The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  Ramírez asked Carty in Spanish what was happening. When Carty told him, his brother-in-law asked, “Do they do that here?”

  “ Yes,” Carty replied. “Sometimes between the blacks and whites.”

  “Why?” Ramírez asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Carty. “I just play ball and go home.” And the two laughed. Then the two in the other car started shouting “Nigger!” at the Dominicans. Still not understanding the ways of American racism, Carty shouted back in English, “You may be more nigger than me, because you are American and I’m not.”

  Carty was not his usual athletic self, because he was just recovering from a severe leg injury. Spotting a uniformed white policeman, he got out of his car and limped up to him and asked for his help, saying he had an injury and didn’t want any trouble from the two men in the car. But the two he was complaining about were plainclothes policemen. The police took out their guns and one of them said, “These are the cop-killing niggers.” He hit Ramírez over the head with his handgun, and then they began beating Carty with a blackjack, kicking him on the ground, then handcuffed and arrested him before finally one of the policemen recognized him.

  The policemen were suspended; one already had a record of brutalizing black people, and the police chief and mayor apologized profusely. The attorney for the three suspended policemen said that it was a minor incident that had been blown up because it involved a famous baseball player. But in truth, Carty had been saved by his standing in baseball. The Atlanta press expressed concern that the finger injuries and black eye might somehow keep Carty from finishing the season.

  Carty was what is known as a natural hitter, or, as they say in San Pedro, nació para batear, he was “born to bat.” His swing had both power and grace, and he had that mysterious ability to see pitches and put his bat where they were going. For seven years he maintained the highest lifetime batting average of any current player. At the time, few players were hitting well—a period known in baseball history as “the second dead-ball era.” The first dead-ball era, a time when hitters inexplicably were all slumping, was the first two decades of the twentieth century. The second dead-ball era, from 1963 to 1972, corresponded almost exactly with Carty’s career. The phenomenon is only partly explained by the fact that it was an era of great pitchers. Carty was, along with Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, Carl Yastrzemski, and only a few others, one of the rare great hitters of his time. The reverse of Marichal, who was underappreciated because of the wealth of great pitchers, Carty enjoyed great renown because so few others were hitting so well.

  Had he stayed healthy, Carty might have been one of the all-time greatest hitters in baseball. In 1963 he had a brilliant rookie year, but the following year he had back problems. In 1967 he missed weeks of play from a shoulder injury caused by a bad slide into second base. In 1968 he seemed to run completely out of luck: that year he missed the entire season, spending 163 days in the hospital with tuberculosis. He missed fifty-eight games in 1969 with three shoulder separations. Often his injuries were sustained in the winter, playing for the Dominican League, which he insisted on doing every winter.

  In 1970 he had a phenomenal batting average of .366, which was the best in the major leagues since 1957, when Ted Williams hit .388 for the Red Sox. Then, triumphant, Carty went home to San Pedro to play for the Estrellas, but he was traded to Escogido. While playing for Escogido, he broke his leg in three places and shattered his knee colliding with Matty Alou in the outfield. The Braves did not have their batting champion for the entire 1971 season. After the knee healed and a hip-to-calf brace was removed, he went back to Escogido and, in a game against Licey, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Pedro Borbón hit Carty on the left side of his face and broke his jaw.

  Carty never did make tremendous amounts of money in Major League Baseball. A restaurant he started in Atlanta, Rico Carty’s Open Pit Barbecue, burned down when flames leaped out of the open pit after the restaurant had been operating only fifteen days.

  He did wear rings that spelled out his name and uniform number in diamonds. When he was in Atlanta, he earned a reputation as a shopper after buying twenty-five pairs of shoes at one time. He also once bought six suits and another time twenty-four shirts. When a reporter asked him about this, he said, “I go into a store and I can’t help myself. I see all the beautiful things and I have to have them.”

  In Carty’s best-paying year of his fifteen seasons in the majors—1977, at the end of his career—he received $120,000. Most years he earned half of that or less. But back in San Pedro he did not need a lot of money. He bought a large, comfortable house in downtown San Pedro for $45,000—a one-story ranch house large enough for his wife, four daughters, and son. In the 1960s, when his mother picked the spot, it was an undeveloped neighborhood on the edge of downtown, and Carty had to pay to get electricity brought in. He was a popular figure in San Pedro, the local boy from Consuelo who became a star. Most of the next generation of players, including Carty’s own nephew, Julio Santana, cite Rico Carty as their inspiration. In 1994, with neither political nor administrative experience, he was elected mayor of the town. This may not have been a measure of his popularity, since he was handpicked by Joaquín Balaguer, and Balaguer did not permit his candidates to be defeated. Carty explained, “Joaquín Balaguer is a good friend of mine, so when he asked me to run I could not tell him no.” He pledged as mayor to keep the youth of San Pedro supplied with bats and balls from the major leagues.

