“It was okay for George Bell,” said Julio Franco. “He spoke English and he was in Helena. I was in Butte. There were Latin guys in Helena but not Butte. In 1978, I went to spring training in Sarasota, Florida. There were Spanish-speaking people around. There was a pool and a Ping-Pong table and a pool table. It was really nice. Then they said we were going to Montana. I didn’t even know where Montana was, but I looked out a window and saw snow on the mountains. I didn’t even own a coat! It was freezing cold there.”
In what was becoming something of a cliché for Dominican ballplayers, Franco often resorted to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken because it was easy to order. However, he also bought food and cooked in the dormitory where he was living. There was one Spanish-speaking player who knew English, a Puerto Rican named Carlos Cabassa. He taught Julio to speak English and then things got a little easier. But one of the players went to a local disco one evening, “and the cowboys beat him up and then we weren’t allowed to go there. We learned never to go out at all.”
Sammy Sosa was born in a shack on a well-trimmed unpaved street in Consuelo. The small, crumbling, toffee-colored structure still stands, a different family occupying it, around the corner from F Street where Julio Franco was born in a house about the same size, number 14, which was why Julio always wore that number. Like many homes in the Dominican Republic, these had only occasional electricity and running water that was not drinkable. Sosa’s father drove a tractor, clearing harvested cane fields. It was not as good a job as the ones inside the mill, but it was much better than cutting cane. Sammy’s mother, like George Bell’s, earned money cooking and selling food out of her home.
When Sammy was six, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sammy’s mother tried hard to support her three children. They moved to Santo Domingo and then back to central San Pedro, where Sammy wandered the streets with a shoe-shine box, competing with hundreds of other poor kids in search of customers.
Sosa’s brother Luis was a boyhood baseball fanatic, but not Sammy. His heroes were not Juan Marichal and Rico Carty but Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. Like Alfredo Griffin and many other boys, he had fought a great deal on the streets in Consuelo. When he got to central San Pedro, he discovered a boxing school and started working out on the bags and sparring. His mother convinced him to give it up.
When Sammy was thirteen, an American businessman in whose shoe factory he worked took a liking to him and brought him a gift from the United States: a blue glove that cost a hundred dollars. In his eighteen seasons in the major leagues, Sosa always played with a blue glove. He joined a youth organization team that played in a park named after Rico Carty. With his powerful throwing arm, he could accurately fire the ball to basemen to tag out runners. He hit home runs. Some of the local experts watching these games did not believe he was only fourteen. Sosa had power but no skills, and predictably every hit went to deep right field. But a coach named Héctor Peguero began teaching him how to change his leg position and swing a little early to hit the ball just before it arrived so that it would pop off to left field, a technique known as pulling the ball.
When Sosa was fifteen years old, Acevedo signed him to the Phillies and hid him away in Santo Domingo for training with some forty other prospects, most of them older, some on their way to America. Acevedo brought Sosa’s mother to Santo Domingo to negotiate the signing bonus. According to Sosa’s autobiography, the negotiation process gave her the sickening feeling that she was selling her own son; demoralized, she accepted the first offer, which was $2,500.
Acevedo began training the boys and fattening them up at the university in Santo Domingo. They practiced and worked out from nine a.m. until three or four in the afternoon. “They fed us, washed our clothes,” said Julio Franco about Acevedo’s training program. “We all ate a lot. We were very skinny. Four times a day as much as you wanted. But we were running all day. Then we ate. Then we went to sleep.”
Sosa was in the last group of prospects whom Acevedo signed to the Phillies. Acevedo had a falling-out with the organization and these last players never got their bonuses, nor did the Phillies send for them. They were simply dropped—a bitter disappointment for an impoverished Dominican teenager who had thought his life was about to be changed by Major League Baseball. The Atlanta Braves, Rico Carty’s team, were very interested in San Pedro at the time and signed some of the best of this group. But Sosa was still young, only sixteen, and undeveloped.
