The Eastern Stars Part 3

But it was Ozzie Virgil who had led the way. Juan Marichal, one of the first five Dominican major leaguers and the only Dominican in the Hall of Fame as of 2009, has said that in the Dominican Republic he never thought about playing in the major leagues until Ozzie Virgil started playing for the Giants.

In 2006, when ten percent of major-league players were Dominican, a reporter from The Miami Herald asked Jose Reyes, the young Dominican shortstop for the Mets, about Ozzie Virgil, the first Dominican to play in the majors. Reyes did not know who Virgil was.

Dominicans only very slowly started being signed with Major League Baseball. After Virgil in 1956 came Felipe Alou in 1958, then his brother Matty in 1960. Julin Javier, a sure-handed infielder and swift baserunner, debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1960. Also in 1960, Diomedes Olivo started pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the age of fourteen. In 1961 his brother Chi-Chi started pitching for the Braves. Rudy Hernndez, a pitcher who spent most of his career in the minors, was called up and pitched twenty-one games for the Washington Senators, also in 1960. The first Dominicans-Virgil, the Alous, the Olivos, Marichal-were all from small towns. The only exception was Hernndez, who was from Santiago. Four out of the first seven were pitchers. None of the seven were from San Pedro. The first were found in places where the first Dominican scouts knew to look, such as the Pan American Games and the military teams built up by the Trujillo regime. Virgil was found because he was in New York, Felipe Alou because as a pre-medical student at the University of Santo Domingo he played for a college team that happened to be coached by Horacio Martnez, who had recently signed on to scout for the New York Giants.

Of the first seven, the one who established the most enduring image of a Dominican ballplayer in both positive and negative ways-an image that would impact on both players and fans-was Juan Antonio Marichal Snchez, from the small northern village of Laguna Verde near the Haitian border.

Marichal was an intimidating pitcher with what in the 1960s was already an old-fashioned delivery: an elaborate windup that sent one leg straight in the air and made it impossible for the batter to get any inkling of what type of pitch he was about to release. He had mastered a wide variety of different pitches, which added to the batter's confusion.

He came from a tough world. He was a discovery of Ramfis Trujillo, who grabbed the young Marichal to play for the team he was developing in the Dominican air force. The dictator's son watched Marichal pitch one game and drafted him into the air force on the spot. Although working for a homicidal maniac can be frightening, the Trujillos favored the military and paid their recruits well.

Marichal became a major-league pitcher in 1960 for the San Francisco Giants and was stellar from his first game. His career earned run average was 2.89, one of the lowest in the history of the game. The earned run average, or ERA, measures the average number of earned runs-runs that are the pitcher's fault-scored in a game. In an age when ball clubs have huge pitching staffs and a starting pitcher seldom stays in the game for more than seven innings, it is astonishing to recall the night of January 2, 1963, in San Francisco's Candlestick Park, when Marichal pitched sixteen innings against Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn until finally Willie Mays. .h.i.t a home run off of Spahn.

Marichal seemed to have the attention of the entire Dominican Republic each time he pitched. According to legend, the first Americans to realize there had been a coup d'etat in Santo Domingo in 1965 were the Western Union operators at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It was their job to wire each play to the Dominican Republic when Marichal was pitching. Something cataclysmic must have happened to block scores. In fact, the government-controlled communications had been seized by conspirators.

Marichal would have seemed more spectacular if he had not pitched in an age of spectacular pitchers. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson all pitched at the time. During Marichal's career, the top annual pitching prize, the Cy Young Award, was won once by Drysdale, twice by Gibson, and three times by Koufax but never by Marichal. Was it because Marichal was Dominican? Some make that accusation, but had he beaten Koufax or Gibson, some might have said it was because Koufax was Jewish or because Gibson was black.

Hitters feared Marichal because of his unusual variety of pitches and his ability to conceal the ball until the last moment. Art Shamsky, a top hitter for the Cincinnati Reds at the time, called Marichal "the toughest pitcher I ever faced." Shamsky was what is called a contact hitter: he would always try to get his bat on the ball, even if it led to an out. He prided himself on rarely striking out. He could make contact with Koufax, but Marichal would strike him out. "Hitting is all about seeing the ball out of the pitcher's hand," Shamsky said. "With that high kick you couldn't see the ball until it was there."

In a game that loves statistics, Marichal had spectacular numbers-sometimes even better than Koufax's. The press, the people who choose the Cy Young Award, stereotyped them both. Koufax, the Jew, was an "intellectual" pitcher, whereas Marichal, the Dominican, was a "hot-blooded Latin" pitcher. Giants manager Al Dark, who had three Latins on his roster, mused publicly on whether Latins could truly understand the game of baseball. He said that Latins lacked "mental alertness."

The press called Marichal "the Dominican Dandy," a slightly denigrating label implying that he did not know what to do with his money and so indulged in clownish foppishness. Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the impact of Marichal than the fact that, years after he stopped playing, the press would still occasionally refer to some Dominican player as a dandy.

