The Eastern Stars Part 8

It was growing harder to get major-league players. The major-league clubs did not like their multimillion-dollar properties risking injury in the Dominican Republic in the off-season. It had happened too many times. Everyone remembered 1971 when Rico Carty, at the height of his skills, was out for a year from an injury playing for Escogido. The clubs started limiting the partic.i.p.ation of their players. "When I was in the majors," Bonny Castillo complained, "they let us play. They're probably protecting their money." Att.i.tudes change when a few million dollars have been invested in the player.

Griffin claimed that the reason the Estrellas went on a losing streak at the end of the season was that they had lost their best players, including two San Pedro natives, Daniel Cabrera and Robinson Can. Griffin had to use Cabrera judiciously because the Orioles would only allow him to pitch five games for the Estrellas. Now, at the end of the season, his five games were used up. Can, one of the Estrellas' most reliable hitters, could no longer play because the Yankees had allowed him to play in only ten games.

To Macorisanos this was not an acceptable explanation for their six-game slide at the critical end of the season. "It's just an excuse," said Jose Can. "One player doesn't decide a team." And it was true that there were numerous other major-league players on the Estrellas, including Fernando Tatis. Griffin, it was felt, had not done what he had to do to win, although there was some disagreement around town about just what that would have been. The general feeling was that he had failed to a.s.semble a good enough team.

Dominican League teams wanted the major leaguers not only because they wanted to win games but also because they wanted to earn money and these were the players who drew the crowds, especially when they played in their hometowns. Another reason why the crowd did not turn out in Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the critical game was that neither Cabrera nor Can was playing.

Although the pay was low by Major League Baseball standards, star quality was important. When Griffin was a player, the Estrellas wouldn't use him regularly until he won Rookie of the Year. Julio Guerrero, the very tall, lean, broad-shouldered pitcher from Porvenir, in his best year made Triple A for the Pirates for three weeks. That was enough to get him a salary of 40,000 pesos a month from the Estrellas the following winter. But when he dropped down from Triple A, the Estrellas paid him less. A top salary for a major leaguer was only about 300,000 pesos-about $10,000.

Mercedes said, "When I was playing in the major leagues, I didn't even think about the money here. But any kind of baseball-you have to love baseball to play it."

"But I'll tell you something," said Bonny Castillo in spring 2008. "Young players improve when they play winter baseball. Ervin Santana is having a better year for the Angels this year because he pitched for Licey last winter. He threw thirty innings. Young players need added experience."

Young major-league players, not all of them Dominican, came down to the Dominican Republic to play winter baseball and improve their game.

In the Dominican Republic, time is an approximation. So even though the baseball games started late, many fans did not get there for the first inning. The poor were more punctual. The cheap seats, benches along right and left field, were filled at game time, but the better center seats, which could be as high as $6 or $7, only filled gradually during the course of the early innings.

The worst seats in Tetelo Vargas were in the press box. It was an enclosed room with a long window with rumbling air-conditioning. Being sealed off in air-conditioning gave the press a sense of superiority, and they sat in there drinking rum and beer and arguing about Middle Eastern terrorism. It was hard to concentrate on the game from the press room because, unable to hear the pop of the bat or the snap of the pitch hitting the mitt or the screams of the crowd, the people in the press box were not involved.

Noise was part of Dominican baseball, as with most things Dominican. Estrellas fans were equipped with incredibly loud green noisemakers. Vendors sold them. Estrellas fans wore green. The women wore it in such tight clothes that they appeared to have green skin. The women were dressed in their most spectacular and revealing outfits because the games were televised and in between plays the cameramen liked to zoom in on women who caught their eye. If you were done up right, you could get on television. That, too, was Dominican sports. The sports pages in the newspapers always featured cheesecake photos of women, with no further explanation offered.

When the Estrellas scored, the sound system trumpeted jungle-stirring elephant noise. Someone in an Estrellas uniform with an elephant head was on the field dancing merengue at propitious moments. Vendors sold homemade confections of wrenching sweetness. Between innings there were cheerleaders in skintight white and green with suggestive hip movements and a lot of skin showing in many different shades.

The Estrellas would have to win this game or be eliminated. Then they had to win the next game to come to a tie and force yet another game, which they would also have to win to be in the playoff. There was no room for mistakes now. Any loss in the next three games and Las Estrellas would once again go down in defeat.

As the guilas came onto the field, old friends among them came over to Griffin and they hugged. Given the situation, Griffin seemed remarkably calm. He explained, "There is so much pressure in playing a game seven of a World Series that, once you've done that, you never feel pressure anymore." Griffin was on three World Series-winning teams.

