With professional careers like Tetelo Vargas’s the cane workers of San Pedro had even more motivation to play their sugar-mill games hard and well and maybe someday leave the mill for Estrellas or the other teams or even the Negro League.
Trujillo was not a baseball fan, but that did not mean he wasn’t interested in controlling it. His son Ramfis and other family members and many of his generals liked the game. Besides, his concept of governance was to own everything, so that the profits went to himself and the rest he could distribute as he pleased to those who said, “Gracias, Presidente.”
When sugar prices started to rise in the late 1940s, he took over mills to get the profits. By the mid-1950s he controlled two-thirds of the sugar production in the country, mainly for his personal profit. Among his assets were the San Pedro mills of Porvenir, Quisqueya, Santa Fe, and Consuelo.
But even before taking over sugar, when he first came to power and sugar did not look profitable, Trujillo took over baseball. It was at this time that some of the best players came to the Dominican Republic. Top players of the Negro League came to the Dominican capital—in fact, some of the best players in the world, including Josh Gibson, who came with a Venezuelan team in 1933. Gibson, one of the best catchers and hitters of all time, was called the black Babe Ruth, and some said he was a better hitter than Ruth. He had the best lifetime batting average in the history of the Negro League, possibly as high as .384. Batting averages show how difficult it is to get a hit in professional baseball. A batter who got a hit every time he went to bat would have a 1.000 batting average. In reality, any professional who can get a hit once out of every three times at bat—an average of .333—is considered an excellent hitter. Anyone who hits over .300 is considered formidable. Gibson had a .467 batting average for 1933, a hit almost every other time at bat.
The Santo Domingo teams, bankrolled by the dictator, started bringing in foreign talent such as Cuban pitcher Luis Tiant, Sr., the left-handed father of the right-handed pitcher of the same name. Fewer and fewer positions were left for Dominicans unless they were remarkable players such as Tetelo Vargas. Dominican teams recruited whoever they could get to win.
Until then, the San Pedro team had not won a championship. Unlike the Santo Domingo teams, who usually won, San Pedro did not draw foreign stars. They were not even drawing a great deal on the tremendous talent at their sugar mills, because they played during the zafra. The home team was mostly made up of upper-class gentlemen players, some of them doctors—something else San Pedro was known for—and they generally lost. San Pedro wanted to compete too. Instead of playing on the local team, a group of prominent Macorisanos, centered around a judge originally from Santo Domingo, Federico Nina Santana, decided to organize, with the judge financing it. He spent money buying top players and was willing to lose money to see San Pedro win. This is when the team was given its name, Estrellas del Oriente, and later Estrellas Orientales, Eastern Stars. Before, it had been El Macorís. The Eastern Stars were mostly from Cuba. They took on the Cubans and Puerto Ricans of Licey and Escogido and beat them both, winning the 1936 championship.
By 1936, Licey and Escogido were used to bringing the championship to the capital, with an occasional strong showing from Santiago. Losing to San Pedro came as a shock. And the Estrellas in San Pedro kept buying even more talent, giving them every hope of winning the championship again in 1937. Although Trujillo did not care about baseball, he did not like seeing the city that now bore his name lose. The general had no feelings for Licey or Escogido, both of whom lost their stadiums in Hurricane San Zenón. But Trujillo felt that Trujillo City should have a baseball team, and that team had better win.
Trujillo’s brother José was a baseball fanatic—an emotionally unstable one who once lost his temper in a game and hit an American player. José and his sister had been the money behind Licey. Dr. José E. Aybar, a dentist, who had run Licey since 1929, had an endless source of money from the Trujillos to conduct a bidding war with Escogido over Cuba’s greatest talent. Now the dictator decided that there would be only one team in his city, that they would buy the greatest players on the market, and that they would beat San Pedro de Macorís for the championship. Dr. Aybar was put in charge of the Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo.