Since baseball players earn their living playing their childhood game, they have much less pressure than most people to act like adults in the workplace. There is no shortage of incidents of American ballplayers having temper tantrums and outbursts of violence. But when a Spanish-speaking player does it, he is being a hot-blooded Latin. Marichal did not originate the stereotype of the hot-blooded Latin ballplayer. The original hot-blooded Latin was Adolfo Luque, a Cuban who was one of the all-time great pitchers, enshrined in American literature because Hemingway mentions him in The Old Man and the Sea. Luque never hesitated to threaten other players, umpires, or fans. Once, when heckled by an outfielder named Bill Cunningham, who was shouting at the pitcher from the bench, Luque put down his ball and glove, marched over to Cunningham, and threw a mighty roundhouse punch-which Cunningham side-stepped. Luque's fist landed squarely on the jaw of outfielder Casey Stengel. A brawl ensued and Luque was ejected from the game, but he returned in a rage, swinging his bat clublike at players and umpires. Latins are like that, a lot of people in baseball concluded.

All the worst fears about Marichal were confirmed on August 22, 1965. The Giants were playing against their main rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, with Marichal pitching against Koufax. At bat, Marichal got into an argument with Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro, who, Marichal claimed, deliberately threw the ball too close to Marichal's head. In some versions the throw nicked Marichal's ear. Words escalated and finally Marichal hit the catcher with a bat. Roseboro needed fourteen st.i.tches.

Marichal gave baseball an enduring and unfair image of Dominicans as rough and violent people-a backward people. It was the baseball version of a long-standing Dominican stereotype. In the tough Latino neighborhoods of New York where Dominicans move in on the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Ricans often insist that Dominicans don't wear socks-that is, that they are primitive.

But Marichal was an inspiration to Dominican players. He was one of the greats. A player becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame five years after retirement, which in Marichal's case was 1981. He failed to get positive votes from seventy-five percent of the members of the Baseball Writers of America, which is the requirement for induction. He was turned down the following year as well. Some thought it was because of the Roseboro incident. Others, especially in the Dominican Republic, thought it was because he was Dominican. The following year Roseboro himself, who had become a good friend of Marichal's, urged his election to the Hall of Fame, and that year he was accepted-the first and, more than 460 Dominican major-league players later, the only Dominican to be so honored.

As recently as 2008, Marichal found controversy. He and Dominican pitcher Pedro Martnez were filmed in the Dominican Republic attending a c.o.c.kfight. And there was the old accusation once again: barbarous and primitive Dominicans are cruel to animals. Martnez tried to argue that c.o.c.kfighting was simply "part of the Dominican culture."

In the 1960s, young ballplayers in the bateys and barrios of San Pedro de Macors followed Marichal's career and gleaned two contradictory lessons: First, it was very difficult for a Dominican to get along in the United States; second, those who braved it had a chance at a great deal of fame, money, and glory. But it was never going to be easy.

In the southern towns that many young baseball players are sent to, the strange American breed of racism persisted for years, long after baseball and even the South were integrated. Rogelio Candalario, a player from San Pedro, signed with the Houston Astros. He was a promising left-handed pitcher until he broke his arm in 1986. The Astros sent him to their Double A team in Columbus, South Carolina. "People would just stare at me," Candalario recalled. "I'd say, 'What's wrong?' 'Nothing,' they would say."

CHAPTER SIX.

San Pedro Rising In 1962, something happened that had an enormous impact on baseball, sugar, and tourism. On February 7, in response to the expropriation of American a.s.sets in Cuba by the new revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, the U.S. declared a trade embargo. First of all, this meant that the U.S. would now buy its sugar elsewhere, while the Cubans responded by opening trade with the Soviet Union. Until then, a Caribbean vacation had largely meant Cuba; there was little tourism in the rest of the region. Now Americans were suddenly looking for other places for Caribbean winter holidays. But also it meant that Cuban baseball players could no longer play in the United States. To be eligible for work in the United States, a Cuban had to defect permanently, leaving behind friends and family, which few Cuban baseball players wanted to do. Major League Baseball would have to look elsewhere for Latino talent.

The first ballplayers from San Pedro de Macors entered the major leagues in 1962, the year of the Cuban embargo. Not surprisingly, these players came from the sugar mills. Amado Samuel, a shortstop from Santa Fe, was the first Macorisano in the majors. He signed with the Milwaukee Braves in 1958 and played his first major-league game at the beginning of the 1962 season. He lasted only three seasons in the majors, his last one for the Mets. The second Macorisano to make the majors, Manny Jimenez, was also from Santa Fe. He missed being the first Macorisano by one day, beginning the 1962 season with the Kansas City Athletics. He had a seven-year career as a left fielder and, unlike Samuel, was a respectable batter with a kick to his swing that back in the sugar fields of Santa Fe had earned him the nickname "El Mulo." In his best years he batted over .300.

Pedro Gonzlez, from the Angelina sugar mill, was the third player from San Pedro to play major-league ball. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother was a French cocolo from Saint Martin. As a small child he lived in downtown San Pedro, in a neighborhood on the sh.o.r.e of the Caribbean Sea that is called Miramar. When his parents separated, Gonzlez's mother took him back to the sugar mill at Angelina, where he became a cocolo and a baseball player. He laughs now about the equipment he and his friends played with. Occasionally they had real baseb.a.l.l.s, because in the Dominican League whoever catches the last out of the game, by tradition, keeps the ball and generally gives it to the street kids of his choice.