Sosa went back to working with his old team and went to every scout and every tryout he could find. It was the 1980s and San Pedro was full of scouts, especially after the previous wave of rookies: Bell; Franco; Samuel; the shortstop Rafael Ramírez from Angelina, whom Pedro González had signed to the Braves; and Pedro Guerrero, the Dodgers’ popular first baseman from Santa Fe. But no one was interested in scrawny Sammy Sosa. Sosa remembers Pedro González taking a look at him and saying that he didn’t sign “undersized players.” González denied this story in his sometimes unmusical Cocolo, saying, “That’s bullshit.” He argued that he would never dismiss a player for being too small, pointing out that he had signed Rafael Furcal, who, at five feet, nine inches, was one of the smallest players in the major leagues.
For two months Sammy played at the training camp Epy Guerrero had set up in the bushes just inland from Santa Domingo. Guerrero had said he liked Sosa; Sammy hoped Epy would sign him. He never did. Sosa spent a year in this desperate limbo while George Bell and Julio Franco were becoming stars. But a new scout in the Dominican Republic, Omar Minaya, was looking for Dominican talent for the Texas Rangers. Minaya offered Sosa a signing bonus of $3,000. Sosa asked for $4,000 and they settled on $3,500. Sosa would be saved. According to Sammy—not always a reliable source—he gave $3,300 to his mother and bought a used bicycle.
The Dominican players all had different temperaments, but they had one thing in common: they were determined to make it, because there was simply no other option. George Bell said, “Being cocky, I always knew I would play in the majors. I knew I could do it. I could see a breaking ball from a fastball. I just knew. I could see it.”
Julio Franco put it another way: “My feeling was I have to make it. It’s all I’ve got. I mean, you leave school and that’s all you’ve got. Of course, that was also true of the many more who didn’t make it.”
PART TWO
DOLLARS
La esperanza es la muerte de la muerte.
La esperanza es la esperanza
de reanudar la juventud del pueblo.
Hope is the death of death
Hope is the hope
to restore people’s youth.
—Pedro Mir, “Concierto de Esperanza para la Mano Izquierda” (“Concert of Hope for the Left Hand”)
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Fourth Incarnation of San Pedro
The oldest and most timeless part of San Pedro, Punta de Pescadores, never had a single reincarnation. Just before the bridge leading to the town along the mangrove coast of the Río Higuamo, slightly upriver from the port on the opposite side, was a little village of pastel one-story houses on unpaved roads by the river’s edge. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, the Cuban fisherman Santiago bravely goes to sea in his small open-deck boat to hand line for billfish as big as his craft. That way of life was still alive in twenty-first-century Punta de Pescadores. This was one of the rare San Pedro neighborhoods that did not produce Major League Baseball players. It produced fishermen.
They fished in deep-welled nineteen-foot open boats, the old ones made of wood, the newer ones of fiberglass. It was essentially a rowboat, but with outboard engines mounted on the back. They had to go a long distance to catch fish—farther all the time as fish became scarcer, because too many were being caught and because of pollution.
Gasoline for the outboards was expensive, and the only viable fishery within rowing distance had been steadily vanishing since the 1990s. From their muddy shore, fishermen rowed a few hundred yards and dragged a net over
the side. They would slap the water with the oars to scare the fish and drive them into the net. These small freshwater fish did not command a high price, but when they were plentiful, a full net—which the fishermen wove together by hand—would quickly pay for the $600 in nylon line used to make it.
This fishery was dying out because it was downstream from Cristóbal Colón and a plant owned by CEMEX, the Mexican cement producer, both of which dumped pollutants in the river. A fisherman named Edwin said of CEMEX, in good New York English, “They kill everything. There is no fish left.” Tony Echavaría, the mayor, recognized the often-cited problem: “CEMEX is a problem because of pollution, but it is very important to the local economy.”
