The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  As recently as 2008, Marichal found controversy. He and Dominican pitcher Pedro Martínez were filmed in the Dominican Republic attending a cockfight. And there was the old accusation once again: barbarous and primitive Dominicans are cruel to animals. Martínez tried to argue that cockfighting was simply “part of the Dominican culture.”

  In the 1960s, young ballplayers in the bateys and barrios of San Pedro de Macorís followed Marichal’s career and gleaned two contradictory lessons: First, it was very difficult for a Dominican to get along in the United States; second, those who braved it had a chance at a great deal of fame, money, and glory. But it was never going to be easy.

  In the southern towns that many young baseball players are sent to, the strange American breed of racism persisted for years, long after baseball and even the South were integrated. Rogelio Candalario, a player from San Pedro, signed with the Houston Astros. He was a promising left-handed pitcher until he broke his arm in 1986. The Astros sent him to their Double A team in Columbus, South Carolina. “People would just stare at me,” Candalario recalled. “I’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Nothing,’ they would say.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  San Pedro Rising

  In 1962, something happened that had an enormous impact on baseball, sugar, and tourism. On February 7, in response to the expropriation of American assets in Cuba by the new revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, the U.S. declared a trade embargo. First of all, this meant that the U.S. would now buy its sugar elsewhere, while the Cubans responded by opening trade with the Soviet Union. Until then, a Caribbean vacation had largely meant Cuba; there was little tourism in the rest of the region. Now Americans were suddenly looking for other places for Caribbean winter holidays. But also it meant that Cuban baseball players could no longer play in the United States. To be eligible for work in the United States, a Cuban had to defect permanently, leaving behind friends and family, which few Cuban baseball players wanted to do. Major League Baseball would have to look elsewhere for Latino talent.

  The first ballplayers from San Pedro de Macorís entered the major leagues in 1962, the year of the Cuban embargo. Not surprisingly, these players came from the sugar mills. Amado Samuel, a shortstop from Santa Fe, was the first Macorisano in the majors. He signed with the Milwaukee Braves in 1958 and played his first major-league game at the beginning of the 1962 season. He lasted only three seasons in the majors, his last one for the Mets. The second Macorisano to make the majors, Manny Jiménez, was also from Santa Fe. He missed being the first Macorisano by one day, beginning the 1962 season with the Kansas City Athletics. He had a seven-year career as a left fielder and, unlike Samuel, was a respectable batter with a kick to his swing that back in the sugar fields of Santa Fe had earned him the nickname “El Mulo.” In his best years he batted over .300.

  Pedro González, from the Angelina sugar mill, was the third player from San Pedro to play major-league ball. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother was a French cocolo from Saint Martin. As a small child he lived in downtown San Pedro, in a neighborhood on the shore of the Caribbean Sea that is called Miramar. When his parents separated, González’s mother took him back to the sugar mill at Angelina, where he became a cocolo and a baseball player. He laughs now about the equipment he and his friends played with. Occasionally they had real baseballs, because in the Dominican League whoever catches the last out of the game, by tradition, keeps the ball and generally gives it to the street kids of his choice.

  The rest of the time balls were made out of socks, also a San Pedro tradition. Socks are stuffed tightly into an outer sock, which is then sewn closed and dipped in water before playing to give it a little density. Socks, too, were hard to come by. When Julio Franco, the durable major-league shortstop, was growing up in Consuelo, he used to steal socks from his big brother, Vicente. This is another way of looking at the Puerto Rican assertion that Dominicans don’t wear socks.

  For a time batillas were used. Bottled water came in large jugs with a big cap that could be used as a ball. But in recent years manufacturers have switched to lightweight plastic and the cap does not have enough weight for throwing.

  Bats were another problem. The real bats were broken and glued, taped, or even nailed back together, but often a stick of tough tropical wood or even light sugarcane served instead. Sometimes a milk carton could be shaped into a glove—a fairly good glove if you knew how to shape it, especially if you were not catching anything harder than a wad of socks. If anyone had a real glove, he left it in the position on the field so that the other team could use it too. Dominican children were resourceful: girls skipped rope with palm fronds.