The rest of the time b.a.l.l.s were made out of socks, also a San Pedro tradition. Socks are stuffed tightly into an outer sock, which is then sewn closed and dipped in water before playing to give it a little density. Socks, too, were hard to come by. When Julio Franco, the durable major-league shortstop, was growing up in Consuelo, he used to steal socks from his big brother, Vicente. This is another way of looking at the Puerto Rican a.s.sertion that Dominicans don't wear socks.

For a time batillas were used. Bottled water came in large jugs with a big cap that could be used as a ball. But in recent years manufacturers have switched to lightweight plastic and the cap does not have enough weight for throwing.

Bats were another problem. The real bats were broken and glued, taped, or even nailed back together, but often a stick of tough tropical wood or even light sugarcane served instead. Sometimes a milk carton could be shaped into a glove-a fairly good glove if you knew how to shape it, especially if you were not catching anything harder than a wad of socks. If anyone had a real glove, he left it in the position on the field so that the other team could use it too. Dominican children were resourceful: girls skipped rope with palm fronds.

The best way to get bats and b.a.l.l.s was to play on a team, and there were teams all over San Pedro. There were the sugar mills, and Gonzlez did not limit himself to Angelina. One year he played on a team run by the Haitian vice consul, who was based in San Pedro to look after the many Haitians who cut cane there. Also on that team were Manny Jimenez and his brother Elvio, a shortstop, who would be a teammate of Gonzlez's again in 1964 with the New York Yankees. But Elvio's major-league career lasted only one game.

In 1957, Ramfis Trujillo drafted not only Juan Marichal but several San Pedro players from the mills, including Gonzlez and both Jimenez brothers. In San Pedro it was becoming clear that the Dominican military was a pathway to the major leagues. The army, navy, air force, and police all had teams that competed against one another, and still do. This was top-quality Dominican baseball, and players who did well on these teams got noticed. San Pedro youths in the sugar mills even today will point out that the military teams are a good opportunity because "that is how Juan Marichal got discovered."

Gonzlez, a large and affable man, signed with the Yankee organization in 1958, the year Marichal began his major-league career. He arrived in America speaking no English. There were few Spanish speakers to help him. "I ate ham and eggs for breakfast and the rest of the time chicken and french fries," Gonzlez recalled. "It was all I knew how to order."

When he started in the majors in 1963, Dominicans were still not completely accepted. After distinguishing himself as a hitter in the minors, Gonzlez started playing for the Yankees in 1963. He was the first Dominican to play for the Yankees. He was a novelty, nicknamed "Speedy Gonzlez" after a vaguely racist Looney Tune stereotype: a Mexican mouse with a gold tooth and a big sombrero who spoke in an exaggerated singsong nasal accent-the Latino as a cartoon character. Or he may have been named not so much for the cartoon as for the 1962 hit single by singer Pat Boone that seems to be about this same cartoon mouse, but is really about nothing at all.

Because of injuries, Gonzlez never lived up to his batting potential, but he was a smooth and artful infielder who made only thirty-one errors in his five years of Major League Baseball. In 1964 he covered five positions and made only three errors in sixty-six games.

As with Virgil, Gonzlez's skin color was a bigger issue than his ethnicity. "I remember when the Yankees came to play the Baltimore Orioles in 1963," he said without a trace of bitterness in his voice. "The whole team stayed in the Sheraton in Baltimore, but they wouldn't serve me in the restaurant. I used to have to go to the black part of town to find a place to eat. But I always said I didn't come to integrate, I came to play baseball."

At bat, Gonzlez was often hit by pitches. He believed it was intentional: "Pitchers used to bean black players. The managers would say 'get the black guy.'" Surprisingly, Gonzlez insisted that Charles Dressen, a legendary Hall of Fame manager for Brooklyn who was managing Detroit at the time, "always told them hit the black guy." A hit batter moves to first base, but he will have been intimidated-which is known in baseball as "having his power taken away." Racists believed that blacks could be easily intimidated, and so pitchers often threw at them. Longtime club owner Bill Veeck openly criticized the practice.

But Gonzlez tried not to make trouble, concentrating instead on building his career. "I learned a lot because I was in love with baseball and I worked my tail off," he recalled. One time, tired of the stinging blow of fastb.a.l.l.s, he lost his temper. Toward the end of the 1965 season, while batting for the Cleveland Indians against Detroit Tigers pitcher Larry Sherry, two pitches in a row barely missed him. It is not certain that Sherry was trying to hit Gonzlez-often a pitcher will throw inside very close to the batter to force him to move back off the plate-but Gonzlez was furious. Bat still in hand, he ran up to the pitcher and swung at him, hitting Sherry's arm before being restrained. Gonzlez was fined $500 and suspended for the rest of the season, which was not many games. He did not injure Sherry the way Marichal had injured Roseboro, and it was not a notable game-Gonzlez was not a famous player like Marichal-but for those who noticed, it was another hot Latin Dominican running amok, even though baseball had a long tradition of cool northerners doing similar things.

