle name. All the Rojas boys-Felipe, his brothers Matty and Jess, and Felipe's son, Moises, all major leaguers-changed their name rather than contradict the Americans. In 1992, Felipe Alou became manager of the Montreal Expos, the first Latino manager in Major League Baseball.