Alou

by Felipe Alou

  I understood racism academically, in that I knew it existed, but I didn’t understand it. I certainly didn’t understand it coming from a family with a black father and white mother or from a country where race didn’t matter. Early in Jackie Robinson’s career, I remember seeing a photograph in the newspaper that showed him sitting alone, with white players sitting away from him. By now blacks were starting to trickle into Major League Baseball—and I do mean trickle. For years there were staunch holdouts, like the Boston Red Sox, who didn’t field their first black player until Pumpsie Green made the roster in 1959, which turned out to be my second year in Major League Baseball. It was also in 1959 when Fidel Castro came into power in Cuba, which would greatly impact the Dominican Republic. Though integration was forging some headway, for a boy on a Caribbean island in 1949, the thought of going from Latin America to North America to play Major League Baseball was as foreign as we were at the time. We played for fun, and that was it.

  Baseball in the Dominican Republic originally migrated from Cuba. Historians say the game was first played in Cuba in 1865, in Matanzas, which at the time was a thriving trade port on the island’s northern coast, toward the western tip. Dockworkers were the first to play the game, doing so against North American ship workers. Early in its Caribbean evolution baseball was much more organized in Cuba than it was in the Dominican. So if you had some talent in the Dominican, you went to Cuba to play or perhaps into North America’s Negro Leagues and even Puerto Rico. One of the topflight players to emerge from the Dominican Republic early last century was Horacio “Rabbit” Martínez, born in 1912, who played both in Cuba and in the Negro Leagues. He was a great man—a man who profoundly impacted my life and the lives of my family.

  My father was too busy trying to feed six children to ever play with us. I never once played catch with him. But he wanted us to play, and he would craft crude baseball bats for us in his carpentry shop. It was just a piece of wood, slightly thicker than a broomstick. Soon, as he gained a reputation for making the Dominican version of a Louisville Slugger, he made bats for other neighborhood boys. Prior to those homemade bats, we would usually play with hard, unripe lemons, hitting them with our hands. But when we had my father’s homemade bats, we would play with small, dry coconuts, which lasted longer as a substitute for a ball.

  There was one time when Matty and I happened to procure a real baseball. We had gone to watch a local ragtag team play a squad from Santo Domingo. It wasn’t much to see, other than they were playing with a real ball and for money. They fashioned a baseball diamond from a cow pasture, the outreaches of which were overrun with underbrush. One ball was hit into those dense scrubs, and several fans spent quite a while searching in vain for it. The next day Matty and I returned to the scene, scouring the area, rooting around. It took us an hour, but we found the ball. For two poor boys like us, it was like a diver finding a rare pearl.

  Whenever we or our friends did have a real baseball, we would use it until the cover started peeling off. Then we would wrap tape around it. I first learned how to throw a little bit of a breaking ball with a lemon, trying to mimic what I heard on the radio station from Cuba, listening to Winter League games and announcers describing pitches as spinning, spinning. Large rocks passed for bases, and usually we had only two bases. We didn’t fully understand the rules of the game, but what we did know is that an open field ignited our imaginations. We had fun, and we played for hours.

  Sometimes real life interrupted our fun. One day a military truck rumbled by our home, bellowing to a stop. Before Matty, who was about fifteen, knew what was going on, they grabbed him. I learned later that the dictator, Rafael Trujillo, needed laborers to work at the fairgrounds in preparation for the 1955 Fair of Peace and Fraternity of the Free World, which was behind schedule. The soldiers forced Matty to work all day without paying him a cent or even feeding him. Plus, he had to walk eight miles back home that night.

  Another time when Matty disappeared, we didn’t know what happened. It was a Sunday morning, and he left without saying anything. Lunchtime came, and he didn’t come home. Dinner, no Matty. I could see my father pacing, worried. He went to the closest police precinct inside the city and told them he hadn’t seen his son the whole day. On an island ruled by a ruthless dictator, it’s hard to stay calm when your son suddenly disappears. Soon night fell, and still no Matty. At 10 p.m., we heard the gears of an open-bed truck grind to a stop in front of our home. There were fifteen guys bunched in the back of it. One of them was Matty, who bounded off as if nothing had happened. He had gone across the island to play in two sandlot baseball games, a five-hour trip each way. Normally, such an offense would be worthy of a whipping. Not that it would’ve mattered to Matty. He was fearless, a characteristic I saw years later in my son Moisés. I was afraid of the belt, but Matty wasn’t. As it was, my father didn’t whip him. We were all so glad to see our brother and have him back.