Griffin started right-hander Kenny Ray, mainly a relief pitcher, who had played with Kansas City but in recent years was struggling with injuries to his arm. The guilas started with Bartolo Coln, a hometown hero in their Cibao region who started for Griffin's own Angels, for whom he had won pitching's highest honor, the Cy Young Award, in 2005. Despite this seemingly unequal match, Ray pitched well, and with some good hitting the Estrellas had a 4-to-3 lead in the middle of the game. Elephant sounds were heard. Then the guilas scored four runs. But to the trumpeting of plastic horns, the Estrellas came back with two more runs. The Estrellas had their last chance in the eighth inning, when they were down by only one run, 7 to 6. They loaded the bases with only one out. Then they did a typical Estrellas maneuver: they hit into an inning-ending double play. Another disappointing year for the Estrellas Orientales.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

San Pedro's Black Eye When George Bell was a teenager playing in Santa Fe, he fell while avoiding a flying bat and hit his right eye on the corner of a bench. The discoloration under his right eye never went away, and so Bell always looked as though he had just been in a fight and gotten a black eye. When he was a player, the press constantly asked him about his black eye. This was in part the image of a Dominican player-a brawler-but it was also who George Bell was. Once when he was playing for the Blue Jays in Toronto's Sky Dome, he delivered an unmistakable gesture with his middle finger to some 50,000 booing fans. Bell was booed a lot, and he always said that it was bigotry directed against him because he was a Dominican. But some of the fans said that it was because he was a bad outfielder. He often failed at critical plays and was booed for that. Eventually, over his angry protests, he was taken out of the field and made a designated hitter who only stepped in to bat for the pitcher. Batting was what made him valuable.

Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy once wrote, "Baseball fans hear the name 'George Bell' and they think of tantrums, b.u.mps with umpires, confrontations with pitchers and public pouts." He went on to say that Bell would "never get the recognition he deserves as long as he wears the badge of the Loco Latin." The "Loco Latin" badge has kept many Dominicans from getting their due, but Bell was particularly insensitive to this problem. Bell played baseball as a contact sport. Not only was he known for running over catchers and even bas.e.m.e.n-an accepted practice to make them drop the ball-but he was also notorious for "charging the mound." If he was. .h.i.t by a pitch, he ran up to the pitcher's mound and threw a punch at the pitcher. At least once he tried out the karate kick he had learned in karate school back in San Pedro. In his autobiography, Hard Ball, published in 1990 when he was still a player, he attempted to explain this behavior:Some games the fans get angry because they can't understand the way I act, but part of my game, along with hitting homers and driving in runs, is fighting back. If I hit a home run with two men on and the next time up the same pitcher knocks me down, I'm going to get up and charge the mound. I don't care whether it's a home game and the place is sold out, or we're in Cleveland and no one is watching, or the game is the TV Game of the Week. If a pitcher tries to intimidate me, I'm going to go out there to kick his a.s.s. That's the way I grew up playing the game.

Eighteen years later, in a 2008 interview in La Romana, Bell-now a middle-aged man-hadn't softened in the least. "Every time I got hit I would kick their b.u.t.t," he stated.

You mean literally?

"f.u.c.k yes. They are trying to intimidate you."

Bell felt justified because he believed, as Pedro Gonzlez had before him, that pitchers were hitting him intentionally because he was a Dominican. He would hear angry fans shouting pejorative comments about Dominicans. He always remembered a restaurant in Milwaukee in 1989 that refused to serve him and two other Dominican players.

"I understand," Bell said. "You don't like to get beaten by a foreigner, and I was a good hitter and I was black. It's all part of the mix."

But what was disturbing to other Macorisano players was Bell's claim that charging the mound was something he learned in San Pedro-that it was the San Pedro way of playing baseball. A later generation of San Pedro players developed a sense that baseball had become something extremely valuable that they had to handle with considerable care.

Fernando Tatis, asked about Bell's a.s.sertion that his aggressiveness was the San Pedro way, said, "Some people play like that and some people don't. I don't. I think you have to respect the game. It is what is going to give me and my family a better life."

The better buscn programs emphasized that such antics are unprofessional and not good for them or for baseball.

George Bell was not the only San Pedro player with the Latin-hothead reputation. Pitcher Balvino Galvez, born on a batey, would have been infamous had his career lasted longer. He threw a hard fastball, often while sticking out his tongue. His control of the pitch was flawless, but the pitches started drifting when he had the pressure of runners on the bases. He pitched only one season in the majors, 1986 for the Dodgers. He then had a career in j.a.pan, where he was known for his tantrums, more than once expressing his anger at an umpire's call by throwing the ball at him. Galvez almost made it back to the majors in 2001, when he was slated to join the starting rotation of the Pirates. But at spring training he got into an argument with the pitching coach, Spin Williams. Galvez threw down his glove, stomped into the clubhouse, and without saying a word packed up and flew back to the Dominican Republic. He was immediately released, never again to play.

Joaqun Andjar was infamous for his erratic behavior. He once removed himself from the mound, complaining that his crotch itched, and after one game went badly he demolished a toilet with a baseball bat. In 1985 he took off after an umpire in a World Series, had to be restrained by his teammates, and started the following year suspended for ten days. Then there was a drug scandal that might explain the erratic behavior. In between the Chicago World Series fixing scandal of 1919 and the steroid scandal of the twenty-first century, the biggest scandal to shake baseball was the 1986 investigation into widespread amphetamine and cocaine use among important major-league players. During the investigation Andjar confessed to using cocaine.