  But then something else happened to open the door of Major League Baseball even wider for the boys of San Pedro and produced perhaps the most important generation San Pedro has ever sent out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Draft Dodging

  By the 1970s, boys had been playing baseball in San Pedro for nearly a century without dreaming that it could change their lives. But after the first few major leaguers—especially once Rico Carty became a star—baseball turned into something much more serious than a sport: it could be the salvation of an entire family. What had changed was not so much San Pedro but Major League Baseball.

  Until 1976, once a player signed a contract with a franchise, he was theirs until they did not want him anymore and traded him or released him. When a contract expired, the franchise always had the option to renew it. The rule, known as the “reserve clause,” came into effect in 1879. An owner could even cut a player’s salary by twenty percent. In 1969, after distinguishing himself as a hitter and outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals for twelve years, Curt Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Cardinals had traded three players for three Phillies. But Flood refused to go, saying he didn’t like the Phillies, their stadium, or their fans. The Phillies were infamous for racism. The manager, Ben Chapman, had led his team in shouting racist insults at Jackie Robinson. Flood sued baseball and got former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to argue his case, which went to the Supreme Court. Among Goldberg’s arguments was the claim that the current system unfairly repressed wages. The Court ruled against Flood.

  But many people felt that Flood, who had been active in the civil rights movement, was fighting a just cause. He had written to the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, in 1969: “I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Since he was black, the comparison to slavery was evident, and his struggle was seen as one for civil rights at a time when there were many such struggles in America. It was not seen as being about money. Had he let himself be traded, his $100,000 salary would have been one of the top paychecks in baseball. The celebrated sportswriter Red Smith, writing in The New York Times, satirized: “ ‘ You mean,’ baseball demands incredulously, ‘at these prices, they want human rights too?’ ”

  Yes, they did.

  In 1975 two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, refused to sign their contracts, and after they had played a season without contracts it was ruled that they then had the right to be free agents.

  A player who becomes a free agent
by fulfilling his contract puts himself on the market and can go to the team he chooses, often the highest bidder. If a player has been doing well, this can produce highly competitive bidding. This has made agents important because, with millions of dollars at stake, there is often considerable negotiating. Before free agents, players negotiated contracts with management on their own.

  Regardless of the high principles that had guided Flood, one of the results was that baseball became a game of millionaires. Salaries like Flood’s $100,000 became laughable. Before there were free agents, in the Rico Carty years, the average salary in the major leagues was $52,300. Carty’s salaries, which seem meager today, were above average. But by 1980 the average had leaped to $146,500. A decade later it was more than $800,000. By 2008 the average was $3 million a year. Signing bonuses, an extra one-time bonus on signing the first contract, also went up; the once token handouts for the most promising players are now in the millions.

  At this same time, with jets replacing trains for traveling teams, Major League Baseball began a process of expanding from sixteen teams in the Northeast and Midwest to the current thirty around the country, and this, too, created a hunger for fresh young talent. The most important source of new young players was the draft, in which every franchise got to pick from a pool of undeveloped talent. The lower the standing of a club in the previous season, the higher the pick in the draft so that the last-place teams got the first picks.

  But the draft was a highly regulated operation, and teams were limited in the number of draft picks they could take. This placed the player in a good negotiating position. A very promising prospect could refuse the offer. Then he had to wait a year, but a year later he would probably be worth more money to whoever got him. In the meantime the franchise had wasted a pick, because they were limited to the players they drafted whether those players signed on or not. So it might be in the club’s interest to sweeten the deal—fatten the bonus—in order to get the prospect signed, which was why bonuses had been going up.

  However, players who were not born in the United States were not subject to the draft. They were declared “amateur free agents,” and there was no limit on hiring free agents, and you did not have to be a last-place team to be first to grab a top prospect. Foreigners became an unlimited source of new talent. This internationalized baseball, opening it up to Venezuelans, Colombians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Japanese. Today, more than a quarter of major-league players are foreign born, and the percentage will probably rise, since the minor leagues are about half foreign born. Moving beyond the limitations of the draft was the original reason, but then a wealth of talent was discovered and they were cheaper to sign than American drafted players of comparable promise.

  The first country to profit from this search for nondrafting talent was the Dominican Republic. This was partly because, by the mid-1970s, baseball was accustomed to the idea of Latin players. There had been Cuban and Puerto Rican players, but Cubans were no longer available and Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens and therefore subject to the draft. With a tradition of baseball and the second-worst economy in the Americas—Nicaragua has recently fallen lower and bumped the Dominican Republic up to third—Dominicans were ready to be saved by baseball. When Major League Baseball went looking for foreign players, the first place they looked was the Dominican Republic.

  San Pedro and other parts of the Dominican Republic became the feeding grounds of major-league scouts. A scout had to identify a young teenager, develop his ability, and get him signed—a process that sometimes took years—without another scout grabbing the prospect. And so these scouts were cruising the ball fields, often running into and trying to out-maneuver one another. Some, like Pedro González, were ex-players, but many of the more successful ones were not. Epifanio Guerrero, commonly known as Epy, from Santo Domingo, never made it as a player. His brother Mario, a shortstop, never got out of the minors, and neither of Epy’s two sons got beyond AAA ball. But Epy was the most famous Dominican scout, signing 133 young Dominicans, thirty-seven of whom—including George Bell and Tony Fernández—made it to major-league rosters.