  As I got older my dreams of getting an education and becoming a doctor started coming into focus. Because there wasn’t a high school where I lived, I moved to Santo Domingo to live with Uncle Juan and attend high school there. This was only the second time I saw a baseball game played with two teams wearing different-colored uniforms and the first time I regularly saw it played with four bases. Because he was a captain in Trujillo’s army, Uncle Juan earned a decent salary, mainly because Trujillo wanted to keep the soldiers who surrounded him happy. I would stay with my aunt and uncle during the week, and then Uncle Juan would give me bus fare on Fridays so I could go home and be with my family on the weekend. When I turned seventeen I decided I wanted to move back home while still attending school in Santo Domingo. It was a twelve-mile trip each way. I would get up at five in the morning and walk and catch rides along the way. I was never once late for school. Years later, my teachers would tell students who followed me that, despite my twelve-mile journey in the predawn hours, I was never late. There were other times when I would walk those twelve miles—and it was to play baseball against the city kids. During my teenage years my father somehow saved enough money to buy me a pair of baseball spikes from a pawn shop. I was so proud of them that one night I walked home from the city to my parents’ home wearing those spikes. Good thing it was mostly along dirt roads. Sometime later, my father had to reclaim those baseball shoes and remove the spikes, because he didn’t have a pair of shoes for himself.

  All that walking proved beneficial, because in addition to having become a pretty good baseball player, I was a fast runner. I would often run instead of walk to wherever I wanted to go. People used to say about me, “That Felipe Rojas—he’s always running.” Although baseball was my favorite sport, I found myself drawn to other athletic endeavors. One day a group of high school friends and I were watching the track and field team. Some of the kids were retrieving the javelin that was thrown and walking it back to the coach. Not me. I picked it up, and instead of taking it back, I threw it. To everyone’s astonishment it sailed over their heads by about twenty-five feet.

  The coach approached me, saying, “Do you want to practice doing this?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Before I knew it I was on the track and field team, throwing the javelin, the discus, and the shot put and running the 100- and 200-meter dashes. With practice and learning the techniques, I improved my skills as both a runner and a thrower. My senior year in high school I threw the javelin 204 feet, which established a national record. My progression was so rapid that, while still a high school senior, I represented my country at the 1954 Central American and Caribbean Games in Mexico City—competing in the javelin, discus, and dash events. It was the first time I ever left our island and got an inkling that there was indeed a world out there, not just the images of it from scratchy radio broadcasts or hearing my father reading the newspaper under a gas lamp.

  Soon, with the financial help of Uncle Juan, I was enrolled at the University of Santo Domingo, taking premed courses and pursuing my goal of becoming a surge
on and hopefully helping the poor people of my homeland. By now track and field was my passion, supplanting baseball. Although I was on the baseball team at the university, it was track and field I set my sights on, with the goal of representing my country at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia.

  It wasn’t all sports and schooling, though. I learned the blacksmith and carpentry trade from my father and often worked long hours with him. Also, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, I worked in a rock mine, my shift starting at 10 p.m. and ending at 6 a.m. It was arduous, brutally hard work, the most physically taxing work I’ve ever done in my life, which my father was also doing at the time. I made 12 pesos a week, the equivalent of $12, all of which went straight to my parents to help support the family. Not even one penny went into my pocket. There was no doubt that between the athletics and the hard work, I was growing into a strong man, about six feet tall, muscular, and with cheetah-like swiftness, like my father.

  In 1955, when I was twenty, I was invited to represent my country in track and field at the Pan American Games in Mexico City. I was to throw the javelin, the discus, run the 200, and maybe compete in the pentathlon. Our country’s baseball team was also there. It was my second trip off our island. During our stay two wrestlers, determined to escape Trujillo’s dictatorship, defected. Because of that the watch over the rest us tightened, at times to a suffocating degree. We were also given strict orders to not mix with our female athletes. One of our baseball players, a big outfielder named Andres Aranda, didn’t like the edict. Aranda was quick-tempered, as well as being a very strong white Dominican whom we called “Tarzan.”

  “I’m a man,” he bellowed, “and these are women!”

  At one point, because Aranda was so aggressively obstinate and so vocal about it, words were exchanged with a high-ranking officer in uniform, who went after Aranda to fight. Some punches were thrown, but thankfully a bunch of guys jumped between them, preventing the incident from really turning ugly. More words and threats spewed from Aranda, and it got him booted off the team for insubordination and sent home. That’s when they came to me, because Aranda was the baseball team’s left fielder and they needed someone to replace him. They didn’t give me a choice. Baseball was growing in popularity in the Dominican Republic, and so my country’s sports officials told me I was no longer on the track and field team. Instead, I was ordered to play baseball.

  The best player on the team was Julián Javier, and he was on the radar of several pro scouts. He eventually signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates and played thirteen years in the Major Leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds. His son Stan Javier played seventeen years in the big leagues. I had a very solid showing, performing well, including going 4 for 5 in a 10–4 victory against the United States in the championship game, helping us win the gold medal.

  Now the scouts were noticing me, which likely never would have happened had Andres Aranda not been sent home. It’s one of those twists of fate, when a sequence of events gets shuffled in a way you never anticipated. What if those two wrestlers hadn’t defected, leading security to tighten around us, which included forbidding us from socializing with the female athletes, angering Aranda, who caused a scene, which resulted in his being sent home and my moving into his vacated left-field spot on our country’s gold medal–winning baseball team at those 1955 Pan American Games?

  Once back in the Dominican Republic, my university’s athletic director and baseball coach, Rabbit Martínez, approached me. As I’ve mentioned, he was a well-respected baseball man who played in both Cuba and the Negro Leagues and was now a New York Giants scout. He told me he wanted me to become the first player he signed. Who knew then that I was going to open the door for my country?

