According to official history, the first organized game between Cuban club players was on a ball field in Matanzas that still exists called Palmar del Junco on December 27, 1874. Unlike Abner Doubleday’s game in Cooperstown, it is well documented that this game between a Matanzas team and the Habana Base Ball Club did take place. But it is not clear that it was the first organized game between clubs. Historian Roberto González Echevarría suggests that it may simply have been the first game to have been written about in the press. Historians like the story of Cuban baseball beginning in Matanzas because it was a port where American ships docked, and Cubans, like Dominicans, have always been drawn to the idea of baseball being a contest in which the locals stood up to the Americans.
But the 1874 game at Palmar del Junco was between Cubans. Havana won by the astonishing score of 51 to 9. Hitting skills developed earlier than fielding skills, and early games often had such scores. Emilio Sabourín, one of the revered martyrs of Cuban independence, played left field for Havana that day and hit eight home runs. Sabourín was one of the early promoters of not only Cuban baseball but also Cuban independence. He founded and managed one of the three Havana clubs that played fourteen series between 1878 and 1892. His club won nine of them. But the worst fears of the Spanish were confirmed when it was discovered that the money Sabourín had raised by organizing baseball games was sent to the independence movement. In 1895 he was arrested and baseball was once again banned. Sabourín was shipped to an infamous military prison in Ceuta, on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The left fielder, sometimes called the “father of Cuban baseball,” died there two years later.
In the 1890s, Spain was fading from the three islands and America was taking hold, and so soccer, the once popular Spanish sport, fell out of favor and was replaced by the American sport, baseball.
As in Cuba and the United States, it is not clear where baseball began in the Dominican Republic. Certainly, in the late 1870s baseball-loving Cuban independentistas and American baseball enthusiasts met to develop a sugar industry in San Pedro de Macorís. In San Pedro it is said that the first Dominican game was played there in 1886. But many historians and people in Santo Domingo refute this. Sugar makers were not the only Cubans to come to the Dominican Republic, and San Pedro was not their only destination. At the same time that sugar makers were building San Pedro, Ignacio Aloma and his brother Ubaldo came to Santo Domingo. They were ironworkers who built balconies and grillwork. In 1891 they formed two baseball clubs with Cuban and American players and even a few Dominicans. The two teams were known to Dominican fans by their colors, the Rojos and the Azules. Another Cuban started two teams in La Vega, in the north near the Cibao, and they were also known as the Reds and the Blues. In Cuba there were also red and blue teams, but the labels were particularly meaningful in the Dominican Republic, where politics for many decades had revolved around the Red and Blue parties.
In the 1880s, when the big new ingenios were being put into operation in San Pedro, experienced baseball players were not easily found. The normal way to establish a baseball club in both the U.S. and in Cuba was to find athletic young men and teach them the game. And it occurred to the Americans, the Cubans, and the Puerto Ricans that in their mills they had the potential for ball clubs. They began teaching the game to sugar workers. Each mill could have its own club and they could play each other. Soon they would have an eight-club league just in the San Pedro sugar industry.
In Santo Domingo, baseball was a game for the wealthy elite. As in Havana, upper-class Dominicans sent their sons to schools in the U.S. and they came back playing baseball. This was very different from the sugar-mill sport of San Pedro.
A few years after the games began in 1886, the ingenios started importing Eastern Caribbean cocolos. The cocolos kept not only their own language—English with a West Indian lilt—but their own culture. They drank dark, strong, smooth rum that was steeped in the small fruit of the tropical plant guavaberry, known to science as Myrciaria floribunda. They made soup with the broad-leaved callaloo and served meat or fish with little hard-boiled flour dumplings or a cornmeal mush called fungi. They danced to their own music with their own drums, and on their holidays dressed up with costumes and masks to perform ritual dances of David and Goliath or Wild Indians.