  The best way to get bats and balls was to play on a team, and there were teams all over San Pedro. There were the sugar mills, and González did not limit himself to Angelina. One year he played on a team run by the Haitian vice consul, who was based in San Pedro to look after the many Haitians who cut cane there. Also on that team were Manny Jiménez and his brother Elvio, a shortstop, who would be a teammate of González’s again in 1964 with the New York Yankees. But Elvio’s major-league career lasted only one game.

  In 1957, Ramfis Trujillo drafted not only Juan Marichal but several San Pedro players from the mills, including González and both Jiménez brothers. In San Pedro it was becoming clear that the Dominican military was a pathway to the major leagues. The army, navy, air force, and police all had teams that competed against one another, and still do. This was top-quality Dominican baseball, and players who did well on these teams got noticed. San Pedro youths in the sugar mills even today will point out that the military teams are a good opportunity because “that is how Juan Marichal got discovered.”

  González, a large and affable man, signed with the Yankee organization in 1958, the year Marichal began his major-league career. He arrived in America speaking no English. There were few Spanish speakers to help him. “I ate ham and eggs for breakfast and the rest of the time chicken and french fries,” González recalled. “It was all I knew how to order.”

  When he started in the majors in 1963, Dominicans were still not completely accepted. After distinguishing himself as a hitter in the minors, González started playing for the Yankees in 1963. He was the first Dominican to play for the Yankees. He was a novelty, nicknamed “Speedy González” after a vaguely racist Looney Tune stereotype: a Mexican mouse with a gold tooth and a big sombrero who spoke in an exaggerated singsong nasal accent—the Latino as a cartoon character. Or he may have been named not so much for the cartoon as for the 1962 hit single by singer Pat Boone that seems to be about this same cartoon mouse, but is really about nothing at all.

  Because of injuries, González never lived up to his batting potential, but he was a smooth and artful infielder who made only thirty-one errors in his five years of Major League Baseball. In 1964 he covered five positions and made only three errors in sixty-six games.

  As with Virgil, González’s skin color was a bigger issue than his ethnicity. “I remember when the Yankees came to play the Baltimore Orioles in 1963,” he said without a trace of bitterness in his voice. “The whole team stayed in the Sheraton in Baltimore, but they wouldn’t serve me in the restaurant. I used to have to go to the black part of town to find a place to eat. But I always said I didn’t come to integrate, I came to play baseball.”

  At bat, González was often hit by pitches. He believed it was intentional: “Pitchers used to bean black players. The managers would say ‘get the black guy.’” Surprisingly, González insisted that Charles Dressen, a legendary Hall of Fame manager for Brooklyn who was managing Detroit at the time, “always told them hit the black guy.” A hit batter moves to first base, but he will have been intimidated—which is known in baseball as “having his power taken away.” Racists believed that blacks could be easily intimidated, and so pitchers often threw at them. Longtime club owner Bill Veeck openly criticized the practice.

  But González tried not to make trouble, concentrating instead on building his
career. “I learned a lot because I was in love with baseball and I worked my tail off,” he recalled. One time, tired of the stinging blow of fastballs, he lost his temper. Toward the end of the 1965 season, while batting for the Cleveland Indians against Detroit Tigers pitcher Larry Sherry, two pitches in a row barely missed him. It is not certain that Sherry was trying to hit González—often a pitcher will throw inside very close to the batter to force him to move back off the plate—but González was furious. Bat still in hand, he ran up to the pitcher and swung at him, hitting Sherry’s arm before being restrained. González was fined $500 and suspended for the rest of the season, which was not many games. He did not injure Sherry the way Marichal had injured Roseboro, and it was not a notable game—González was not a famous player like Marichal—but for those who noticed, it was another hot Latin Dominican running amok, even though baseball had a long tradition of cool northerners doing similar things.