Even in retirement back in San Pedro, Andjar maintained his reputation. Alfredo Griffin kindly said that it was just that "Joaqun has too much blood." When Griffin was building his new house next to Andjar's in 1986, the pitcher dropped in, had a tirade about the carpet being too dark, shook everyone's hand, and left. Even people in San Pedro thought he was a little crazy. Bell once said, "A lot of North Americans, some Dominicans as well, say that Joaqun is muy malo, a bad guy. But I know he's honest." Nor did Andjar have any objection to Bell's public persona. Andjar repeatedly described himself to the American press as "one tough Dominican" and was fond of characterizing himself as "born to be macho," which to American readers seemed more true than interesting.

Juan Marichal remained the only Dominican inducted into the Hall of Fame, although several good prospects waited in the wings. To be elected, a player must be retired for five years. Entry is voted on by only the members of the Baseball Writers' a.s.sociation of America who are currently working and have been active writers for at least ten years. To be inducted into the Hall of Fame, at least seventy-five percent of the members have to vote favorably. The number of voters varies, but in 2009, for example, this meant receiving a minimum of 405 votes. Few players are a.s.sured entry. Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb easily made it their first voting year with over ninety-five percent. But Cy Young barely made it with seventy-five percent. Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Hank Greenberg were all turned down the first time they came up for a vote. So it is difficult to predict this process, but the most likely Hall of Famer from San Pedro, according to his records, would be Sammy Sosa.

And yet if Macorisanos were asked who was the best ballplayer they ever produced, it is unlikely many would say Sosa. They would probably say Tetelo Vargas. Sosa was not a five-tool player. Early in his career, when he was stealing twenty-five bases each season, he was a three-tool player, but mostly he was an extraordinary hitter who in 2007 became only the fifth player ever to hit more than six hundred home runs. He also drove in more than 140 runs year after year. He was the leading home-run hitter in baseball in two different years, he had the most home runs in a four-year period in history, he was the only batter to hit sixty or more home runs for three consecutive seasons, and he was famous for the record-breaking season of 1998, when he beat the long-standing sixty-one home-run record of Roger Maris, the most celebrated record in baseball, by hitting sixty-six-only to be beaten by Mark McGwire, who hit seventy home runs.

Yet at the opening of the Winter League in San Pedro in 1999-at the height of his record-making career-when Sosa threw out the first ball, people booed. Then others cheered, but he was clearly booed first. The reason was that San Pedro had been devastated by a hurricane and Sosa had made a great show in the American press of hurricane relief, but Macorisanos were not believing it. The mayor at the time, Sergio Cedeo, said, "He asked for money to help the people of San Pedro de Macors. That's what we are asking-where's the money?" In the U.S. also, Sosa's much-trumpeted charitable work was called into question. But for baseball fans, other questions were to arise. By 2004 the onetime Chicago superstar was being regularly booed in Wrigley Field, and his T-shirt was so unpopular in the Wrigleyville Sports store near the field that it had been marked down thirty percent.

In 2002 the steroid scandal was beginning to overtake baseball. Steroids were found in the locker of Sosa's home-run compet.i.tor, Mark McGwire. The other home-run king, Barry Bonds, denied using steroids but had tested positive several times.

That left one home-run champion, Sosa, for whom a grandstand was more than just where he sent the ball. With his customary bravado he took to saying that if baseball started testing for steroids, he wanted to be first in line. In an interview, Sports Ill.u.s.trated columnist Rick Reilly asked him if he meant it, and he said emphatically yes.

Then Reilly asked, "Why wait?"

"What?" said Sosa.

Reilly, thinking that Sosa could clear the air and give a lift to baseball by proving that he, at least, had come by his home runs honestly, wrote down the telephone number and address of a diagnostic lab that could test him only thirty minutes from Wrigley Field, where he was playing for the Cubs.

Sosa became enraged, accused Reilly of trying to "get me in trouble," and stopped the interview, calling Reilly a "motherf.u.c.ker." Reilly said that the lesson for sportswriters was to always ask the steroid question at the end of the interview.

The public and many sportswriters began suspecting Sosa of steroid use. Anabolic steroids are drugs related to testosterone, a male hormone. Anabolic comes from a Greek word meaning "to build up." The drugs were first developed in the 1930s and are used today to treat patients suffering from bone loss and to counteract deterioration in cancer and AIDS patients. But steroids can also be used to build up muscles, and consequently strength, in athletes. The risks are many, including increased cholesterol, high blood pressure, infertility, liver damage, and heart disease. Some studies indicate a physical altering of the structure of the heart and personality changes, including extreme aggression. Since the 1980s the possession of anabolic steroids without a prescription is a crime, in the United States. Not only were baseball players who used them committing a crime, but they were violating the rules of Major League Baseball. Like the Olympics committee, the National Football a.s.sociation, and basketball, hockey, and most other sports organizations, Major League Baseball considered steroids to be an unfair trick to enhance performance and had banned their use. A baseball player who used steroids was considered a cheater.