They also had their own sports, and the most popular of these was cricket. Historians argue about the role of cricket in developing baseball in the United States, but there can be no argument about the important role of cricket in developing baseball in San Pedro. The sugar companies simply had to give the cocolos round bats and a new set of rules. They already knew the concepts of hitting, catching, baserunning, pitching, making outs, and scoring runs.
Cricket and then baseball were diversions in very hard lives. In a land once called Mosquito, malaria was rampant. So was leprosy, the disease that killed the poet Gastón Deligne. With the bad water supply of the bateys, dysentery was a frequent problem. The diet of most of the workers did not include sufficient nutrition for the twelve-hour shifts during the zafra. Serious injuries from the machinery in the mills or machetes in the field were frequent. If an injury such as loss of a limb meant that the laborer was no longer eligible for work, he received no compensation.
Coming from a different world and with a limited but better education, cocolos knew about things that Dominicans had never heard of, such as labor struggles and black people organizing. Marcus Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887 and a forerunner of the Black Power movement, was organizing black people all over the English-speaking world, and he did not forget about the cocolos of San Pedro de Macorís. In 1919, Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association sent an organizer. Within months they had their own building in San Pedro, and within a year San Pedro was the center of an important Dominican chapter of the Garvey movement with more than a thousand members. Garvey promoted the idea of black people reuniting in Africa, and many of the cocolos talked about how they would soon be leaving the sugar mills and going to the continent of their ancestors. During the 1921 zafra, cocolos went on a strike that was quickly crushed.
The cocolos were a well-organized society, and one of the keys to that organization was a network of cricket clubs. They made their own white uniforms. But the mills were more interested in baseball. They sometimes even paid cricket players for baseball. No one paid for cricket. By the 1920s baseball had largely replaced cricket, and many of the fields where they had played it became baseball diamonds.
During the zafra, sugar workers only worked and slept, but the other six months of the year, the dead season, they had time for baseball. This free time corresponded more with the American summer baseball schedule than the winter schedule that became traditional in the rest of the Dominican Republic and the other Caribbean islands. The mills would each sponsor a team with uniforms and equipment and they would play regionales against the other mill teams. Some mills, especially Consuelo, would have so many gifted players that the team couldn’t use them all and would send a few to other mills. Several, such as Alfredo “Chico” Contón, went to play in Cuba or Puerto Rico or even the Dominican Winter League, once it started. But none of these tremendously talented players was going to the major leagues because the leagues did not hire black players.
The sugar-mill players of San Pedro were even separate from La Vega and Santo Domingo players as well as Cubans and Puerto Ricans, because all those other Caribbeans played in the winter during the zafra. But the San Pedro teams had the advantage of constant U.S. contact, since the sugar companies were always bringing in new Americans. In the years since the game had been introduced to the Caribbean, both the rules and the equipment had been rapidly changing. In 1873 it was ruled that catching a fly ball in a hat, a common practice until then, would award the hitter a single and the ball could not be put back into play. In the 1880s the number of balls for a walk gradually was reduced from nine to four, and the number of strikes to an out was changed from four to three. In the 1890s the distance between
the pitching mound and home plate was increased from fifty feet to sixty feet. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the first two foul balls started being counted as strikes, greatly reducing the number of pitches in an at-bat. Every decade the game was considerably different, and Dominican players needed contact with the U.S. in order to keep playing current American baseball.
Communities at the mills, especially the cocolos, were knit extremely tightly, and within their world these games were closely followed and considered important. They were, after all, the closest thing these people had to a leisure activity. Baseball took on great meaning for the players and the fans, and the quality of their Cuban and American instruction from the cadre of the sugar companies was thought to be excellent. During the early decades when baseball was spreading in the Dominican Republic, the baseball played in the mills in San Pedro is remembered as the best Dominican baseball of the time. There is no way to verify this, and baseball has a way of fostering uncertain myths, but this was the beginning of the legend of San Pedro baseball. To baseball fans who ask, “Why San Pedro de Macorís?” the answer is not the water but the sugar.