Aybar then went to New Orleans, reportedly with suitcases full of money, and bought the best talent of the Negro League, including Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, the high-kicking right-handed pitcher who threw breaking balls that were so unique, he gave them his own names, such as the bat dodger, the jump ball, and the two-hump blooper. Some baseball writers claim he was the greatest pitcher of all time. Aybar also got “Cool Papa” Bell, a small, wiry center fielder said by some—Tetelo Vargas fans may disagree—to be the fastest runner in the history of baseball. According to legend, he once scored from first base on a sacrifice bunt, a dribble off the plate designed to move the runner to second. But Dr. Aybar had Trujillo’s money behind him. Reportedly, Paige was handed $30,000 in cash, an enormous amount of money at the height of the Depression, to divide as he saw fit between himself and eight other players. Top players in the Negro League, which was supposed to be high-paying baseball, were earning less than a thousand dollars for an eight-week contract.
Word was spreading in the Negro League that the Dominican League paid better than their clubs. Nina also went shopping for players in the U.S. and brought four back to San Pedro. They arrived at the port by seaplane. Waiting for them was General Federico Fiallo, Trujillo’s military commander and a former pitcher for Licey in its 1906 opening season. Fiallo took the four players to Ciudad Trujillo to play for Trujillo’s team, and Nina had to return to the U.S. to find more recruits.
Throughout the thirty-six-game season, all three teams went on a spending spree to bring in more and more stars. The 1937 season is remembered as the best baseball ever seen in the Dominican Republic, some of the best in baseball history—an epic battle played out with some of the all-time greatest players. Determined to beat San Pedro, Ciudad Trujillo, with its Americans and Cubans and one Puerto Rican, ended up with only one Dominican player on its roster. For the American players it was a novel experience. When Ciudad Trujillo lost, the military would angrily fire weapons in the air. The police would arrest Negro League players and keep them in jail the night before a game to prevent them from going out on the town. Paige later wrote, “I started wishing I was home when all those soldiers started following us around everywhere we went and even stood out in front of our rooms at night.” During one game against San Pedro, the manager told them menacingly, “Take my advice and win.” By the seventh inning they were behind by one run. “You could see Trujillo lining up his army,” Paige said later. “They began to look like a firing squad.” Ciudad Trujillo scored two runs that inning to take a one-run lead and then Paige pitched two scoreless innings.
As sometimes happens today in the major leagues, Ciudad Trujillo spent the most money and they won. The capital erupted with loud merengue and dancing in the streets. More than elation over the victory, the players felt relief, because no one could be sure what the murderous and mentally unstable Trujillos might do if they lost. Paige said, “I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry.”
But it all cost too much money. The plan was to switch to winter baseball so they could raid U.S. teams in the off-season without upsetting American managers. Trujillo did not like to upset the Americans. But San Pedro had no money to bring back the American and Cuban stars, and without the threat from San Pedro, Trujillo wasn’t going to pay for a big-roster Ciudad Trujillo team. No one had any money left, and for more than ten years the league didn’t play professional ball at all. The best Dominican players went abroad. It was amateur ball that kept Dominican baseball alive. And it was widely recognized that the best amateur baseball in the country was in the cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. Even Santo Domingo’s leading baseball historian, Cuqui Córdova, acknowledged that in the 1940s most of the best Dominican
players were poor sugar workers playing mill games in San Pedro.
After the zafra was over, some of the cane cutters had work weeding and hoeing the fields. But when Trujillo bought up the refineries, he eliminated this type of work and used chemicals to kill weeds. Then times were even harder in the San Pedro fields. But they could grow their food in gardens and they could keep themselves together by playing baseball.
In 1951 the Dominican League was reorganized as professional baseball again. Tetelo Vargas, now in his mid-forties, settled in San Pedro to play for the Estrellas; with his bat, it was a contending team. But that first year Licey beat Escogido for the title. The next year Águilas beat Licey and then in 1953 Licey beat Águilas, establishing a competition between those two teams that has dominated the league. The following year Estrellas won, beating Licey. By then baseball was integrated and there was no more Negro League. Dominican teams started hiring major-league players to play winter baseball. The Estrellas got Roger Maris, but they were not very impressed with him. Although Maris was a famously serious and hardworking player in the major leagues, Macorisanos complained that he did not play hard the way they did in San Pedro. That summer he went back to the Yankees and beat Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run season record.