Gonzlez did not make a huge amount of money. Most baseball players didn't in the 1960s. One of his best years, 1966, the Cleveland Indians paid him $15,000 for the year. He probably made more money in baseball after he retired. He could do this because as a former major leaguer, he was somebody. In 1964 he had even played in a World Series. He went on to manage Tampico in the Mexican League and then the Estrellas back in his hometown. His Estrellas were filled with future major leaguers from San Pedro, including Julio Franco, Alfredo Griffin, and Rafael Ramrez.

Later Gonzlez became a well-liked fixture around San Pedro as a scout for the Atlanta Braves. "I just look around and keep kids off the street," he said. "They might turn out to be good players too." A successful man who sent his children to the local medical school, he was proof for young Macorisanos that you can build a life if you make it to the majors.

San Pedro slipped into the major leagues almost unnoticed until its first star, Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty, known as Rico Carty. The first hint of his cocolo roots was the p.r.o.nunciation of his nickname, "Beeg Mon"-an accurate description, as Carty was a muscular six feet, three inches tall. He was from Consuelo, where there is a Carty Street, running from the church to the fenced-off sugar mill, named after his mother, Oliva Carty, who was a midwife. By the twenty-first century there were more than one hundred Cartys in Consuelo, a subdivision with about 45,000 people. They were originally French-speaking sugar workers from Saint Martin but with roots in other islands as well. When Rico spoke his fluent English, it was hard to discern if his accent was French, Spanish, or West Indian. Probably it was all three.

Carty has said in interviews that when he was growing up in Consuelo there were two choices: cut cane for the mill or work in the mill. Carty's father worked in Ingenio Consuelo for sixty years. He loved boxing and cricket. Rico was born in 1939, and when he was a child the older men in Consuelo played cricket. The boys tried it too, but the lure of baseball, encouraged by the mills, was irresistible. The Carty family lived in mill housing behind the ingenio, simple wooden houses in a little Caribbean barrio called Guachupita.

Rico was one of twelve sons and four daughters. The fields that surrounded them were for growing cane. Baseball was played in the unpaved streets. Owing to his ability to hit deep into center field, Carty was known as an "up-the-middle" hitter, which he attributed to the fact that under Consuelo rules you had to keep the ball in the street: if it went into the houses it was an out. He attributed his ability to hit breaking b.a.l.l.s to the fact that wadded socks or rags are not balanced, so the pitches had a lot of unpredictable movement.

Carty's mother understood the value of education and hoped her son would study to become a doctor. But Rico did not like to study-he wanted to play baseball-so she banned him from the baseball fields, hoping that would force him to concentrate on schoolwork. Instead he would sneak off and play games in the street with teams from competing Consuelo barrios.

Since Rico was clearly not a student his parents got him a job cutting wood for the mill. He hated it, but working for the ingenio gave him the opportunity to play on their baseball team. At that time Dominicans could not break into Major League Baseball; the sport that could lift them out of poverty was boxing. Rico's father, who loved the sport, gave him books on it and trained him. Rico was undefeated in seventeen fights, twelve by knockouts. Then he lost his eighteenth. He always claimed it was because he had eaten too many beans before the fight. He gave up boxing and in 1959 went back to baseball for Ingenio Consuelo, where he was much talked about as the boy who could hit the ball four hundred feet straight up the middle on any kind of pitch. But his father was disappointed: although he lived to be ninety, he never went to see his son play baseball. In 1959, Rico and some five hundred other young Dominicans tried out for the Pan American baseball team. The Dominicans had won the 1955 Pan American Games and were a team to watch in the 1959 games, which were in Chicago at Comiskey Park.

The major leagues sent scouts to look at the reigning Dominican team. The team did not do well but Carty did, hitting home runs over center field the way he had learned on the streets and making a spectacular throw to home plate off the right-field fence. Everyone wanted to sign this Dominican kid with the perfect swing, the powerful throwing arm, the tall, lean, and muscular body, and the strikingly sculpted face.

Many of the new Dominican players-unlike the Cubans, who played a season in Mexico, a season in Venezuela-were leaving the Dominican Republic for the first time. The Dominican Republic is not a very big place, and a few dozen miles to Santo Domingo or up to Santiago was as far as Carty had ever been until he played in Chicago at age nineteen. Being a cocolo, Carty always thought he spoke English. But now he discovered that he did not understand Americans and they could not understand him. Scouts went to talk to him, but he could not understand them. Every time someone offered him a contract, he signed. Before long he had signed with six major-league organizations, and by some accounts eight or nine. At the very least he had signed with the Cardinals, the Braves, the Yankees, the Giants, the Cubs, and the Dodgers. In his confusion he had also signed with Estrellas, Licey, Escogido, and guilas.

George Trautman, who headed Minor League Baseball, interceded. He pointed out to the various angry clubs that there was no legal issue, since Carty had neglected to take any money. But he told Carty that he had to choose a team. Carty picked the Milwaukee Braves, because he liked the team. Only later did he understand that the $2,000 signing bonus they offered was small money and he could have gotten far more from the St. Louis Cardinals.