  I was a good player on my university team, but there were several other players who were as good or better. We had an incredible team. We could all hit for power. On the outskirts of our university field, about four hundred feet into left-center field, was a mango tree. I used to hit it on a fly ball and sometimes hit the ball over it. The other guys did, too. We didn’t chop down the tree, though, like we did that coconut tree of my youth. But we would eat its succulent fruit. The difference between my teammates and me was that they came from well-to-do families. They were studying to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, and businessmen, and their families had the money to make those dreams come true. I was the poor kid from Kilometer 12 who was about to become even poorer.

  My father lost his job. So did Uncle Juan, after he had the nerve to disagree with something Trujillo had done. It was something minor, not something that would get him either imprisoned or perhaps vanished altogether, but he did lose his job. As badly as I wanted to become a doctor, the means to do so were starting to look shaky.

  A new Dominican league was forming, and almost all of my teammates from the Pan American Games were signing. The thought of playing baseball for money suddenly didn’t seem so outlandish.

  But the new Dominican league was not what Martínez had in mind for me. Martínez was working as a bird dog for a man named Alejandro “Alex” Pompez, a Cuban American who had owned a team in the Negro Leagues and was now a scout overseeing the New York Giants’ Negro League and Latin American operations. Legend has it that Pompez—in addition to signing players such as Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and Tony Oliva—was the scout who discovered Willie Mays and had a hand in the Giants signing him. Martínez pushed me to Pompez. Selling me to Pompez, however, was easier than selling the notion of my leaving school for baseball to my parents. The first time Martínez went to my parents, he brought two of my teammates with him. As much as they tried to convince them of my talents, the answer was a firm no.

  “I want Felipe to be the first player to go from our country to Major League Baseball,” Martínez pleaded. “He’s that good. He can make it.”

  “Baseball is not a profession,” my parents countered, shaking their heads for emphasis, as if they were placing an exclamation point at the end of a sentence.

  The resistance was even stronger from Uncle Juan, who was adamantly against my leaving the university and abandoning my path toward becoming a doctor. Shortly after that initial visit to my parents, Uncle Juan showed up on a late afternoon when I was playing dominoes with some of the guys. “Felipe,” he called, “come over here.” And then, in front of everyone, he announced, “You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to be a doctor.”

  It wasn’t the first time Uncle Juan had done something like this. When he heard I was going to Mexico City for the Pan American Games, he tried to stop me. That day, because he still had his job, he showed up in his military uniform, getting out of his jeep with two other soldiers. He was stern, and with a voice like he was giving me a military order, he commanded me in front of everybody: “Felipe, you’re not going to Mexico. It’s going to get in the way of your studies. You’re going to become a doctor!”

  I loved him for that, and for other reasons, because I yearned to become a doctor. But I was beginning to see that money could be made playing sports. Already, my participation in athletics was helping to fund my schooling.

  A couple of weeks after getting rebuffed the first time, Martínez returned to my parents’ house, this time with three of my teammates. By now the Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee Braves had heard about me. Al Campanis was also on the island, looking for players for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Campanis had an eye for talent, as attested by the fact that he signed two of the all-time greatest players—Sandy Koufax and Roberto Clemente. I believe Martínez, when he heard Campanis was in the Dominican Republic, was afraid he would find me, so he turned it on with my mom and dad. The teammates he brought with him were telling my parents, “Your son is really good. He’s going to make money.”

  And then Martínez told them how much money I could make by signing—200 pesos. That might not sound like a lot, but to our family it was a fortune. That amount, 200 pesos, was the same amount my father owed my godfather, Bienvenido Ortiz, who wa
s our grocer. The number immediately registered with me, because I heard my father on more than one occasion talk about how he needed to pay the grocer the 200 pesos he owed. I knew how much it was weighing on him. I also knew, with all the schooling I still had ahead of me, that I was years away from helping my family financially. This way I could help them right away.

  I looked around our small home with a floor that was part uneven concrete and part dirt, lit by a lamp barely flickering, hardly able to illuminate the worn-out features on my parents’ faces. “I’m going to sign,” I told them.

  My mind was made up, and I was almost a twenty-one-year-old man. Still, it wasn’t easy. I wanted to become a doctor. My lifelong dream was to help people, to heal people, especially poor people. I thought of those tiny wooden caskets my father made for children and also of my sister who died.

  Nowadays, signing a professional baseball contract is a cause for celebration. But there were no smiles on November 14, 1955, inside our tiny house, when my father finally agreed to cosign my contract, doing so after I promised, in front of my parents and Martínez, that if baseball didn’t work out, I would come back and finish my education. The only reaction in my neighborhood came shortly afterward, when a sergeant at a local police station saw me and said, “You’re going to go, but they’re going to find out you’re not any good.” His words came out of nowhere, and they stung, but I wasn’t deterred. Instead, I was determined.

  Soon, there I was, Felipe Rojas, a poor kid from a poor island village, leaving the Dominican Republic for the United States of America, carrying with me the dream that I would make a name for myself, my family, and my country.