The facility was owned by the Universidad Central del Este in San Pedro. The Angels had been using it on and off since 1992 but full-time since 1998. This was an older, more threadbare facility than Baseball Towers, with a smaller dining room, one big room for bunk beds, worn tile floors, and no landscaping around the diamond—just a very serious baseball program. Rough-hewn and without the corporate feel of the Braves’ academy, it had red paint peeling from the shutters, and no air-conditioning. But it was clean—again with an almost military sense of orderliness.
Major League Baseball, which regulates academy conditions, did not require frills like air-conditioning. Aaron Rodríguez, who inspected the academies for Major League Baseball, said he mainly made sure there were no dangerous conditions, such as holes in the outfields, and that the kitchens were clean and provided nutritious food.
The Angels had six scouts around the Dominican Republic. When they found someone they wanted to sign, they called Charlie Romero, a lean, fit black man from La Romana who was the Angels’ program coordinator at the academy in San Pedro. Romero then traveled to where the prospect played and had a look before the player was signed. He usually signed between fifteen and twenty Dominicans in a year.
At the Angels’ academy, baseball began at eight in the morning with organized ball games. Then they spent the afternoon working on fundamentals, such as fielding ground balls and baserunning. They were served three meals a day and two snacks. It was mostly Dominican food—rice, beans, chicken—but it was considered part of their education to slowly introduce a few American foods, such as hamburgers for lunch and pancakes for breakfast. Romero said, “Most of our kids go to the States, and when they come back—wow—they put on twenty pounds. It’s the training and the nutrition.”
English was taught five days a week at the Angels’ academy, and twice a week the boys had to play entire games during which everything on the field had to be said in English. “We have to teach them English, and how to open a bank account, and baseball fundamentals,” said Romero.
Some were quickly sent up to U.S. farm teams. Others were patiently developed there in the cane field, sometimes for four years.
“Some kids—as soon as you put them in the field you can spot them—haven’t played twenty games in their life,” said Julio García, Latin American field coordinator for the Cubs. He blamed this on buscones. “They find a kid with a good body and say, ‘Do you want to be a Major League Baseball player?’ They teach them throwing and hitting fundamentals and get them a tryout and take between twenty-five and thirty percent of the signing bonus. My job gets harder because they don’t have playing experience.”
This was the main point of the academy system: to give them experience playing games. But also they worked on developing specific skills, especially with pitchers. The Braves organization was the first to emphasize pitching, but now most of the franchises do. José Serra of the Cubs said, “Baseball is about pitching. The Braves decided that a long time ago.” But the young pitchers at the Cubs’ academy are seldom allowed to throw more than fifty pitches.
A young pitcher is easily destroyed, so they are not encouraged to do a lot of breaking balls, which can damage a young arm. José Martínez of the Braves said, “Most of the time, pitchers are asked to throw only fastballs. It builds up strength and doesn’t strain ligaments like other pitches.”
A third or more of the players signed by the Cubs are pitchers. Julio García, a big cigar-smoking Cuban of charm and insight—as long as he was kept off the subject of Cuban politics—said, “We sign pitchers because the arms down here are incredible. My boss came down and told me after watching training that it would take months to see that many arms in the States.”
They have them throw mostly fastballs and changeups. A changeup is a hard pitch to master. It looks like a fastball but the speed is reduced. If the delivery is slow, the batter will see that it’s a slow pitch and hit it far. The motion and speed of the arm must be identical to those when the pitcher throws a fastball. A fastball is held across the seams with a space between the ball and the palm, which causes the wrist to whip it faster on release. A changeup is the same throw but with the ball snug against the hand, which causes no wrist action on release and a backspin on the ball that slows it down. It used to be called a palm ball. If an academy can take a young pitcher with a hard fastball and teach him a truly deceptive changeup, he can be a dangerous pitcher. But it is not entirely enough. Garcia said, “We let them throw occasional breaking balls. They are hard on the arm, but it’s a fine line, because you have to throw breaking balls to develop them.”
Along the road to Consuelo was a compound with a guarded gate. Inside was one of the better-appointed academies. Started in 1991, San Pedro had the only Japanese camp in the Dominican Republic, the Hiroshima Carp Baseball Academy.
There were some clear disadvantages for a young Dominican in signing with a Japanese club. Asked what the Japanese signing bonuses were like, Yasushi Kake, assistant general manager, a husky, gray-haired Japanese man, said, “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” Then he mischievously put his hand over his mouth and pretended to whisper, “Muy barato”—Very cheap—and he laughed.
There were some advantages to the Japanese system, money not being one of them. A top Japanese salary is $200,000—minuscule by the standards of the major leagues, but better than the American minor leagues—and when a player signed with a Japanese team, his chances of making it to the top were much better. There was only one level of minor-league ball between a signing and the major-league teams. And the Japanese released very few players once they were signed.