CHAPTER FOUR
Who’s on First
While San Pedro was hosting regular hard-fought contests between the mills, Santo Domingo was developing their own league. For fifteen years there were two teams, red and blue: Ozama Club, named after the river on whose western bank the city was first built; and Nuevo Club. There were other teams, but these were the two with uniforms and an official schedule. They got their baseball knowledge from Dominicans who had spent time in the U.S.
Lulu Pérez, who led Nuevo Club, learned the new curveball from the Americans and taught it to his ace pitcher. A curveball is a difficult pitch to master. It is accomplished by pressing the middle finger against the seam of the baseball and snapping the wrist as the ball is released. This sends the ball spinning so that it seemingly goes straight but at the last moment veers off course. A good curveball appears to be going right at the batter and, just as he ducks or prepares to step back, drops into the strike zone and a strike is called. What makes it even more difficult is that a good curveball drops from head level to the strike zone or from the strike zone to below the knees, just before reaching the plate. Very few batters can hit a good curveball. But it is a dangerous pitch to throw. If it doesn’t have enough motion, it will either be a ball or fly predictably through the strike zone—a very easy pitch to hit because it is not a fast pitch.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were still only a few good curveballs, which of course meant that batters had little experience against the pitch that was invented in the 1870s by Candy Cummings. Even today it is rare to find a good curveball from a young Dominican pitcher who has not played in the U.S. In fact, good curveballs are fairly rare in general. But in the early years of the twentieth century, Lulu Pérez taught Nuevo Club ace Enrique Hernández how to throw one, and he did it so well that no one in Santo Domingo could hit it. Because Hernández claimed to have some Taino blood, fans started calling him Indio Bravo. At a time of undeveloped outfield defense, it was pitching that kept the score from going into double digits. When Indio Bravo pitched, Nuevo Club was undefeatable.
In 1906 a group of young Santo Domingo players met in a house in the old part of Santo Domingo, the Colonial Zone, once ruled by Columbus and today favored by tourists. Their subject was how to beat Indio Bravo. They built a baseball club designed to take on the Nuevo Club and they called it Club Licey, after another river, this one in the Cibao. At first uniformed in gray, they soon switched to white with blue stripes and ever after they were nicknamed the Azules. Licey fans still celebrate the November anniversary, but more than the founding of the Licey team it was the beginning of the modern Dominican Winter Baseball League that has become the centerpiece of Dominican baseball.
Originally it was a Santo Domingo competition in which the other baseball regions, the north and San Pedro, were not involved. But Licey began traveling outside the capital to find other competition. To play in the north, the entire team would have to travel long hours on dirt roads and even organize mule trains through mountain trails. On the other hand, San Pedro de Macorís had its long-standing commercial advantage: it was only a short ship’s crossing from Santo Domingo. In 1911, Macorisanos put together a team with local Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, and cocolos to face Licey. In the first encounter in 1911, pitching dominated with twenty-one strikeouts. But the baserunning kept it lively with twenty-two stolen bases. To the shock and disappointment of Macorisanos, Licey won.
But back in the capital, Licey was unable to match Nuevo Club, which won the first championship in 1912. Indio Bravo was impossible to get a hit off of, even after an unbalanced Licey fan tried to slow him down by stabbing him in his throwing arm.
The U.S. invasion and occupation of the Dominican Republic, like most military occupations, was deeply unpopular. In San Pedro an angry Dominican opened fire on U.S. Marine officers and killed one as the troops were arriving at the port. After the U.S. invasion the interest in baseball increased, not because of a love of things American, but from a strong desire to beat the Americans at their own game. And the Americans provided knowledgeable and equipped opponents. The Americans, who showed little respect for things Dominican, were impressed with the baseball players. One Dominican pitcher, Felito Guerra, was so respected, he was offered a contract to pitch in the U.S. He would have been the first Dominican major leaguer but instead became a national hero when he refused to go, to protest the occupation.
