The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  With only fifteen percent of the population white, mostly from a privileged class, the Dominican Republic rarely produces white baseball players. But by the 1950s, Dominican players had a chance at the major leagues. If they could get there, they would find themselves in a strange country, very different from theirs, and face a very different kind of racism.

  Dominicans are not strangers to racism. The Dominican—in fact pan-Caribbean—obsession with the calibrating of racial differences is profoundly racist.

  But the Dominican ballplayer is confronted with something entirely different in the U.S. It is because Dominicans are so familiar with the notion of racism that they find the American variety so baffling. Dominicans did not worry about issues of segregation and integration. In the Dominican racist logic, it made no sense to have separate baseball teams or lunch counters because racial traits are not transmitted over lunch counters or on baseball diamonds.

  Most Dominican parents are so mixed that the children could come out most any shade. There are rural superstitions about pregnant mothers consuming white foods to ensure light-colored babies. As citizens of a mulatto country, Dominicans’ skin color could easily get darker or lighter, depending on whom they mixed with. According to the theory, if they got whiter, they would be a happier, more prosperous country, because white people enjoy happy and prosperous countries. On the other hand, were the population to get darker, the Dominican Republic would eventually become a black country. If that happened, it would simply be absorbed into Haiti, a barbarous and impoverished land. Since the first Haitian invasion the main concern has always been the threat of a Haitian takeover.

  Historically, the answer in the Dominican Republic was to keep adding white people to the mix and to get rid of the black people. The problem is that this keeps raising a difficult question: Who’s going to cut the cane? The Dominican Republic needed black people, so white people were needed to offset them. Sugar was the only industry exempt from Trujillo’s decree—designed to prevent the importation of neighboring blacks—that any company’s workforce had to be seventy percent Dominican.

  Concern about whitening the race was continued after Trujillo’s death by his former puppet president, Balaguer, who in 1983 wrote a book titled La Isla al Revés, The Island in Reverse, that claimed the Haitians were still trying to invade though no longer using the military. He called it a “peaceful invasion,” an invasión pacífica, a favorite term of Trujillo’s. The new invasion, he wrote, was “biological” and he warned of the “fecundity” of black people, saying that they “multiply with a rapidity that is almost comparable to that of vegetable species.” To further illustrate his point, he included five pages of color photographs of families from his native region to show what fine Caucasian faces they had.

  When José Francisco Peña Gómez—a popular politician with black skin and African features—ran for president in 1996, Balaguer insisted he had a secret plan to reunify the country with Haiti. Peña Gómez was a Dominican born of Dominican-born parents with one Haitian grand-parent, and yet he was frequently said to be Haitian.

  Even as recently as 1997, President Leonel Fernández, who said he would be different, discovered that the Dominican Republic was threatened by a Haitian “mafia”; some 35,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry were subsequently deported.

  But unlike the Americans, Dominicans do not see their society as divided between white people and black people, with anyone with any touch of African blood considered black. Dominicans are mostly mulattos, and in Dominican society mulattos are not considered black. In fact, mulatto is too vague a term for all of the variants—morenos, indios, chabins, people with African hair, commonly known as “bad hair,” and green eyes, people with “good hair” but bad noses—all recognized classifications that in America were considered black. Dominicans had not expected to be treated as though they were haitianos.

  It was predictable that the first black Latin players would be Cuban. White Cubans had always been in the major leagues. Thirty-two Cubans had played in the majors before 1948, starting in 1871 with the first Latino major leaguer, Esteban Bellán, known in the majors as Steve Bellán, who was one of the founding forces in Cuban baseball. Cubans such as pitcher Dolf Luque, nicknamed “the Pride of Havana,” were mainstays of the majors during the white-only years. There was no gentlemen’s agreement on white-skinned Latinos.

  In 1951, Minnie Miñoso from Havana, the speedy outfielder nicknamed “the Black Comet,” moved from the Negro League to the Cleveland Indians and then to the Chicago White Sox. Miñoso was the first black Latino player in the major leagues. The door was slowly opening for San Pedro.

  In 1952, Sandy Amorós moved from the Cuban League to the majors—a good story, since he was black but didn’t speak a word of English, and so reporters never talked to him. A spectacular player in Cuba, he was a shy man who seemed lost in the English-speaking world of the 1950s major leagues. When he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers he had no home but lived on the yacht of Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ black catcher who had learned Spanish playing in the Mexican League. The unseen Amorós had his one moment of fame, a spectacular catch of Yogi Berra’s hit by the low left-field wall of Yankee Stadium that turned into a double play, saving the 1955 World Series for the Dodgers.

  In the 1950s, when there were few Spanish-speaking players and few black players in the majors, it was not going to be an easy move for Dominicans. The first Dominican to play major-league ball was Osvaldo Virgil. Virgil left his small village near the Haitian border a Dominican named Osvaldo Virgil and ended up in the major leagues a black man named Ozzie Virgil.