But there were tight controls on letting foreigners in. Each team was allowed only six foreigners, and there were only twelve teams. Typically, there were about twenty-five foreigners playing in Japanese baseball. It could be a route to American Major League Baseball. Alfonso Soriano at age seventeen, with no good offers from the Americans, signed with the Hiroshima Carp and played well. He might not have gotten to the major leagues had it not been for Gordon Blakely, a Yankees vice president, who learned that the pitcher Francisco Delacruz was going to be available from the Japanese. He went there to see him play but also noticed the Dominican shortstop.
This might have been a tantalizing story for other young Macorisanos thinking about the Japanese academy, except for the fact that, once the Yankees discovered him in Japan, Soriano found that it was extremely difficult to get out of his Japanese contract. In the end he had to officially resign from professional baseball to get out and become available to the Yankees.
The Japanese do not want to be another stepping-stone to the American major leagues. Kake said, “They leave us for the major leagues for the money, but more than that for the prestige. It’s a big problem.”
Nevertheless, the Japanese in search of Dominican talent signed an average of five or six players a year.
Charlie Romero was asked why so many ballplayers were produced in San Pedro. He smiled and then sighed. “I ask that question to myself all the time. They have even done studies on it. No one can come up with a real answer. It’s like Brazil, where you always see the kids kicking a ball. Here the kids are always throwing something. Or catching, or hitting.”
But the answer may lie in Romero’s own story. He was raised in a batey not far from the Angels’ academy, a village of a few hundred sugar workers who all worked for a mill owned by the American giant Gulf+Western. His father was a cane worker from Antigua. “I was poor,” said Romero, “but I really enjoyed my childhood. I had a responsible father who made sure there was food on the table every day. Growing up in a batey, most kids work at an early age. When they are ten, after school and during school breaks boys work in the fields to make some money. They do cutting and planting. You have to plant them one at a time; a row was about here to the wall. [He pointed about 350 feet to the end of the outfield.] In the early 1980s they were paying twenty-five cents a row. Working in a sugar field is one of the worst jobs you
can do. You just make enough money to survive; there is no saving and going to Hawaii on vacation. That’s not going to happen. But we didn’t know anything else.”
Two things led him to a better life. He had a father who insisted that his four children finish high school; he did well and skipped a year and finished at age sixteen. And he took up track and field. A fast sprinter, he ran the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile.
When Romero was seventeen years old, Epy Guerrero saw him run and asked if he wanted to play baseball. By the following September he was signed with the Blue Jays. He was trained in the fundamentals, although he remained essentially a one-tool player: a great base runner. While still in the minors he tore a ligament in his knee and never made it to the majors.
Romero reflected, “Most of the Dominican kids who have made it to the majors have come from the bateys. These kids really work. You don’t want to go back where you came from, so you give a little extra.”
CHAPTER TEN
Three Three-Brother Families
The Struggling Pitcher
Police in the Dominican Republic, like most other Dominicans, are poorly paid and are always hungry. They supplement their meager incomes by periodically stopping cars and in a soft, sweet voice asking for a tip or, sometimes, a fine, depending on which line they think the customer would be most moved by. Who could say no knowing the homicidal tendencies of the Dominican police force? And they were usually satisfied with a few pesos.
One afternoon in San Pedro, the police stopped a large, shiny black SUV—a Mitsubishi Montero. That was their mistake. They must have been out-of-town cops, because even though the windows were smoked glass and they could not see who was inside, everybody knew that in San Pedro a Montero was the car of choice of peloteros, especially former major leaguers. The driver lowered the window, and one of the policemen started his talk and a passenger said to him, “Don’t you know who this is?”
The policeman stopped in confusion and the driver, a large, powerfully built man with a deep, soft voice, said, “I’m José Canó.”
The policemen were still confused, and so the passenger helped them: “The father of Robinson Canó.”
“Robinson Canó!” The two policemen nearly saluted and the conversation quickly turned, as it often did here, to baseball.
To be someone in the Dominican Republic, you didn’t really have to be someone, you just have to have somebody in your family who is someone. One of the important advantages of being someone was that the police would leave you alone.
José Canó, with considerable talent and even more determination, had struggled mightily, and he had traveled a very long distance. But really it was his son, Robinson, who made him a someone. But that was something he had earned too.
Canó was from Boca del Soco, the mouth of the Soco River. Of the numerous rivers in San Pedro, the Soco is one of the few that are not tributaries of the Higuamo. Its mouth is on the other side of San Pedro. The river is a beautiful, wide, curving tropical river with blackish-brown water and banks overgrown with thick greenery. Unlike the Higuamo, there is little built on those jungle-thick banks: looking around the bend from the mouth suggests a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. In reality, though, the Soco wanders down from the heart of sugar, the cane fields, and the cattle farms in the center of the island.
To cross the Soco and get to the little fishing village on the other side, Macorisanos had to cross a narrow two-lane metal bridge of the kind of minimal construction that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tossed off overnight.
Vendors lined up by the side of the road selling the small, black, whitefleshed fish caught in the brackish waters of the channels. What had become the big item along this roadside was crabs—very ugly land crabs with boxy black and gray bodies and protruding eyes. They sold them in strings of twelve.