Back in the Dominican Republic, it was more complicated to sort out his contracts. Realizing what he had done, he said that he wanted to play for his hometown Estrellas Orientales. Trujillo was furious and Carty was taken to court-a Trujillo court. But in the end, a good ballplayer could be forgiven in a Trujillo court, and he was allowed to play for Estrellas.

The Braves sent Carty to play minor-league baseball in Waycross, Georgia, where he thought Jim Crow laws did not apply to him because he was a Latino. Like Pedro Gonzlez, he ate a lot of chicken because he could say that. Later he learned how to order hamburgers.

In the United States, it was difficult to find familiar foods. In his autobiography, Felipe Alou wrote of being revolted by the coldness of the milk. In rural Dominican Republic, milk generally arrived unpasteurized and was boiled for safety and served warm. But chicken was the one familiar food they could find.

This story about only knowing how to order chicken is repeated over and over again by the early San Pedro major leaguers. Why was that the word they knew? Not all of them even knew that. San Pedro players tell stories of Dominican rookies favoring fast-food restaurants that offered photographs so they could simply point to the chicken picture or even walk in, flap their arms, and make chicken noises to indicate their orders. Poor Dominicans live on a diet of rice, beans, tropical fruits, root vegetables, and occasionally a chicken.

On the wide main curving street that runs by the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, there are many small restaurant-bars where fans can watch American baseball games on large-screen TVs. They serve mostly chicken. Chicken may have been, as Gonzlez suggested, the word they set out to learn. Chicken is popular and good in San Pedro. As in much of the Caribbean, most of it is free-range, because sending chickens foraging is the most cost-effective approach in the tropics.

Not all Dominican players chose chicken. "Ham and eggs" was another phrase the Dominican players quickly learned to say. When Jose Mercedes got to the Orioles, he learned the phrase "same thing" and simply waited for someone else to order and then said, "Same thing."

Carty was not as isolated as Gonzlez had been, because there were some Dominicans in the Braves organization, even other Macorisanos-even one whose father had played cricket with Carty's father. But only Rico made it to the majors.

Carty was liked and certainly respected by the other players, but he was always somewhat of an odd man out, a colorful character. They were puzzled by his habit of carrying his wallet in his uniform into the game because he was not confident that his money would be safe in the locker room.

He found American racism hard to understand. He could see that, as a Latino, he had a slightly better standing than American black players. So he always presented himself as a Latino. But American black players were resentful of this. Carty did not understand much about black America at the height of the civil rights movement. He called himself "Big Boy," and the black players resented it because they did not want to see a black man call himself "boy." He changed it to "Man": "Beeg Mon." But he never really understood the issue.

It was after the Braves moved to Atlanta that Carty got a taste of what it was like to be a black man in America. In September 1971, after Carty had established himself as a baseball star, he was driving in Atlanta with his brother-in-law, Carlos Ramrez, at about midnight. Ramrez was visiting from the Dominican Republic and spoke no English. Racial tension had been heightened in Atlanta by the killing of two white policemen in a black neighborhood. According to Carty, who described the incident in a 1975 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, another car pulled up with two white men. The two called out to a black man in the street, "Hey, n.i.g.g.e.r."

Ramrez asked Carty in Spanish what was happening. When Carty told him, his brother-in-law asked, "Do they do that here?"

" Yes," Carty replied. "Sometimes between the blacks and whites."

"Why?" Ramrez asked.

"I don't know," said Carty. "I just play ball and go home." And the two laughed. Then the two in the other car started shouting "n.i.g.g.e.r!" at the Dominicans. Still not understanding the ways of American racism, Carty shouted back in English, "You may be more n.i.g.g.e.r than me, because you are American and I'm not."

Carty was not his usual athletic self, because he was just recovering from a severe leg injury. Spotting a uniformed white policeman, he got out of his car and limped up to him and asked for his help, saying he had an injury and didn't want any trouble from the two men in the car. But the two he was complaining about were plainclothes policemen. The police took out their guns and one of them said, "These are the cop-killing n.i.g.g.e.rs." He hit Ramrez over the head with his handgun, and then they began beating Carty with a blackjack, kicking him on the ground, then handcuffed and arrested him before finally one of the policemen recognized him.

The policemen were suspended; one already had a record of brutalizing black people, and the police chief and mayor apologized profusely. The attorney for the three suspended policemen said that it was a minor incident that had been blown up because it involved a famous baseball player. But in truth, Carty had been saved by his standing in baseball. The Atlanta press expressed concern that the finger injuries and black eye might somehow keep Carty from finishing the season.

Carty was what is known as a natural hitter, or, as they say in San Pedro, naci para batear, he was "born to bat." His swing had both power and grace, and he had that mysterious ability to see pitches and put his bat where they were going. For seven years he maintained the highest lifetime batting average of any current player. At the time, few players were hitting well-a period known in baseball history as "the second dead-ball era." The first dead-ball era, a time when hitters inexplicably were all slumping, was the first two decades of the twentieth century. The second dead-ball era, from 1963 to 1972, corresponded almost exactly with Carty's career. The phenomenon is only partly explained by the fact that it was an era of great pitchers. Carty was, along with Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, Carl Yastrzemski, and only a few others, one of the rare great hitters of his time. The reverse of Marichal, who was underappreciated because of the wealth of great pitchers, Carty enjoyed great renown because so few others were hitting so well.