  González did not make a huge amount of money. Most baseball players didn’t in the 1960s. One of his best years, 1966, the Cleveland Indians paid him $15,000 for the year. He probably made more money in baseball after he retired. He could do this because as a former major leaguer, he was somebody. In 1964 he had even played in a World Series. He went on to manage Tampico in the Mexican League and then the Estrellas back in his hometown. His Estrellas were filled with future major leaguers from San Pedro, including Julio Franco, Alfredo Griffin, and Rafael Ramírez.

  Later González became a well-liked fixture around San Pedro as a scout for the Atlanta Braves. “I just look around and keep kids off the street,” he said. “They might turn out to be good players too.” A successful man who sent his children to the local medical school, he was proof for young Macorisanos that you can build a life if you make it to the majors.

  San Pedro slipped into the major leagues almost unnoticed until its first star, Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty, known as Rico Carty. The first hint of his cocolo roots was the pronunciation of his nickname, “Beeg Mon”—an accurate description, as Carty was a muscular six feet, three inches tall. He was from Consuelo, where there is a Carty Street, running from the church to the fenced-off sugar mill, named after his mother, Oliva Carty, who was a midwife. By the twenty-first century there were more than one hundred Cartys in Consuelo, a subdivision with about 45,000 people. They were originally French-speaking sugar workers from Saint Martin but with roots in other islands as well. When Rico spoke his fluent English, it was hard to discern if his accent was French, Spanish, or West Indian. Probably it was all three.

  Carty has said in interviews that when he was growing up in Consuelo there were two choices: cut cane for the mill or work in the mill. Carty’s father worked in Ingenio Consuelo for sixty years. He loved boxing and cricket. Rico was born in 1939, and when he was a child the older men in Consuelo played cricket. The boys tried it too, but the lure of baseball, encouraged by the mills, was irresistible. The Carty family lived in mill housing behind the ingenio, simple wooden houses in a little Caribbean barrio called Guachupita.

  Rico was one of twelve sons and four daughters. The fields that surrounded them were for growing cane. Baseball was played in the unpaved streets. Owing to his ability to hit deep into center field, Carty was known as an “up-the-middle” hitter, which he attributed to the fact that under Consuelo rules you had to keep the ball in the street: if it went into the houses it was an out. He attributed his ability to hit breaking balls to the fact that wadded socks or rags are not balanced, so the pitches had a lot of unpredictable movement.

  Carty’s mother understood the value of education and hoped her son would study to become a doctor. But Rico did not like to study—he wanted to play baseball—so she banned him from the baseball fields, hoping that would force him to concentrate on schoolwork. Instead he would sneak off and play games in the street with teams from competing Consuelo barrios.

  Since Rico was clearly not a student his parents got him a job cutting wood for the mill. He hated it, but working for the ingenio gave him the opportunity to play on their baseball team. At that time Dominicans could not break into Major League Baseball; the sport that could lift them out of poverty was boxing. Rico’s father, who loved the sport, gave him books on it and trained him. Rico was undefeated in seventeen fights, twelve by knockouts. Then he lost his eighteenth. He always claimed it was because he had eaten too many beans before the fight. He gave up boxing and in 1959 went back to baseball for Ingenio Consuelo, where he was much talked about as the boy who could hit the ball four hundred feet straight up the middle on any kind of pitch. But his father was disappointed: although he lived to be ninety, he never went to see his son play baseball. In 1959, Rico and some five hundred other young Dominicans tried out for the Pan American baseball team. The Dominicans had won the 1955 Pan American Games and were a team to watch in the 1959 games, which were in Chicago at Comiskey Park.

  The major leagues sent scouts to look at the reigning Dominican team. The team did not do well but Carty did, hitting home runs over center field the way he had learned on the streets and making a spectacular throw to home plate off the right-field fence. Everyone wanted to sign this Dominican kid with the perfect swing, the powerful throwing arm, the tall, lean, and muscular body, and the strikingly sculpted face.