Sosa, once a fan favorite for his ready smile and his maudlin talk of remembering the poor, had other problems. In 2003 he was at bat for the Cubs in the first inning against Tampa Bay, a notoriously ineffective pitching team that year. But Sosa, the home-run king, was having a bad year. It was June and he had hit only six home runs-none in the past thirty-three days. Sosa took a swing; the pitch shattered the bat and sent a ground ball to second base. The alert catcher, Toby Hall, gathered the broken pieces and showed them to the umpire, who promptly ejected Sosa from the game. The pieces revealed that the bat had a cork interior.

It is not clear if corked bats are an advantage. They make the bat lighter for a faster swing, but Robert K. Adair, a Yale professor who auth.o.r.ed The Physics of Baseball, claimed that because cork is a softer substance, it may actually slow down the ball. But corked bats were used by hitters who believed they sent the ball farther, and Major League Baseball had banned their use. Players caught using them were officially cheating. Baseball rules state that a bat must be a solid piece of wood.

The following day, seventy-six bats were confiscated from Sosa in the Cubs locker room while a game was still going on; the bats were all X-rayed and found to be "clean." Sosa had claimed that his use of the corked bat the day before had just been a big mistake, that he had accidentally pulled out a bat that he used for home-run exhibitions. Major-league officials said they believed his story and cut his eight-day suspension to seven days. But the fans and the press felt Sammy Sosa had been caught cheating. USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno called Sosa's explanation a "highly implausible defense." USA Today conducted a poll in which sixty percent of respondents said they didn't believe Sosa and thought he had used the corked bat intentionally. The press wrote variations on the "Say it isn't so, Joe" line to "Shoeless" Joe Jackson after the 1919 World Series had been found to be fixed. The New York Post, with their traditional love of tabloid headlines, ran the story with "Say It Isn't Sosa," a line that was being used by Chicago fans. Jackson, by the way, got only two votes when his name was brought up in the Hall of Fame in 1936. Baseball writer Roger Kahn in the Los Angeles Times linked Sosa to Pete Rose, a player who has not been voted into the Hall of Fame because he was caught betting on baseball.

Things got worse for Sosa. In 2004 it became clear that the Cubs organization wanted to trade their onetime star, and the fans wanted them to also. The relationship reached a low point when they fined Sosa $87,400 for arriving late and leaving early for the last game of the season. Being late to work is one of those things that is not-not ever-supposed to happen in baseball, and sneaking out early is also unacceptable. Sosa tried to claim he left in the seventh inning, but the security videotape in the player parking lot showed that he had actually left in the first. His teammates were furious.

Fairly or unfairly, in both the U.S. and San Pedro in the last years of Sosa's career, a cloud of suspicion hung over the once smiling hero from Consuelo, and it remained there even after his 2007 retirement. In 2009 lawyers leaked to the press that Sosa had been shown positive for steroids in a 2003 test that Major League Baseball gave on condition that the results remained secret. Such a cloud can do a lot of damage to a player's reputation. It can keep a significant number of sportswriters from voting positively for a Hall of Fame candidate.

There is already a growing sentiment among some sportswriters, old-time players, and fans that it is not fair to compare modern players' records with old-time players' achievements, even without performance-enhancing drugs; steroid use further complicates the issue. How can a Roger Clemens be compared with Bob Feller, Juan Marichal, or Sandy Koufax, when Clemens pitched only six- or seven-inning games every four or five days and the earlier pitchers had to keep their arms in shape for complete games every three days? In 1965, Sandy Koufax pitched a complete game seven of the World Series on two days' rest, a feat that would be unimaginable to today's pitchers.

How do you compare the home runs. .h.i.t in one season by McGwire or Sosa with those hit by Ruth or Greenberg, when the earlier hitters played 154-game seasons in which to make their records and modern hitters play 162 games?

Then, when it is added to the mix that Clemens and Sosa may have also used steroids, and that McGwire did, the old-time players, fans, and, most important, the sportswriters start to get angry.

Baseball had its share of scandals in the U.S., but in the Dominican Republic-where it dangled millions of dollars in front of underfed, impoverished teenagers and their desperate, often uneducated families-occasional incidents of corruption could not be surprising.

In 1999 there was the marriage scandal. Signed major-league prospects from the Dominican Republic were taking money from local women to say they were married so they would be eligible for U.S. visas. The only problem was that the U.S. consulate started noticing that suddenly a lot of young players, especially from San Pedro, were married. They uncovered the scam and denied visas to players who had been caught. One of the players who lost his visa this way was Manny Alexander, but he pleaded that he was just trying to help out his cousin, and the State Department gave him back his visa. Alexander had other problems. In 2000, while playing for the Red Sox, steroids and syringes were found in his car. When he played for the Yankees, he was accused of stealing items from Derek Jeter's locker and selling them to memorabilia dealers.

The signing prospect, an uneducated teenager from a small town, had a dizzying array of people swirling around him, mostly looking for part of his fat check. Players' agents signed them up even though it would be years before they needed an agent. Scouts and buscones were ready with ideas.