Had he stayed healthy, Carty might have been one of the all-time greatest hitters in baseball. In 1963 he had a brilliant rookie year, but the following year he had back problems. In 1967 he missed weeks of play from a shoulder injury caused by a bad slide into second base. In 1968 he seemed to run completely out of luck: that year he missed the entire season, spending 163 days in the hospital with tuberculosis. He missed fifty-eight games in 1969 with three shoulder separations. Often his injuries were sustained in the winter, playing for the Dominican League, which he insisted on doing every winter.

In 1970 he had a phenomenal batting average of .366, which was the best in the major leagues since 1957, when Ted Williams. .h.i.t .388 for the Red Sox. Then, triumphant, Carty went home to San Pedro to play for the Estrellas, but he was traded to Escogido. While playing for Escogido, he broke his leg in three places and shattered his knee colliding with Matty Alou in the outfield. The Braves did not have their batting champion for the entire 1971 season. After the knee healed and a hip-to-calf brace was removed, he went back to Escogido and, in a game against Licey, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Pedro Borbn hit Carty on the left side of his face and broke his jaw.

Carty never did make tremendous amounts of money in Major League Baseball. A restaurant he started in Atlanta, Rico Carty's Open Pit Barbecue, burned down when flames leaped out of the open pit after the restaurant had been operating only fifteen days.

He did wear rings that spelled out his name and uniform number in diamonds. When he was in Atlanta, he earned a reputation as a shopper after buying twenty-five pairs of shoes at one time. He also once bought six suits and another time twenty-four shirts. When a reporter asked him about this, he said, "I go into a store and I can't help myself. I see all the beautiful things and I have to have them."

In Carty's best-paying year of his fifteen seasons in the majors-1977, at the end of his career-he received $120,000. Most years he earned half of that or less. But back in San Pedro he did not need a lot of money. He bought a large, comfortable house in downtown San Pedro for $45,000-a one-story ranch house large enough for his wife, four daughters, and son. In the 1960s, when his mother picked the spot, it was an undeveloped neighborhood on the edge of downtown, and Carty had to pay to get electricity brought in. He was a popular figure in San Pedro, the local boy from Consuelo who became a star. Most of the next generation of players, including Carty's own nephew, Julio Santana, cite Rico Carty as their inspiration. In 1994, with neither political nor administrative experience, he was elected mayor of the town. This may not have been a measure of his popularity, since he was handpicked by Joaqun Balaguer, and Balaguer did not permit his candidates to be defeated. Carty explained, "Joaqun Balaguer is a good friend of mine, so when he asked me to run I could not tell him no." He pledged as mayor to keep the youth of San Pedro supplied with bats and b.a.l.l.s from the major leagues.

But then something else happened to open the door of Major League Baseball even wider for the boys of San Pedro and produced perhaps the most important generation San Pedro has ever sent out.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Draft Dodging By the 1970s, boys had been playing baseball in San Pedro for nearly a century without dreaming that it could change their lives. But after the first few major leaguers-especially once Rico Carty became a star-baseball turned into something much more serious than a sport: it could be the salvation of an entire family. What had changed was not so much San Pedro but Major League Baseball.

Until 1976, once a player signed a contract with a franchise, he was theirs until they did not want him anymore and traded him or released him. When a contract expired, the franchise always had the option to renew it. The rule, known as the "reserve clause," came into effect in 1879. An owner could even cut a player's salary by twenty percent. In 1969, after distinguishing himself as a hitter and outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals for twelve years, Curt Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Cardinals had traded three players for three Phillies. But Flood refused to go, saying he didn't like the Phillies, their stadium, or their fans. The Phillies were infamous for racism. The manager, Ben Chapman, had led his team in shouting racist insults at Jackie Robinson. Flood sued baseball and got former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to argue his case, which went to the Supreme Court. Among Goldberg's arguments was the claim that the current system unfairly repressed wages. The Court ruled against Flood.

But many people felt that Flood, who had been active in the civil rights movement, was fighting a just cause. He had written to the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, in 1969: "I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes." Since he was black, the comparison to slavery was evident, and his struggle was seen as one for civil rights at a time when there were many such struggles in America. It was not seen as being about money. Had he let himself be traded, his $100,000 salary would have been one of the top paychecks in baseball. The celebrated sportswriter Red Smith, writing in The New York Times, satirized: " ' You mean,' baseball demands incredulously, 'at these prices, they want human rights too?' "

Yes, they did.

In 1975 two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, refused to sign their contracts, and after they had played a season without contracts it was ruled that they then had the right to be free agents.

A player who becomes a free agent by fulfilling his contract puts himself on the market and can go to the team he chooses, often the highest bidder. If a player has been doing well, this can produce highly compet.i.tive bidding. This has made agents important because, with millions of dollars at stake, there is often considerable negotiating. Before free agents, players negotiated contracts with management on their own.