Between 1951 and 2008, in the fifty-four championships—with time off for coups and invasions—thirty-nine have been won by either Licey or Águilas, with Águilas having one more championship than its competitor and the Eastern Stars winning only twice, in 1954 and 1968. They became a heartbreaking club, much like the twentieth-century Red Sox, with a history of collapsing just before victory. Twelve times they made it into the final series but lost.
In 1959, the Estrellas Orientales got a new home, a stadium on the edge of town by the rural road that led to the sugar fields. It was named for Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s murderous, baseball-loving son. There was originally some question of the paternity of Ramfis, whose real name was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez. Ramfis’s mother, María Martínez, had had him while she was married to a Cuban who insisted that he was not the father of the baby. María left him and became Trujillo’s third wife. From an early age a family resemblance became apparent, as young Ramfis—Trujillo gave him the nickname from a character in the Verdi opera Aïda—delighted in obliterating farm animals with a large-caliber pistol. Trujillo had proudly named Ramfis a colonel at the age of four. A lover of baseball and polo, he was also given to inflicting particularly barbaric forms of torture on people he believed to be his enemies.
It was a double insult for San Pedro to have its stadium named after this killer, both because of his brutality and because Ramfis had always been an outspoken fan of Escogido. After his father was assassinated, San Pedro changed the name of the stadium to Estadio Tetelo Vargas. But the masters of the republic continued to stake their claim to San Pedro’s baseball stadium. At the entrance is a plaque to Joaquín Balaguer for renovations in 1993, and next to it one to President Leonel Fernández for renovations in 1999. One of the trappings of president was to get your name on the Tetelo Vargas Stadium.
CHAPTER FIVE
The First Opening
It was not the home team but Major League Baseball in the U.S. that made the world realize that this little sugar town produced great ballplayers. Three things happened in the mid-twentieth century that opened the major leagues to San Pedro de Macorís.
The first thing that happened was an end to the so-called color line in Major League Baseball, the segregation that had created the Negro League. Originally baseball was integrated, but a movement grew to exclude African-Americans. It was led by Cap Anson in the 1880s. Anson was one of the greatest players of his day, with a twenty-seven-year career—mostly for the Chicago White Stockings, who later became the Cubs—during which he became the first player with three thousand hits. He was so influential in baseball that his racism infected the entire game. On numerous occasions Anson refused to play because there were black players either on his team or the opposing one. Famously, in 1883 he objected to playing with the catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker, a well-educated son of a doctor and considered the first African-American major leaguer. Other players followed Anson. There was never a stated rule barring black players, but increasingly in the late nineteenth century they were not allowed to play. Some called it a “gentlemen’s agreement.” After the 1898 season, blacks were not even allowed in the minor leagues. Being the instigator of this injustice did not stop the National Hall of Fame from inducting Anson in 1939, one of the first nineteenth-century Hall of Famers.
Occasionally lighter-skinned players passed by claiming to be Latin or Indian, but they would be discovered and forced out. In 1916, Jimmy Claxton played two games for the Oakland Oaks as an American Indian. When it was revealed that he had some African blood, he was fired. The somewhat darker skin of such players as Alex Carrasquel from Venezuela, Hiram Bithorn from Puerto Rico, and several Cubans did not pass without comments from press and fans, but they did manage to play in major-league games, though never for long or illustrious careers. Some signed forms certifying the Spanishness of their background. In the 1920s, two Cubans, outfielder Jacinto “Jack” Calvo and pitcher José Acosta, pulled off the feat of playing for both major-league teams and Negro League teams.