Across the river was a series of sheds and ramshackle houses around a large square field, a cricket field. It was a cocolo neighborhood with a good number of Haitians as well. It had been a neighborhood of fishing and crabbing even before the cocolos and the Haitians arrived.
Andre Paredes, twenty-six years old, had been doing this since the year 2000, although he was at least the third generation in his family to catch crabs in Boca del Soco. Every year more people wanted crabs, which at first he thought would be good for business. But the result was that more and more hungry people came to Soco to dig crabs and sell them by the side of the road. Now there was more demand but fewer crabs. This was true of the fish in Soco also: more people wanted to buy them, so the prices went up, so more people fished until there were fewer fish to catch.
The crabs burrowed straight into the ground for about a foot and then turned at a sharp right angle. A crabber looked for a crab hole and then dug a second hole with a machete. If this was done right, the crab would now find itself in a tunnel with two exits. Sometimes the crabber could just reach down the hole and grab the animal. Or he could stick a hook down to grab it. If the crab ran, it would come out the other hole and the crabber could still get it. In the dry season there was one crab to a hole, but in the wet season three or four would be found in the same hole. There were several theories on why. One popular and implausible theory—Dominicans usually prefer the implausible—was that they huddled together in the rainy season because they were afraid of thunderstorms.
A good crabber used to catch five or six dozen in a day around the village of Soco. But then too many crabbers came and the crabbers had to hike for miles over rugged terrain into the mountains to find crabs.
The locals in Soco eat crabs, often in coconut. Cooking with coconut was a cocolo idea that had become typical of San Pedro. This was the recipe of Raquel Esteban Bastardo, who was married to José Canó’s cousin. Squeezing the liquid out of coconuts is still common practice in San Pedro, although few Americans would have the patience.
Grate coconut and squeeze out the milk until it is completely liquid. Add garlic, big and small ajies (long chartreuse peppers that are not very hot), and ground oregano.
Mix the coconut milk with the seasoning and a little oil and vinegar. Wash the crab in clean water and take out the meat. Add it to the coconut milk mixture, add 3 spoonfuls of Maggi chili pepper sauce, and let boil 15 or 20 minutes, but be careful not to let the meat fall apart. (Nestlé makes a series of Maggi sauces that are very popular in Latin America, including the chili pepper sauce for this recipe.)
The Canós were fishermen, the only alternative to being crabbers in Soco. The fishermen lived in Boca del Soco, on the eastern side of the river. José’s father would get him up at two every morning, and they would row their deep-welled, open-decked wooden boat out into the river. A man stood on either end of the boat, holding a net. They dragged a net while rowing, which demanded tremendous skill because the rowers had to maintain an even speed to keep the net extended behind the boat. At noon they would row in and sell whatever had turned up in the net. Some days the ten hours would not yield a single fish.
An exceptional day on such a boat might land one hundred pounds of fish, which today would earn them about $125, a fat paycheck in San Pedro. But that rarely happened. Half that much was more likely. There were fewer and fewer fish near shore. Most locals blamed this on too many fishermen. But in North America, studies of climate change show northern species moving toward the arctic, subtropical species moving toward temperate areas, and tropical species moving toward the subtropics. What will that leave in tropical waters? Today, to get a good catch, fishermen have to mount little fifteen-horsepower engines on their boats and go to sea to a fishing ground seven hours away. They stay there in the calm Caribbean Sea for five days to catch enough fish to make it worth the cost of gasoline and ice.
In good weather Soco seemed empty, a quiet town of women and children, because the men were all off fishing. It was a village of unpaved streets and small Caribbean wooden houses, some of which seemed to have been slapped together out of scraps. Other houses, such as one handsome little dwel
ling on a corner, freshly painted a bright blue, were constructed a little better. That was the house of Canó’s mother, and as everyone in town knew, the Canós had money. But it wasn’t always like that.
José remembered his father, a catcher, as a good ballplayer. But he never made it into professional baseball. Life would have been different if he had, because he was trying to support his fourteen children on fishing. Three of the fourteen tried to go into baseball. Charlie Canó was a shortstop who signed with the Dodgers but never made it past the minor leagues. Another brother, David, was never signed at all. Then there was José.
He started playing on the dirt streets of Soco when he was five years old. His was a typical San Pedro story. He and his teammates had socks for balls, sticks for bats, and no gloves at all, but socks are not very hard on the hands. There was no diamond. When a car came they had to stop the game, but in Soco that didn’t happen often.
This was San Pedro and there were scouts everywhere, and one day a scout from Florida watched José playing shortstop and walked up to him and said, “How would you like to be a major-league ballplayer?” At that moment his life changed, although it did not all work out the way he had imagined.
He was signed to the Yankees at age eighteen, a little late, with a signing bonus of $2,000. Two years younger and he might have gotten twice as much. But the bonus was all right, because it was 1980 and ballplayers did not expect big bonuses; the important thing was that he had leaped the first hurdle to his major-league career. He had not yet gotten fed and trained in America: although he was tall, he weighed only 145 pounds. The scout had been impressed with his throwing arm and signed him as a pitcher, calculating that in the U.S. they could bulk him up to give him more power.
The Eastern Stars Page 17