Regardless of the high principles that had guided Flood, one of the results was that baseball became a game of millionaires. Salaries like Flood's $100,000 became laughable. Before there were free agents, in the Rico Carty years, the average salary in the major leagues was $52,300. Carty's salaries, which seem meager today, were above average. But by 1980 the average had leaped to $146,500. A decade later it was more than $800,000. By 2008 the average was $3 million a year. Signing bonuses, an extra one-time bonus on signing the first contract, also went up; the once token handouts for the most promising players are now in the millions.

At this same time, with jets replacing trains for traveling teams, Major League Baseball began a process of expanding from sixteen teams in the Northeast and Midwest to the current thirty around the country, and this, too, created a hunger for fresh young talent. The most important source of new young players was the draft, in which every franchise got to pick from a pool of undeveloped talent. The lower the standing of a club in the previous season, the higher the pick in the draft so that the last-place teams got the first picks.

But the draft was a highly regulated operation, and teams were limited in the number of draft picks they could take. This placed the player in a good negotiating position. A very promising prospect could refuse the offer. Then he had to wait a year, but a year later he would probably be worth more money to whoever got him. In the meantime the franchise had wasted a pick, because they were limited to the players they drafted whether those players signed on or not. So it might be in the club's interest to sweeten the deal-fatten the bonus-in order to get the prospect signed, which was why bonuses had been going up.

However, players who were not born in the United States were not subject to the draft. They were declared "amateur free agents," and there was no limit on hiring free agents, and you did not have to be a last-place team to be first to grab a top prospect. Foreigners became an unlimited source of new talent. This internationalized baseball, opening it up to Venezuelans, Colombians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Koreans, Taiwanese, and j.a.panese. Today, more than a quarter of major-league players are foreign born, and the percentage will probably rise, since the minor leagues are about half foreign born. Moving beyond the limitations of the draft was the original reason, but then a wealth of talent was discovered and they were cheaper to sign than American drafted players of comparable promise.

The first country to profit from this search for nondrafting talent was the Dominican Republic. This was partly because, by the mid-1970s, baseball was accustomed to the idea of Latin players. There had been Cuban and Puerto Rican players, but Cubans were no longer available and Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens and therefore subject to the draft. With a tradition of baseball and the second-worst economy in the Americas-Nicaragua has recently fallen lower and b.u.mped the Dominican Republic up to third-Dominicans were ready to be saved by baseball. When Major League Baseball went looking for foreign players, the first place they looked was the Dominican Republic.

San Pedro and other parts of the Dominican Republic became the feeding grounds of major-league scouts. A scout had to identify a young teenager, develop his ability, and get him signed-a process that sometimes took years-without another scout grabbing the prospect. And so these scouts were cruising the ball fields, often running into and trying to out-maneuver one another. Some, like Pedro Gonzlez, were ex-players, but many of the more successful ones were not. Epifanio Guerrero, commonly known as Epy, from Santo Domingo, never made it as a player. His brother Mario, a shortstop, never got out of the minors, and neither of Epy's two sons got beyond AAA ball. But Epy was the most famous Dominican scout, signing 133 young Dominicans, thirty-seven of whom-including George Bell and Tony Fernndez-made it to major-league rosters.

At the start, Guerrero was scouting for the Toronto Blue Jays and his archcompet.i.tor Rafael Avila was scouting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. From Los Angeles, the Dodgers-the same management that had opened the sport to black players in Brooklyn-pioneered Latino recruitment. Avila was a Cuban, a veteran of the ill-fated 1961 anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1970, when Avila moved to the Dominican Republic, there had still been only twenty-four Dominican players who had risen to the major leagues. But at a time when baseball was not very international, for twenty-four players to have turned up on major-league rosters in fourteen years from one small foreign country was a phenomenon.

At first the scouts tried to raid the military teams, where Marichal had been found. But this had the complication of getting the player released from the military. Then they looked at the Dominican League. Avila started working with Licey. But eventually they discovered an untapped wealth of very talented teenagers who lacked proper training, in the sugar fields of San Pedro. The scouts needed to find places to train the young players and feed them-they were all undersized and undernourished-without attracting too much attention. Avila built two rooms in Elvio Jimenez's backyard and housed and fed fifteen players there, the forerunner of what came to be known as a baseball academy.

The compet.i.tion for San Pedro ballplayers was lively. In 1976 a Cuban scout for the Cleveland Indians, Reggio Otero, picked up a fifteen-year-old cocolo from Consuelo named Alfredo Griffin, who had honed his skills playing every Sunday for the sugar mill where his stepfather worked. Epy Guerrero never forgot that Griffin had gotten away from him, and after three years of slowly rising in the Indians organization, he was able to get Griffin away to Toronto, where he started his career winning the Rookie of the Year Award.

Alfredo Griffin, Pepe Fras, Julio Franco, Rafael Ramrez, and Tony Fernndez were all shortstops from San Pedro who went to the majors in the ten years between Fras in 1973 and Fernndez in 1983, and all became stars. Griffin, Fras, and Franco were from Consuelo. Soon San Pedro de Macors, the city of plntanos, sugar, and poets, became known as the city of shortstops. To date, only thirteen of the seventy-nine Macorisanos who have played in the major leagues have been shortstops, compared with twenty-seven pitchers, mostly in recent years. But when this town was first getting noticed by the fans of professional baseball, it seemed that it was turning out more excellent shortstops than anything else, and even today when the name San Pedro de Macors is mentioned, often the response is "That town with all the shortstops."