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama had all been occupied by the U.S., and because of that exposure all three became better baseball-playing countries. Now the Dominican Republic followed the same pattern. After the Dominican invasion, the U.S. occupied Nicaragua and their game greatly improved also. It seemed that baseball was the one thing a small Latin American nation could gain from a U.S. invasion.
Licey built up their team with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Americans. Their star pitcher was a Cuban called El Diamante Negro. But Nuevo Club was still holding its own because they had Indio Bravo, who was still accomplishing Homeric feats. After the U.S. occupation, Nuevo Club took on the U.S. Navy cruiser Washington and Indio Bravo struck out twenty-one Navy batters. But he got into a dispute with his ball club and went over to Licey, making them undefeatable. The demoralized Nuevo Club disintegrated.
The Licey Tigers had become the dominant club. By 1921 northern baseball had shifted from La Vega to the capital of the Cibao, Santiago de los Cabelleros. It took the Licey team five days to get there and two days to rest. They then won all eight games against Santiago.
But this same year a new Santo Domingo team, Escogido, was formed for the purpose of taking on Licey. They made their color red because Licey was blue. Because Licey had stripes on their uniform they called themselves Los Tigres, the Tigers, so Escogido became the Lions. In 1928, Santiago named its team Sandino after Augusto César Sandino. The year before, three years after leaving the Dominican Republic, the U.S. invaded and occupied Nicaragua and Sandino became a folk hero throughout Latin America for his armed resistence to U.S. occupation. But once Trujillo—a product of U.S. military anti-insurgency efforts—came to power, the name Sandino was no longer allowed and, conforming to the Santo Domingo teams, the Santiago team became the Águilas, the Eagles, and then the Águilas Cibaeñas, the Cibao Eagles. Only San Pedro de Macorís did not have an animal. True to their tradition as the city of poets, they called their team Las Estrellas del Oriente, the Stars of the East. But they needed an animal, too, to give fans an image to use in the spectacle that erupts in Dominican stadiums. And so they declared their mascot to be an elephant so that fans could trumpet like elephants when the Estrellas scored a home run. Noise is important in Dominican culture.
These four teams—the Tigres del Licey, the Leones del Escogido, the Águilas Cibaeñas, and the Estrellas Orientales—from these three towns became the core of Dominican professional baseball
. They played long seasons against one another, with grueling final contests for the Dominican championship.
The games in Santo Domingo, Santiago, and San Pedro drew huge crowds and were avidly covered by sportswriters, who always used pseudonyms to protect themselves from the ire of fans. For a few years it was an amateur passion, what is known by Dominicans as baseball’s romantic era. But the clubs could make so much money at these packed stadiums that inevitably the romance was soon overtaken by commerce, and baseball became a professional sport. Players sought the highest salary in a circuit that included not only the four Dominican teams but the teams of Cuba and Puerto Rico and a few other Latin American countries as well as the Negro League in the United States. And players from these foreign teams, especially the Negro League, the Cuban League, and the Puerto Rican League, also came to the Dominican Republic to play.
The most famous player of the Dominican League was Juan Esteban Vargas, known as Tetelo Vargas. Born in Santo Domingo in 1906, he was a phenomenally fast runner nicknamed “the Dominican Deer.” He broke a world record rounding a baseball diamond in 13:25 seconds. There is an unconfirmed rumor that he once beat Olympic track star Jesse Owens in a sprint. Vargas played all three outfield positions, shortstop, and second base, and was a great hitter with a strong throwing arm. He played for Escogido, for the Negro League in New York, for Puerto Rico, for Mexico, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for Colombia, for Canada, and finally, past the age of retirement, for the Estrellas in San Pedro. This was the world of Dominican ballplayers. Vargas was never allowed in the major leagues because he was black, but in Puerto Rico in the 1940s he played in a tournament against the Yankees during their spring training and batted .500, getting seven hits in fourteen at-bats. In 1953, playing for the Estrellas at the age of forty-seven, he was the Dominican League batting champion with an average of .353.
The Eastern Stars Page 6