CEMEX provided fourteen thousand jobs. The entire San Pedro sugar sector was now providing only two thousand jobs, and many of those for only half the year. Also, CEMEX brought supplies through the port, one of the few port activities left. They even provided one of the better youth baseball programs developing teenage major-league prospects.
Meanwhile, Edwin complained that although the price of gasoline was rising, the fishermen were forced to go farther every year to find fish. Their engines were small—usually only forty horsepower—but still burned twenty-five gallons in a day of fishing, which meant the first 140 pounds of fish that was caught only paid for the gasoline. Some days they caught less than 140 pounds.
Edwin grew up fishing from Punta de Pescadores but went abroad, becoming a Dom Yor, as Dominicans refer, not altogether kindly, to those who move to New York. He lived in Queens with his father, a former fisherman, until, as he put it, “I did something bad and was sent back.” The reference to “something bad” was not awkward English but a touch of satire that made Dominicans laugh about the patronizing nature of U.S. policy. The U.S. government warned Dominicans with the ultimate threat: if you don’t behave, we will make you go back to your hometown. Drug convictions most often led to deportation, but Edwin did not want to explain or give his last name. However, he came back with investment money and owned five nineteen-foot fishing boats.
Edwin fished the only profitable way left here, by taking his boats sixty miles out into the Caribbean. A line was planted with an anchor in 1,500 fathoms of water at one end and a buoy with a palm tree at the other. The palm, known as the balsa, provided shade, which attracted small fish, which in turn drew larger fish. The fisherman dragged a heavy handheld line with a baited hook through the shaded area and tried to hook a four-foot-long sharp-toothed, sleek, and silvery king mackerel, which Dominicans call a carite. Or the yellow fish with the huge foreheads and tender flesh that are sometimes five feet long and weigh more than fifty pounds, known here as dorado and sometimes in the U.S. as dolphin fish—except by the squeamish and politically correct, who prefer the Hawaiian name, mahimahi. There are also hefty yellowfin tuna, large sharks, and six- and seven-foot-long marlin.
Landing these fish on a small boat in open sea with a hand line takes considerable strength and stamina, and the battles may last ten minutes or longer. Some of these fish are strong enough to haul these boats; some are stronger than the forty-horsepower engine.
It is a culture of the-one-that-got-away stories, which was also the basis for Hemingway’s novel. Edwin and his friend Ramón Fernández, known in Punta de Pescadores as Sanbobi, once hooked what they estimated to be a thousand-pound blue marlin. It was clearly longer than their boat. Sanbobi hooked it on a steel cable and was so jubilant that he could not stop laughing and joking. The more somber Edwin, operating the boat, just said repeatedly, “That’s a lot of money out there.” But Sanbobi had the giant by a steel cable, and so he kept laughing as he struggled to bring it in until finally the marlin did the impossible and snapped the cable, swimming free.
Both Sanbobi and Edwin had for the time being given up on deep-sea fishing because of the cost of gasoline and instead were finding smaller fish closer to shore. But there were no fish in the mangroves, the rooty growth along the banks of the Higuamo where oysters used to grow before the pollution killed them. Sanbobi still believed he was better off than his father, who was a worker for the Cristóbal Colón mill. Of fishing he said, “It’s cash every day,” in contrast to his father’s seasonal employment.
The fishermen went out in the morning. In the afternoon the action switched to the other side of the river in downtown San Pedro, where the fish were taken to market, most of them stored at extremely low temperatures in walk-in freezers—a precarious business in a country known for power outages. The fishermen putt-putted back from sea and up the river with about five fish, four to seven feet long, tying up at a concrete landing with corrugated metal roofs. The fish were gutted and then hefted onto a large basket made of steel concrete-reinforcement rods and hung on a scale. Prices varied depending on the fish. A gruff man playing dominos on the dock explained dryly, “Fish are all different. Women are all the same.” The men all laugh.
Everything—gutted fish, shelled conch, and bags of clawless tropical spiny lobsters and crabs—was immediately dragged into the freezers, their floors covered in bloody ice. Fresh fish is not a commercial concept in the tropics.