In May 2008 the White Sox fired their director of player personnel, David Wilder, and two Dominican scouts, Victor Mateo and Domingo Toribio, charging that they had conspired with buscones to pressure prospects into paying them a part of their signing bonuses. The White Sox turned the case over to Major League Baseball, which quickly turned it over to the FBI. Before any results of the investigation were made public, it became apparent that such corruption was not a uniquely White Sox problem. It was not clear exactly how they managed to get the prospects' money, but the scam was clearly based on how easily intimidated the desperately poor are. It could have all been stopped by the prospects or their families speaking up, but few wanted to make trouble because it could result in a release. It could not be done without the knowledge of the prospect, who is paid directly by Major League Baseball. Yet players were not coming forward to lodge complaints.

A scout could approach a buscn and tell him an amount that he could get his boy, and suggest he talk the family into taking less so he and the scout could share the extra. The buscn, often trusted and liked by the young prospect, went to the family and told them that he could get a larger bonus if he was willing to leave a cut for the scout. Or he might tell them that they had to pay a cut or there wouldn't be any deal. Desperate for the deal, the family usually did what they were told. No matter how big a bite they lost, they would be getting more money than they had ever seen, with the possibility of even greater paychecks in a few years.

Buscn Astin Jacobo said, "I've been around this sport all my life. Yes, there are some bad guys in baseball, but there are a lot more on top than on the bottom. Yes, sometimes a scout comes up to me with a deal, but I've got my father's name to protect and my son who is trying to be a ballplayer. But this is not the first time I've seen s.h.i.t in baseball. Scouts came up to you, the old-timers, and they say, 'Listen, I like the kid, but he needs to be seventeen, not twenty. Here is five hundred pesos.' They used to do that a lot-not all the time, but a lot."

Because of the increased value of a younger player, false birth certificates were a common occurrence. In 2003, Alfonso Soriano told Yankees general manager Brian Cashman that he was not born on January 7, 1978, as stated when they signed him, but in 1976. Often false ident.i.ty papers do not even have the correct name. Adriano Rosario from San Pedro, age nineteen, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher who signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002 for a $400,000 bonus, was actually Ramn Antonio Pea Paulino, age twenty-two. Rafael Perez, manager for Major League Baseball's Latin American office in Santo Domingo, was quoted as saying that they should have been more suspicious because everyone called Adriano "Tony." Rosario later claimed that he perpetrated the fraud under pressure from Rafael Mena, a well-known scout in San Pedro. As Astin said, it was often the scout who pushed for a changed age. Then the scout sometimes demanded part of the player's bonus to keep from exposing the fraud. It was not difficult to handle a frightened teenager trying to negotiate a life-changing deal.

False papers were not only lowering ages to make players more valuable but also raising ages to make players eligible. A boy named Adrin Beltre from Santo Domingo worked at the Dodgers' academy, where scout Ralph Avila and others spotted his remarkable speed and strong arm. In 1994 the Dodgers signed him with a $23,000 signing bonus-a good bonus for that time, considering that the Dodgers were not competing for him. In 1999, with Beltre now playing third base for the Dodgers, Major League Baseball-which was investigating illegal signings in the Dominican Republic-discovered that Beltre had been only fifteen years old when he signed. The Dodgers were fined $50,000 and banned from scouting, signing, or running an academy in the Dominican Republic for one year, although they did find loopholes to keep the academy open. Two months later, in February 2000, the Braves were fined $100,000 and banned from the Dominican Republic for six months for having signed shortstop Wilson Betemit when he had not yet turned fifteen. Pitcher Ricardo Aramboles was illegally signed by the Florida Marlins when he was still fourteen years old. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, visas came under closer scrutiny and more than three hundred cases of age fraud were found.

One of San Pedro's ugliest baseball scandals came in 1997, when a scout, Luis Rosa, who worked in San Pedro, was arrested not only for illegally taking cuts from players' bonuses but also for demanding s.e.x from fifteen young prospects at the Giants' San Pedro training camp by Porvenir. The initial complaint was filed by a twenty-year-old right-handed pitcher, Yan Carlos Ravelo, who said, "Luis Rosa took advantage of our poverty and our desperation for an American visa to make us his slaves."

Luis Rosa was not a small-time scout. He had signed Ozzie Guillen, Roberto and Sandy Alomar, Juan Gonzlez, Ivn Rodrguez, and many other Dominican major leaguers. In a country where h.o.m.os.e.xuality was usually an unspoken taboo, this was a messy case written about in The New York Times and other foreign newspapers. While Rosa maintained his innocence, the case was a tremendous embarra.s.sment involving some of the biggest names in Dominican baseball. Rosa had been working for the San Francisco Giants, a pioneering team in introducing Dominican players to Major League Baseball: Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers had starred for the Giants. Juan Marichal had to deal with the case because he was now the Dominican government's secretary of sports and recreation. Joaqun Andjar testified on behalf of the boys.

By 2008 the steroid scandal was full-blown and there seemed little escaping it-not in the Dominican Republic, not even in San Pedro de Macors. What was most awkward for San Pedro and Dominican baseball in general was that one of the leading arguments that Sammy Sosa was a steroid user was the fact that he had been so small when he signed and then he became such a large burly man. This was true of so many Dominican players. Was it really a sign of steroid use?