For two decades there was no permanent organization for African-American professional baseball until 1920, when Rube Foster, a black former pitcher—not to be confused with the white Red Sox pitcher of the same name—founded the Negro National League. The Negro League was a separate major-league-quality baseball system. In addition to their U.S. season they played in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Venezuela. African-American players became part of the Latino world.
In 1920, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed the first commissioner of baseball. Theodore Roosevelt had appointed him judge to the Northern District of Illinois, where he distinguished himself by his trials against unionists, leftists, opponents of World War I, and black people. Many of his rulings were overturned on appeal. He was the judge who managed to get the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, banned from the sport; backed by bigoted white players and club owners, he managed to maintain segregation in baseball.
But race relations were changing in the 1940s. The military was becoming integrated, there was a nascent civil rights movement, and there was a wealth of talent in the Negro League—some of the best players in baseball, waiting for the team with the courage to tap them. Landis died in 1944, and the new commissioner, Happy Chandler, a Kentucky politician nicknamed for his comportment, was willing to allow integration. In 1945, Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager, held tryouts for black players. He said he was thinking of forming a black Brooklyn team. That same year he signed Jackie Robinson, an all-around athlete and talented infielder, sending him to the minor leagues with the stated intention of bringing him up to the Dodgers.
Rumors had been floating around for some time about giving Negro League players tryouts in the majors. It was widely thought that Satchel Paige would be given one of the first tryouts. Paige had grumbled about the idea of a tryout, but he was bitter for years that he did not get to be first. However, he probably would not have agreed to starting in the minor leagues because he was considered one of the best pitchers of his day.
There is some evidence that Rickey was considering a Cuban for the first black. A Latino might have seemed more acceptable to fans because, oddly, Americans were more willing to accept blacks if they were foreign. He was looking at Silvio García, a famous Cuban infielder who was also famous for his alcoholism and for his menacing statements about what he might do to white people who dared to bother him.
Robinson, though talented, was a rookie and not the best the Negro League had to offer. But he was good and he had something else Rickey was looking for. When he signed Robinson, Rickey told him that he wanted him to accept abuse stoically. That was something Paige or García would never have done. Paige was famous fo
r his tantrums and antics on the mound. Robinson withstood verbal abuse and death threats with a calm façade few other players could have mustered—not because of a stoic or passive nature but because of a strong and disciplined character.
Robinson fascinated the press and the public. In 1947 he became the first Rookie of the Year, making it a coveted award forever after. Eleven weeks after Robinson signed with Brooklyn, Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians signed a Negro League outfielder named Larry Doby. Several years earlier Veeck had tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and sign numerous top black players, but after he told Landis of his intention, the club was suddenly sold to another bidder. Doby, who endured all that Robinson did, has been largely ignored by history because he was the second and not the first. This was why Satchel Paige had so wanted to be first. Doby was the first black player to hit a home run in a World Series, in 1948, which helped Cleveland win that Series. Satchel Paige was also signed, and helped the Indians win. Robinson was instrumental in helping Brooklyn win a World Series, but not until his final season, 1956, long after he became a legend.
The third black player was Hank Thompson, signed by the St. Louis Browns twelve days after Doby. The fourth, Willard Brown, played his first game for the Browns two days after Thompson. Thompson then went to the Giants in 1951, joining Monte Irvin and Willie Mays in the first all-black outfield.
Major-league teams were acquiring tremendous talent from the Negro League and winning pennants and World Series with them. But there was still enormous resistance from owners, players, and fans. The minor-league Class AA Southern Association refused to hire black players and was eventually the target of a civil rights movement boycott. The organization finally died in 1961 but maintained segregation to the last. Tom Yawkey, owner of the Boston Red Sox—today a favorite team of many Dominican fans—refused to hire black players. He turned down both Jackie Robinson, who tried out in Fenway Park, and Willie Mays. By the 1960s, while integrated teams were prospering, the Red Sox stubbornly remained at the bottom with their all-white team.
The Eastern Stars Page 7