The best place to eat fish in San Pedro was the Robby Mar, which started in 1989 on the river next to the fish market. It had a pleasant white tableclothed terrace with a view of the river and its dense, tangled mangroves. Neither stuffy-pretentious nor downscale-ugly, which are the two usual choices, it would have been popular with tourists, but tourists did not turn up very often for a meal in local restaurants because the price of a room in a resort hotel included all meals. The tourism industry did not want tourists straying away from the resorts: something might happen to them, and that would be bad for tourism.
Without tourists, Robby Mar, located near much of the city government, did lunches for government officials, who—baseball players aside—had the best jobs in San Pedro. On some days half of the restaurant was taken over by the town fire department—some twenty men and women in white uniforms with dazzling arrays of metals and battle ribbons on their chests. After a few guavaberries, everyone just had to hope that no fires started during lunchtime.
The restaurant specialized in local seafood with a long menu that included some rare specialties and some very popular San Pedro dishes, such as congrejos al ajillo.
Grind garlic in a food processor with salt and oil. If you have olive oil, it’s much better. Boil crabs, take out meat, cook with a little butter and add garlic sauce. The same recipe can be used with fish.
But this whole world might be ending: the San Pedro of fishermen and waterfront, the original San Pedro before baseball, sugar, and even poets. Sanbobi gave Punta de Pescadores at most twenty more years. “Kids just aren’t becoming fishermen anymore,” he said. It is a trade that has gotten more and more difficult. It was different when the only alternatives were baseball and sugar. But now there were a few choices in between. Or at least it seemed that way.
San Pedro de Macorís entered the twenty-first century in the town’s third reincarnation. Originally it was a rural fishing town, then it turned into a booming sugar center, then it became the wretchedly poor failed sugar town of the Trujillo years, when baseball was the only respite from the mills and the only way out for a lucky few. Then came the fourth reincarnation, in which San Pedro had a slightly more developed economy and baseball was no longer the only alternative to sugar, just the only good one.
Sugar was still there, but it was now secondary to employers such as CEMEX and César Iglesias, an old San Pedro factory making soap, flour, and butter that had eight thousand workers.
The Porvenir mill was off a street in central San Pedro. It used to be in the northern rural area like Consuelo. But the town—which, like the country, tripled in population in a generation—grew around Porvenir just as it may eventually grow past Consuelo. That is what is happening in the Dominican Republic: more and more rural areas are being taken over by the shacks of urban sprawl. Already a grid of dirt roads with modest concrete houses with
corrugated metal roofing had spread north of Porvenir.
The mill itself, Porvenir, “Future,” was a shack, albeit a large one five or six stories high but mostly slapped together with the ubiquitous Caribbean building material, corrugated metal. It was dark inside, but hot white rays of sunlight shot through seams in the metal skin, slashing across the huge dark space at dramatic angles. Workers who stood on top of a two-story-high tank for cane juice could look longingly at a ball field where young signed prospects trained for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The tall, dark shed housed monstrous nineteenth-century cast-iron machinery: two-story-high cogwheels with menacing teeth for cane crushing; wood-burning furnaces for cooking the juice, stacks of chopped trees at the ready; tall cane elevators; and huge conveyor belts.
All this for what was now four months of operation a year. Some of the better jobs lasted six months. Some workers earned 20 pesos an hour to clean machines and others 800 pesos a month to supervise. Some workers had nothing to do at all. Porvenir was controlled by the ruling Dominican Liberation Party, the PLD, and party members in good standing could get paid to do absolutely nothing. And some of those jobs were year-round. Killing time, unlike cane crushing, is not seasonal. And so some workers were at the mill in the dead season, showing up every day, sitting around, sometimes gratefully wearing purple hats, the party color, with a picture of Leonel Fernández on them because they did have reason to say “ Gracias, Presidente.”
The Eastern Stars Page 12