  Dominicans were not being recruited in those days, and Ozzie probably would never have been found by Major League Baseball had his father not so vociferously opposed the Trujillo regime that the family had to flee to Puerto Rico. From there, like many Puerto Ricans of the time, the Virgils moved to the Bronx, where Ozzie played sandlot ball in his neighborhood—which happened to be near the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Later he played for the Marines. Virgil could do almost everything in baseball: he was a utility player—someone who filled in where needed—and in his nine years in the major leagues, he played every position except pitcher and center field.

  The Giants at the time had hired Alejandro Pompez as a scout. Alex Pompez, born in Key West, Florida, of Cuban parents, had owned two Negro League franchises: the New York Cubans and the Cuban Stars. He was known for bringing Latinos into the Negro League, including Minnie Miñoso and pitcher Martín Dihigo, regarded in Cuba as one of their all-time greatest players.

  Pompez was out scouting in the Bronx. He was always looking for Latino players and had even expressed a desire to find some Dominicans when he stumbled on a very talented one right in the neighborhood. Virgil played his rookie year for the Giants in 1956 and later said that he was so nervous during his first major-league at-bat that he could not stop his legs from shaking. He batted four times and failed to get a single hit; he even made an error at third base. This was the official debut of Dominican Major League Baseball.

  There was not a great public reaction to the first Dominican—at least not to his nationality. Everyone was too preoccupied with his skin color—especially in 1958, when Virgil was traded to the Detroit Tigers. The Detroit Free Press reported the trade with the headline “Tigers Call Up First Negro,” and on the day of his first game another page-one headline announced, “Tigers’ First Negro to Play 3rd Tonight.” The Detroit News front-page story ran with the headline “Tigers’ Decision to Play Negro Hailed by Race.” Suddenly a man too light to be considered black in his native land was a symbol of racial integration in America. His historic significance as the first Dominican player was almost completely forgotten, despite the fact that at the time the major leagues had forty-six black players and no Dominicans but him. At that point the Tigers were the only major-league club other than the Red Sox that had not integrated, and so his race was the single most important fact about hi
m. A June 9, 1958, editorial in the Free Press began “The Tigers now includes a Negro” and misspelled his name. The same paper thirty-nine years later ran a profile that revealed, “Ozzie Virgil doesn’t think of himself in terms of black and white.”

  But even though Virgil was willing to accept his role in Detroit as a black icon, American blacks did not see him as one of their own. “They thought of me more as a Dominican Republic player instead of a Negro,” he once complained to the Detroit Free Press.

  The same year that Virgil started, the next Dominican, Felipe Alou, came to the U.S. to play minor-league baseball. His name was actually Felipe Rojas Alou. He went by the surname of Rojas Alou, with the traditional use of the father’s name first, but the scout who recruited him did not understand the Spanish custom with names and assumed that Alou, his mother’s name, was his last name and Rojas was simply a middle name. All the Rojas boys—Felipe, his brothers Matty and Jesús, and Felipe’s son, Moisés, all major leaguers—changed their name rather than contradict the Americans. In 1992, Felipe Alou became manager of the Montreal Expos, the first Latino manager in Major League Baseball.

  But it was Ozzie Virgil who had led the way. Juan Marichal, one of the first five Dominican major leaguers and the only Dominican in the Hall of Fame as of 2009, has said that in the Dominican Republic he never thought about playing in the major leagues until Ozzie Virgil started playing for the Giants.

  In 2006, when ten percent of major-league players were Dominican, a reporter from The Miami Herald asked José Reyes, the young Dominican shortstop for the Mets, about Ozzie Virgil, the first Dominican to play in the majors. Reyes did not know who Virgil was.

  Dominicans only very slowly started being signed with Major League Baseball. After Virgil in 1956 came Felipe Alou in 1958, then his brother Matty in 1960. Julián Javier, a sure-handed infielder and swift baserunner, debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1960. Also in 1960, Diomedes Olivo started pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the age of fourteen. In 1961 his brother Chi-Chi started pitching for the Braves. Rudy Hernández, a pitcher who spent most of his career in the minors, was called up and pitched twenty-one games for the Washington Senators, also in 1960. The first Dominicans—Virgil, the Alous, the Olivos, Marichal—were all from small towns. The only exception was Hernández, who was from Santiago. Four out of the first seven were pitchers. None of the seven were from San Pedro. The first were found in places where the first Dominican scouts knew to look, such as the Pan American Games and the military teams built up by the Trujillo regime. Virgil was found because he was in New York, Felipe Alou because as a pre-medical student at the University of Santo Domingo he played for a college team that happened to be coached by Horacio Martínez, who had recently signed on to scout for the New York Giants.

  Of the first seven, the one who established the most enduring image of a Dominican ballplayer in both positive and negative ways—an image that would impact on both players and fans—was Juan Antonio Marichal Sánchez, from the small northern village of Laguna Verde near the Haitian border.

  Marichal was an intimidating pitcher with what in the 1960s was already an old-fashioned delivery: an elaborate windup that sent one leg straight in the air and made it impossible for the batter to get any inkling of what type of pitch he was about to release. He had mastered a wide variety of different pitches, which added to the batter’s confusion.