"Everybody who comes to America to play this game in the minors is always skinny," Sosa argued. "When they get to the major leagues they start eating good and doing things better. If you eat better and work out better you are supposed to gain some weight." He said that he filled out when he got to Texas because he was eating so much better. "What'd he eat," quipped Rick Reilly, "Fort Worth?"

It was a disturbingly familiar story in San Pedro, and became even more embarra.s.sing once it was revealed that Sosa really had built himself up with steroids.

In the Dominican Republic, steroids are sold cheaply and without prescription in most pharmacies. Also, in the Dominican Republic there are many talented young players whose chances of getting into the millionaire club are impeded by the slightness of their builds. Add the fact that most of these youths had an entire family counting on them, and this was a scenario for steroid abuse. In the year 2000, a New York Times reporter went into a dozen pharmacies-some in San Pedro and some in Santo Domingo-and found only two that were not willing to sell some version of testosterone without a prescription. This is not surprising, since there is very little effort to control the sale of pharmaceuticals in the Dominican Republic. In fact, investigations of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball have found that the drugs are often obtained in the Dominican Republic. Major-league players often talk among themselves about how those who go down to the Dominican Republic to play winter ball gain easy access to steroids. In 2009, when New York-born infielder Alex Rodriguez confessed to having used steroids, he said he obtained them from his cousin in the Dominican Republic. In San Pedro the most easily obtainable steroids are ones designed to be used by veterinarians on animals, usually horses.

Major League Baseball responded in 2004 by testing in the academies. That year eleven percent of the signed players in the Dominican academies tested positive. Clearly the practice was widespread. Talks on the serious health risks involved in using these drugs became a standard part of the curriculum in the academies. Also, prospects understood that they would be tested when they went to the academies and that steroid use would be exposed, putting their careers at risk. Test results after 2004 showed the practice steadily declining and leveling off in 2007 and 2008 to slightly more than three percent of signed players testing positive for steroid use.

Macorisanos and Dominicans have reason to worry. The American press eagerly picks up any whiff of such scandals, because in America the idea that there is something less than proper about all these foreign and wild "Latins" getting into baseball has considerable resonance. Foreign is generally not a positive adjective in the United States. In 1987 pitcher Kevin Gross got caught illegally creating an odd movement in his pitch by means of a sticky substance that he hid in his glove. Accused of slipping a foreign substance on the ball, he denied the charge by protesting, "Everything I used on it is from the good old U.S.A."

The fact that more and more players are not from the good old U.S.A. is not popular in America. This author wrote a cover story in Parade magazine in July 2007 about baseball in San Pedro de Macors and the magazine received more than one hundred letters from readers. Most complained that there were too many foreigners, too many Latins, or too many Dominicans in baseball. Baseball, after all, was an American sport and the top players should be American. In the nineteenth century, the great American poet Walt Whitman, definer of things American, called baseball "America's game," said it had "the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere," and even compared it in significance to the Const.i.tution. While Major League Baseball is seeking to internationalize the game, many Americans want to keep it uniquely American.

Much of the criticism comes from African-Americans. It is undeniable that the number of black players has declined precipitously just as the number of Latino players, the majority of whom are Dominican, has risen. After Jackie Robinson, the number of African-American players steadily climbed until 1975, when it reached twenty-five percent: one in four major leaguers. By 2005, black Americans represented only 9.5 percent of major-league players. At the same time, almost one in three major leaguers was foreign born. That number seemed certain to rise. Dominicans alone made up about a quarter of all minor leaguers.

Not only fans but some African-American players have been outspoken about this, most notably the great hitter Gary Sheffield. Sheffield claimed that Major League Baseball was favoring Latin players because they could be acquired more cheaply and were easier to control. "Where I'm from, you can't control us," said Sheffield. "You might get a guy to do it that way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going to go back to being who he is. And that's a person that you're going to talk to with respect, you're going to talk to like a man."

That Latinos are easy to control would come as a revelation to anyone who had worked with George Bell or Joaqun Andjar. But it was true that Dominican ballplayers came to the U.S. with a terror of being released and shipped back to the cane fields. Ironically this was the exact same logic that had made the American sugar companies prefer imported cocolos, thinking that fear of being shipped back would make them easier to control than Dominican laborers. As for getting Latin players more cheaply, even Dominicans, including Sammy Sosa and Manny Alexander, publicly acknowleged-complained-that drafted American rookies got more money than Dominican prospects. That was certainly true of Sosa and Alexander. But top Dominican prospects in the twenty-first century were landing signing bonuses that strongly suggested that baseball's interest in Dominican players was not about getting them cheaply.

A careful study of the evidence suggests that Major League Baseball is looking abroad for talent because it is faced with declining interest in the U.S. When asking what has happened to African-American baseball players, it should not be ignored that nearly eighty percent of players in the National Basketball a.s.sociation are black, as are two-thirds of the players in the National Football League. Major League Baseball has made a considerable effort to attract African-Americans, but without much result. In black neighborhoods around America, baseball programs are closing down because of a lack of partic.i.p.ation.