  Many of the new Dominican players—unlike the Cubans, who played a season in Mexico, a season in Venezuela—were leaving the Dominican Republic for the first time. The Dominican Republic is not a very big place, and a few dozen miles to Santo Domingo or up to Santiago was as far as Carty had ever been until he played in Chicago at age nineteen. Being a cocolo, Carty always thought he spoke English. But now he discovered that he did not understand Americans and they could not understand him. Scouts went to talk to him, but he could not understand them. Every time someone offered him a contract, he signed. Before long he had signed with six major-league organizations, and by some accounts eight or nine. At the very least he had signed with the Cardinals, the Braves, the Yankees, the Giants, the Cubs, and the Dodgers. In his confusion he had also signed with Estrellas, Licey, Escogido, and Águilas.

  George Trautman, who headed Minor League Baseball, interceded. He pointed out to the various angry clubs that there was no legal issue, since Carty had neglected to take any money. But he told Carty that he had to choose a team. Carty picked the Milwaukee Braves, because he liked the team. Only later did he understand that the $2,000 signing bonus they offered was small money and he could have gotten far more from the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Back in the Dominican Republic, it was more complicated to sort out his contracts. Realizing what he had done, he said that he wanted to play for his hometown Estrellas Orientales. Trujillo was furious and Carty was taken to court—a Trujillo court. But in the end, a good ballplayer could be forgiven in a Trujillo court, and he was allowed to play for Estrellas.

  The Braves sent Carty to play minor-league baseball in Waycross, Georgia, where he thought Jim Crow laws did not apply to him because he was a Latino. Like Pedro González, he ate a lot of chicken because he could say that. Later he learned how to order hamburgers.

  In the United States, it was difficult to find familiar foods. In his autobiography, Felipe Alou wrote of being revolted by the coldness of the milk. In rural Dominican Republic, milk generally arrived unpasteurized and was boiled for safety and served warm. But chicken was the one familiar food they could find.

  This story about only knowing how to order chicken is repeated over and over again by the early San Pedro major leaguers. Why was that the word they knew? Not all of them even knew that. San Pedro players tell stories of Dominican rookies favoring fast-food restaurants that offered photographs so they could simply point to the chicken picture or even walk in, flap their arms, and make chicken noises to indicate their orders. Poor Dominicans live on a diet of rice, beans, tropical fruits, root vegetables, and occasionally a chicken.

  On the wide main curving street that runs by the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, there are many small re
staurant-bars where fans can watch American baseball games on large-screen TVs. They serve mostly chicken. Chicken may have been, as González suggested, the word they set out to learn. Chicken is popular and good in San Pedro. As in much of the Caribbean, most of it is free-range, because sending chickens foraging is the most cost-effective approach in the tropics.

  Not all Dominican players chose chicken. “Ham and eggs” was another phrase the Dominican players quickly learned to say. When José Mercedes got to the Orioles, he learned the phrase “same thing” and simply waited for someone else to order and then said, “Same thing.”

  Carty was not as isolated as González had been, because there were some Dominicans in the Braves organization, even other Macorisanos—even one whose father had played cricket with Carty’s father. But only Rico made it to the majors.

  Carty was liked and certainly respected by the other players, but he was always somewhat of an odd man out, a colorful character. They were puzzled by his habit of carrying his wallet in his uniform into the game because he was not confident that his money would be safe in the locker room.

  He found American racism hard to understand. He could see that, as a Latino, he had a slightly better standing than American black players. So he always presented himself as a Latino. But American black players were resentful of this. Carty did not understand much about black America at the height of the civil rights movement. He called himself “Big Boy,” and the black players resented it because they did not want to see a black man call himself “boy.” He changed it to “Man”: “Beeg Mon.” But he never really understood the issue.

  It was after the Braves moved to Atlanta that Carty got a taste of what it was like to be a black man in America. In September 1971, after Carty had established himself as a baseball star, he was driving in Atlanta with his brother-in-law, Carlos Ramírez, at about midnight. Ramírez was visiting from the Dominican Republic and spoke no English. Racial tension had been heightened in Atlanta by the killing of two white policemen in a black neighborhood. According to Carty, who described the incident in a 1975 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, another car pulled up with two white men. The two called out to a black man in the street, “Hey, nigger.”