  At the start, Guerrero was scouting for the Toronto Blue Jays and his archcompetitor Rafael Avila was scouting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. From Los Angeles, the Dodgers—the same management that had opened the sport to black players in Brooklyn—pioneered Latino recruitment. Avila was a Cuban, a veteran of the ill-fated 1961 anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1970, when Avila moved to the Dominican Republic, there had still been only twenty-four Dominican players who had risen to the major leagues. But at a time when baseball was not very international, for twenty-four players to have turned up on major-league rosters in fourteen years from one small foreign country was a phenomenon.

  At first the scouts tried to raid the military teams, where Marichal had been found. But this had the complication of getting the player released from the military. Then they looked at the Dominican League. Avila started working with Licey. But eventually they discovered an untapped wealth of very talented teenagers who lacked proper training, in the sugar fields of San Pedro. The scouts needed to find places to train the young players and feed them—they were all undersized and undernourished—without attracting too much attention. Avila built two rooms in Elvio Jiménez’s backyard and housed and fed fifteen players there, the forerunner of what came to be known as a baseball academy.

  The competition for San Pedro ballplayers was lively. In 1976 a Cuban scout for the Cleveland Indians, Reggio Otero, picked up a fifteen-year-old cocolo from Consuelo named Alfredo Griffin, who had honed his skills playing every Sunday for the sugar mill where his stepfather worked. Epy Guerrero never forgot that Griffin had gotten away from him, and after three years of slowly rising in the Indians organization, he was able to get Griffin away to Toronto, where he started his career winning the Rookie of the Year Award.

  Alfredo Griffin, Pepe Frías, Julio Franco, Rafael Ramírez, and Tony Fernández were all shortstops from San Pedro who went to the majors in the ten years between Frías in 1973 and Fernández in 1983, and all became stars. Griffin, Frías, and Franco were from Consuelo. Soon San Pedro de Macorís, the city of plántanos, sugar, and poets, became known as the city of shortstops. To date, only thirteen of the seventy-nine Macorisanos who have played in the major leagues have been shortstops, compared with twenty-seven pitchers, mostly in recent years. But when this town was first getting noticed by the fans of professional baseball, it seemed that it was turning out more excellent shortstops than anything else, and even today when the name San Pedro de Macorís is mentioned, often the response is “That town with all the shortstops.”

  A shortstop is one of the most important players on a team—certainly the star of the infield. He roams between second and third base, between infield and outfield. Because most hitters are right-handed, they tend to hit toward the left, and so the shortstop is in more plays than anyone else. If it were a left-handed world, the shortstop would have been placed between first and second. It is a role that requires great athleticism because he is involved in tight critical plays, including double and triple plays. Often by the time a ground ball has gone the distance to reach the shortstop, there is little time to beat the runner on a long throw to first base. A shortstop’s moves often appear spectacular, and good shortstops usually become fan favorites.

  Since the youth of San Pedro dreamed of being stars, they dreamed of being shortstops. But also, since they had hard lives and poor nutrition, Macorisanos tended to be small, with powerful throwing arms, which is the classic shortstop—or at least it was until large men such as Cal Ripken, Jr., and Alex Rodriguez started playing the position.

  Griffin’s family came from Nevis. His father, Alberto Reed, was a musician and a dockworker in Santo Domingo. They lived in Villa Francisca, a poor crumbling and crowded one-story neighborhood in the old part of the capital near the Ozama River. Reed performed at a nearby night-club called Borojol. He played in a musical tradition that r
eached its height in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s with singers who earned international reputations such as Tito Rodríguez and Beny Moré. The music was called son, an Afro-Cuban hybrid. Eventually son would mutate into salsa, but before that happened, in the 1940s, Arsenio Rodríguez introduced big conga drums to son; by the time Alberto Reed was playing, conga drumming was an important part of the band. This made a huge impression on young Alfredo, who developed a permanent love for conga drums.

  When Alfredo was only eight years old, the rough, fetid streets of the capital, in which boys from rival barrios fought one another for dominance, got even rougher. A U.S. invasion followed a coup d’état, and a civil war meant street battles with high-caliber automatic weapons. Alfredo’s unmarried mother, Mary, a Macorisana, wanted to leave the dangerous town, where young Alfredo liked to run loose and watch both the violence and food distribution by American soldiers. She took her three sons and left Reed and moved back with her family in her native Consuelo. She later became involved with the sugar worker whom Alfredo still refers to as his stepfather. Although Alfredo always used his mother’s name, clearly Reed was an important influence. People in Consuelo who recall growing up with Alfredo say that their earliest memories are not of him laboring in the mills, because he didn’t work there, or playing on the Consuelo ball team on Sundays, for which he was paid, but of Alfredo playing the conga in a band and entertaining at cocolo parties and fiestas. Other things they remember are that he earned money shining shoes and that he was a tough street fighter.