No one is certain why this is happening. It is sometimes suggested that it is because the route to a high-paying position is considerably faster for an NFL or NBA player than for a professional baseball player. Football and basketball do not have minor leagues. They bring their players up through college programs, and college stars seamlessly move to being high-paid professionals without putting in a few low-paying and humbling years in the minors.

But there is a broader problem. Americans in general are losing interest in baseball. The fans are getting older and older, and young people are dramatically less interested. Hundreds of Little League programs have closed.

Fred Cambria, a former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who has coached major-league and college players and often runs clinics for urban boys wanting to develop baseball skills, said, "I see the Latino player being dominant for the upcoming years. They are great athletes, they work hard from an early age." He was not saying that African-Americans would not work hard but that they were poor people who found more economic incentive in other sports. "There's no scholarships for baseball players in colleges, so they go to the revenue sports-football and basketball," he explained. "You get a small amount of scholarship money and you have to divide it up, and a black kid needs a full ride. So now there are not enough heroes for them to look up to in baseball."

Cambria sees the urban programs struggling. Revitalizing Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) was supposed to develop urban baseball players. "RBI is trying to get African-Americans to play, and it's very very difficult. Inner city programs are closing," he said. But it is not a problem only with African-Americans: Americans in general seem to be losing interest in baseball. Cambria lives in the largely white, middle-cla.s.s Long Island town of Northport, where, he said, "ninety percent of the kids play soccer or lacrosse and the baseball diamonds are empty."

Major League Baseball now has thirty teams and needs 750 active players. They also need more fans and more television contracts in the world to bring in the revenue to pay all of these enormous salaries. Major League Baseball has become a huge international corporation. There is even a division called Major League Baseball International that focuses on expanding baseball in the world.

None of this is good news for Dominicans. When a few innovators such as the Dodgers and Giants and Blue Jays went looking abroad for new talent, the Dominican Republic easily dominated their attention. It still does, but now there are programs to develop players all over the world-not just in Latin America and Asia but in Australia, where the first recorded game was in Melbourne in 1857; in Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa, where it has been played since the 1930s; and even Great Britain, although the British are not being easily lured.

Even within Latin America it is getting more compet.i.tive. Major League Baseball has become particularly interested in Nicaragua, a country that in recent years has edged out the Dominican Republic for the distinction of being the second-poorest nation in the Americas. The una.s.sailably poorest, Haiti, seems too convulsed in its own tragedy for baseball. And inevitably the day will come when the United States government will make peace with Cuba and stop requiring Cubans to desert their country-that is to say, defect-if they want to work in the United States. Once the U.S. allows Cubans to spend their summers playing baseball in the U.S. the way Dominicans and other Latin Americans do, Major League Baseball will be awash with talent from what is probably the richest vein of baseball players in the world.

Even within the Dominican Republic, San Pedro had more compet.i.tion. By 2008 only Santo Domingo, a city three times the size of San Pedro, had produced more major-league players than San Pedro, and only barely: 103 compared with 79. San Pedro had provided one out of every six of the 471 Dominican-born major-league players. But even though the pipeline-the academies and the minor-league system-was full of Macorisanos, San Pedro's share was declining. Increasingly, players were coming from the poorest region of the country, the southwest, where there was not the rich soil of impoverished San Pedro but only an arid desert where people lived in sun-parched wooden huts and struggled for food and water. Major leaguers started coming from Bani, Azua, and even-like shortstop Julio Lugo-from Barahona, one of the poorest towns in this poor country. People in Barahona needed a way out even more desperately than Macorisanos.

Still, it would be hard for a town to break the record of little San Pedro de Macors, where seventy-nine major leaguers originated between 1962 and 2008. San Pedro has given the sport of baseball the most major-league players of any small town in the world. During those same years, New York City, with one of the oldest and strongest traditions in baseball history, produced 129 major-league players-not even twice as many-from twenty-seven times the population. And of course that included many Dom Yors such as Alex Rodriguez.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Fickle Judgment from the Peanut Gallery On the main street of Consuelo, amid stores and other one- and two-story commercial buildings, was one large two-story house bulging and drooling white wrought-iron curlicues from its many door gates, window grates, and balcony rails. On the second story was an elderly woman in a rocking chair watching the street life below. It was eighty-seven-year-old Felicia Franco, the mother of Julio Franco, who chose to take her name rather than his father's. She had three sons. Julio was the only major leaguer. Older brother Vicente Franco was said to be a good pitcher for Consuelo in the 1960s, but he threw out his arm. He lived there with his mother. The third son never played and now lived in New York.

When Julio played in a game that was on television, friends and neighbors used to pack into the roomy house. In 1985, only three years into his long career, Julio built the house for his mother. Her husband, who was dead, could never have built a house like this. He had been a jack-of-all-trades in the mill-what the mills called, borrowing a baseball term, as a utility man.

With the typical disloyalty of a San Pedro fan, she was a die-hard Licey supporter. Her reason was simple: "They're the best. They're going to win again this year," she correctly predicted, even though the Estrellas were in first place at the time.