A shortstop is one of the most important players on a team-certainly the star of the infield. He roams between second and third base, between infield and outfield. Because most hitters are right-handed, they tend to hit toward the left, and so the shortstop is in more plays than anyone else. If it were a left-handed world, the shortstop would have been placed between first and second. It is a role that requires great athleticism because he is involved in tight critical plays, including double and triple plays. Often by the time a ground ball has gone the distance to reach the shortstop, there is little time to beat the runner on a long throw to first base. A shortstop's moves often appear spectacular, and good shortstops usually become fan favorites.

Since the youth of San Pedro dreamed of being stars, they dreamed of being shortstops. But also, since they had hard lives and poor nutrition, Macorisanos tended to be small, with powerful throwing arms, which is the cla.s.sic shortstop-or at least it was until large men such as Cal Ripken, Jr., and Alex Rodriguez started playing the position.

Griffin's family came from Nevis. His father, Alberto Reed, was a musician and a dockworker in Santo Domingo. They lived in Villa Francisca, a poor crumbling and crowded one-story neighborhood in the old part of the capital near the Ozama River. Reed performed at a nearby night-club called Borojol. He played in a musical tradition that reached its height in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s with singers who earned international reputations such as t.i.to Rodrguez and Beny More. The music was called son, an Afro-Cuban hybrid. Eventually son would mutate into salsa, but before that happened, in the 1940s, a.r.s.enio Rodrguez introduced big conga drums to son; by the time Alberto Reed was playing, conga drumming was an important part of the band. This made a huge impression on young Alfredo, who developed a permanent love for conga drums.

When Alfredo was only eight years old, the rough, fetid streets of the capital, in which boys from rival barrios fought one another for dominance, got even rougher. A U.S. invasion followed a coup d'etat, and a civil war meant street battles with high-caliber automatic weapons. Alfredo's unmarried mother, Mary, a Macorisana, wanted to leave the dangerous town, where young Alfredo liked to run loose and watch both the violence and food distribution by American soldiers. She took her three sons and left Reed and moved back with her family in her native Consuelo. She later became involved with the sugar worker whom Alfredo still refers to as his stepfather. Although Alfredo always used his mother's name, clearly Reed was an important influence. People in Consuelo who recall growing up with Alfredo say that their earliest memories are not of him laboring in the mills, because he didn't work there, or playing on the Consuelo ball team on Sundays, for which he was paid, but of Alfredo playing the conga in a band and entertaining at cocolo parties and fiestas. Other things they remember are that he earned money shining shoes and that he was a tough street fighter.

Griffin credits the mill with making Consuelo a place that produces baseball players. "They all come from here," he said, "because we played ball for the mills every Sunday." Certainly Consuelo, a small subdivision that has produced eleven major leaguers as of 2009, is per capita the most productive neighborhood in modern baseball history. Griffin first learned baseball playing street ball in Santo Domingo, but he is not certain he would have ended up a baseball player if he had stayed in his tough city neighborhood. None of the boys he grew up with there played pro ball, and some of them ended up in jail.

Were it not for baseball, Alfredo Griffin might have become a very different person, but Alfredo had an uncle, Clemente Hart, who was a cricket player turned baseball player and played for the Estrellas. Hart steered Alfredo toward Consuelo baseball. Soon Ingenio Consuelo was paying him to play on their team. Managed by a former major leaguer, Pedro Gonzlez, this was not the usual company team: it had Alfredo Griffin, Nelson Norman, Rafael Ramrez, Rafael Santana, and Julio Franco-all future major leaguers. This was a team that scouts watched.

In fact, Consuelo played in a league consisting of six mill-sponsored teams, the Circuito de los Ingenios, which played a thirty-game season in the dead season and which scouts closely monitored. The mills supplied uniforms with the name of the ingenio across the chest. Well known for the quality of their baseball, the league games were the primary entertainment in the sugarcane communities.

Teams also developed in the various barrios of central San Pedro, which formed a league. The top San Pedro team would play the top ingenio team at Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the September season finale. The ingenio players and their families would cram into buses and go to the stadium, where the playoff took place in front of a screaming crowd of about nine thousand fans. In October the zafra would begin, the workers would take off their uniforms and return to the mills or the fields, and professional baseball-the Estrellas-would take back the stadium.

San Pedro's amateur leagues and their playoffs gave scouts many games in which to look for prospects. Young ballplayers initially tried out for love of the game, but they quickly became aware that they were being considered for the majors.

Cleveland Indians scout Reggie Otero, a Cuban, spotted fifteen-year-old Griffin playing second base. This was one Otero would not let Epy Guerrero grab for the Toronto Blue Jays, so Otero quickly developed Griffin as a shortstop, signed him in 1973, and sent him off to the Cleveland farm system by the age of sixteen.