  He came from a tough world. He was a discovery of Ramfis Trujillo, who grabbed the young Marichal to play for the team he was developing in the Dominican air force. The dictator’s son watched Marichal pitch one game and drafted him into the air force on the spot. Although working for a homicidal maniac can be frightening, the Trujillos favored the military and paid their recruits well.

  Marichal became a major-league pitcher in 1960 for the San Francisco Giants and was stellar from his first game. His career earned run average was 2.89, one of the lowest in the history of the game. The earned run average, or ERA, measures the average number of earned runs—runs that are the pitcher’s fault—scored in a game. In an age when ball clubs have huge pitching staffs and a starting pitcher seldom stays in the game for more than seven innings, it is astonishing to recall the night of January 2, 1963, in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, when Marichal pitched sixteen innings against Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn until finally Willie Mays hit a home run off of Spahn.

  Marichal seemed to have the attention of the entire Dominican Republic each time he pitched. According to legend, the first Americans to realize there had been a coup d’état in Santo Domingo in 1965 were the Western Union operators at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It was their job to wire each play to the Dominican Republic when Marichal was pitching. Something cataclysmic must have happened to block scores. In fact, the government-controlled communications had been seized by conspirators.

  Marichal would have seemed more spectacular if he had not pitched in an age of spectacular pitchers. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson all pitched at the time. During Marichal’s career, the top annual pitching prize, the Cy Young Award, was won once by Drysdale, twice by Gibson, and three times by Koufax but never by Marichal. Was it because Marichal was Dominican? Some make that accusation, but had he beaten Koufax or Gibson, some might have said it was because Koufax was Jewish or because Gibson was black.

  Hitters feared Marichal because of his unusual variety of pitches and his ability to conceal the ball until the last moment. Art Shamsky, a top hitter for the Cincinnati Reds at the time, called Marichal “the toughest pitcher I ever faced.” Shamsky was what is called a contact hitter: he would always try to get his bat on the ball, even if it led to an out. He prided himself on rarely striking out. He could make contact with Koufax, but Marichal would strike him out. “Hitting is all about seeing the ball out of the pitcher’s hand,” Shamsky said. “With that high kick you couldn’t see the ball until it was there.”

  In a game that loves statistics, Marichal had spectacular numbers—sometimes even better than Koufax’s. The press, the people who choose the Cy Young Award, stereotyped them both. Koufax, the Jew, was an “intellectual” pitcher, whereas Marichal, the Dominican, was a “hot-blooded Latin” pitcher. Giants manager Al Dark, who had three Latins on his roster, mused publicly on whether Latins could truly understand the game of baseball. He said that Latins lacked “mental alertness.”

  The press called Marichal “the Dominican Dandy,” a slightly denigrating label implying that he did not know what to do with his money and so indulged in clownish foppishness. Nothing better illustrates the impact of Marichal than the fact that, years after he stopped playing, the press would still occasionally refer to some Dominican player as a dandy.

  Since baseball players earn their living playing their childhood game, they have much less pressure than most people to act like adults in the workplace. There is no shortage of incidents of American ballplayers having temper tantrums and outbursts of violence. But when a Spanish-speaking player does it, he is being a hot-blooded Latin. Marichal did not originate the stereotype of the hot-blooded Latin ballplayer. The original hot-blooded Latin was Adolfo Luque, a Cuban who was one of the all-time great pitchers, enshrined in American literature because Hemingway mentions him in The Old Man and the Sea. Luque never hesitated to threaten other players, umpires, or fans. Once, when heckled by an outfielder named Bill Cunningham, who was shouting at the pitcher from the bench, Luque put down his ball and glove, marched over to Cunningham, and threw a mighty roundhouse punch—which Cunningham side-stepped. Luque’s fist landed squarely on the jaw of outfielder Casey Stengel. A brawl ensued and Luque was ejected from the game, but he returned in a rage, swinging his bat clublike at players and umpires. Latins are like that, a lot of people in baseball concluded.

  All the worst fears about Marichal were confirmed on August 22, 1965. The Giants were playing against their main rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, with Marichal pitching against Koufax. At bat, Marichal got into an argument with Do
dgers catcher Johnny Roseboro, who, Marichal claimed, deliberately threw the ball too close to Marichal’s head. In some versions the throw nicked Marichal’s ear. Words escalated and finally Marichal hit the catcher with a bat. Roseboro needed fourteen stitches.

  Marichal gave baseball an enduring and unfair image of Dominicans as rough and violent people—a backward people. It was the baseball version of a long-standing Dominican stereotype. In the tough Latino neighborhoods of New York where Dominicans move in on the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Ricans often insist that Dominicans don’t wear socks—that is, that they are primitive.

  But Marichal was an inspiration to Dominican players. He was one of the greats. A player becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame five years after retirement, which in Marichal’s case was 1981. He failed to get positive votes from seventy-five percent of the members of the Baseball Writers of America, which is the requirement for induction. He was turned down the following year as well. Some thought it was because of the Roseboro incident. Others, especially in the Dominican Republic, thought it was because he was Dominican. The following year Roseboro himself, who had become a good friend of Marichal’s, urged his election to the Hall of Fame, and that year he was accepted—the first and, more than 460 Dominican major-league players later, the only Dominican to be so honored.