Although he didn't live there, the house was mostly about Julio. There was a large photo of young Julio in a Texas Rangers uniform with the team's owner at the time, a young and, as always, uncomfortable-looking George W. Bush, who had inscribed the photo to Julio: Let's win together. There was also an even larger photo of Julio with the elder President Bush, looking, as always, somehow in pain. They were posing in front of a washing machine as though they were doing their laundry together-which seemed hard to believe.

Julio Franco had one of the longest careers in major-league history, spanning twenty-five years from April 1982 until September 2007, when he retired at age forty-nine. He maintained an impressive career batting average of .298, getting a hit one out of every three times at bat for twenty-five years. His total of 2,586 hits was the most by any Dominican major-league player. He held a number of gerontological records. He was the oldest regular-position player-an everyday player-in major-league history, pa.s.sing racist Cap Anson's record by three years. He was the last player in baseball born in the 1950s. From 2004 until his retirement, he was the oldest player in baseball and made age records on a regular basis. On April 26, 2006, pinch-hitting for the Mets, he hit a home run against the Padres, making him the oldest major-league player ever to hit a home run. He hit another on September 30 and one more on May 4 of the following year. He was also the oldest player to hit a grand slam-a home run with the bases loaded. He was the oldest player ever to hit two home runs in the same game, and the oldest to steal two bases in the same game. He would have been the oldest player to steal a base except that, in 1909, Arlie Latham, age forty-nine, came out of retirement to play one game with the Giants and stole a base. Franco tried again on June 20, 2007, at age forty-eight while playing for the Mets against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. He got on base, beating forty-four-year-old pitcher Roger Clemens, but was picked off when he tried to steal second on him. Still, it went into the records as the oldest pitcher-batter baserunning duel in major-league history.

After he retired he returned to San Pedro not to live but just to pa.s.s some time playing dominos with old friends and his brother Vicente. He had his own house on a dirt street of new houses in a different part of town from his mother's, although nothing in Consuelo is very far away. Ask anyone in Consuelo, and he would know where Julio Franco's house was. It was a two-story pink stucco-and-stone house behind a high wall with a solid steel gate that was kept locked even on the rare occasions when Franco was there. It was a more luxurious house than most people in Consuelo had; few of the other players maintained houses there. But it was not an ostentatious mansion, because that was not the way people did things in Consuelo, even if they became rich. If you want a mansion, you have to build it somewhere else, as Sammy Sosa and Alfredo Griffin did.

When he was in Consuelo, Franco could be found in the back of the house on a red-tiled patio where a roof with a ceiling fan was held up by Grecian pillars. Julio sat there in a T-shirt and jeans, lean and fit and youthful looking at fifty, a middle-aged face on a twenty-five-year-old's body, relaxed, home at last, playing dominos with two of his best friends, Vicente and Vicente's friend Guillermo.

They slapped the domino tiles on the table hard, making the prerequisite loud clack, and kept score with chalk on the table edge.

"I come back here once or twice a year, sometimes at Christmas," Franco said. "I like to stay in Consuelo. I go to the ballpark here, the gym. I like to stay here, surrounded by people I know." Without warning he slammed a domino tile down, smiled at his brother, and started shouting, "I got him! I got him!" Julio liked to compete. He really liked to win.

No longer a player, his new ambition was to be a manager. He had a family in Fort Lauderdale, and moving back to San Pedro was nowhere in his plans.

"I could have kept playing," Julio observed, "but n.o.body thinks a fifty-year-old can help a ball club. They would rather give a chance to a young prospect. I understand that."

One of the reasons he would not stay in San Pedro was that in his twenty-five years in Major League Baseball he had earned millions of dollars, and everyone in San Pedro knew it.

"What I'm not going to do is give money to a guy on the street. I will give someone money for medicine, I will give money to a mother to buy milk. I'll give a kid a glove and could take him to a ball game, but that's as far as I go."

He said that he was frequently asked for money "by people who call me a friend. My real friends never have to ask me. They know I would help them if they needed it. If you had a million dollars and you gave a dollar to a million people, the million-and-first person would complain. You're not going to satisfy everyone."

Sammy Sosa's experience offers an example of this dilemma. At the height of his career he was being paid $10 million a year to play baseball, and after his home-run derby with Mark McGwire he started earning millions of additional dollars in advertising appearances and celebrity endors.e.m.e.nts. He became an industry besieged with offers. Possibly the weirdest was from the man who wanted Sosa to send him his soiled undershirts after each game to be encased in Lucite and sold as memorabilia. Other ideas included a soft drink and Sammy Sosa Salsa.

In San Pedro, where Sosa's wealth was well known and, no matter how rich you are, you are even richer in the minds of the poor, he was constantly criticized for not giving enough. This was partly because he talked so much, especially to the U.S. press, about how much he was giving. The reason he was questioned about his contribution to hurricane relief in 1999 was that he had made such a show of giving it, and yet people felt they weren't seeing it. Mayor Cedeo claimed that Sosa had raised money in j.a.pan to rebuild one thousand homes destroyed by Hurricane George but the money never turned up in San Pedro. Sosa said that the deal with the j.a.panese fell through over disputes about who would build the homes.