The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  Griffin credits the mill with making Consuelo a place that produces baseball players. “They all come from here,” he said, “because we played ball for the mills every Sunday.” Certainly Consuelo, a small subdivision that has produced eleven major leaguers as of 2009, is per capita the most productive neighborhood in modern baseball history. Griffin first learned baseball playing street ball in Santo Domingo, but he is not certain he would have ended up a baseball player if he had stayed in his tough city neighborhood. None of the boys he grew up with there played pro ball, and some of them ended up in jail.

  Were it not for baseball, Alfredo Griffin might have become a very different person, but Alfredo had an uncle, Clemente Hart, who was a cricket player turned baseball player and played for the Estrellas. Hart steered Alfredo toward Consuelo baseball. Soon Ingenio Consuelo was paying him to play on their team. Managed by a former major leaguer, Pedro González, this was not the usual company team: it had Alfredo Griffin, Nelson Norman, Rafael Ramírez, Rafael Santana, and Julio Franco—all future major leaguers. This was a team that scouts watched.

  In fact, Consuelo played in a league consisting of six mill-sponsored teams, the Circuito de los Ingenios, which played a thirty-game season in the dead season and which scouts closely monitored. The mills supplied uniforms with the name of the ingenio across the chest. Well known for the quality of their baseball, the league games were the primary entertainment in the sugarcane communities.

  Teams also developed in the various barrios of central San Pedro, which formed a league. The top San Pedro team would play the top ingenio team at Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the September season finale. The ingenio players and their families would cram into buses and go to the stadium, where the playoff took place in front of a screaming crowd of about nine thousand fans. In October the zafra would begin, the workers would take off their uniforms and return to the mills or the fields, and professional baseball—the Estrellas—would take back the stadium.

  San Pedro’s amateur leagues and their playoffs gave scouts many games in which to look for prospects. Young ballplayers initially tried out for love of the game, but they quickly became aware that they were being considered for the majors.

  Cleveland Indians scout Reggie Otero, a Cuban, spotted fifteen-year-old Griffin playing second base. This was one Otero would not let Epy Guerrero grab for the Toronto Blue Jays, so Otero quickly developed Griffin as a shortstop, signed him in 1973, and sent him off to the Cleveland farm system by the age of sixteen.

  Despite his cocolo background, Griffin spoke little English and lived a lonely existence in America, away from family and friends for the first time. For three years in the minors he got occasional starts with the Indians. In his first major-league at-bat, in 1976, he got a hit. The following winter he went back to San Pedro, to the Estrellas, where he developed skills as a switch-hitter. The ability to bat either left- or right-handed is a great advantage, because pitchers usually do better against batters who bat on the side from which they throw. A switch-hitter can bat on the opposite side no matter who is pitching, so Griffin returned from San Pedro a more valuable hitter.

  After three years in which he played only occasionally, Griffin was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for Victor Cruz. According to legend, Epy Guerrero stole him. But the truth is that the Blue Jays simply made a great trade. Cruz had been an excellent relief pitcher for Toronto, and Toronto fans could not understand why the Blue Jays would give up a top pitcher for an unknown who was not greatly appreciated in Cleveland.

  But Griffin was noticed immediately in his new home. When the press saw him working out in 1980, he became the talk of spring training. They used words like “smooth” and “ballet of the infield” to describe his defensive skills. His first year in Toronto—his first complete season playing, because Cleveland had kept sending him down to the minors—Griffin won Rookie of the Year, the coveted Jackie Robinson title.

  When a young man from San Pedro got his hands on Major League Baseball money, he almost always did something for his family, and especially his mother. But in Griffin’s day a signing bonus wasn’t enough. Griffin did not see money until Toronto; once he had his first full season there, he built a large house for Mary Griffin on Carty Street in Consuelo. Later he put some earnings into a long gray stone house with a fountain in Rico Carty’s newly developed neighborhood in central San Pedro.

  Over an eighteen-season major-league career, Griffin became known as a reliable hitter, a fast enough runner to score numerous triples, a nearly unstoppable base stealer, and a smooth-handed, award-winning infielder who played in several World Series for both Toronto and the Dodgers and then went on to be an infield coach for the California Angels. In between seasons he played for the Estrellas. He seemed to relish his winters back in San Pedro: his comfortable house, the music, and the discos—including the one he bought by the waterfront. He even enjoyed going back to Consuelo, where his mother still lived.

  Griffin projected a different kind of image of a Dominican in the major leagues. He was known as a leader and a peacemaker, a player with the kind of temperament that holds ball clubs together. He always made a special effort to help rookie players adapt to the team. Griffin always insisted that this wasn’t new for Dominicans and that Rico Carty had helped him. Among his prized baseball souvenirs was an autographed photo of the Beeg Mon. But the American press seemed not to notice that Griffin contradicted the stereotype: for them he was simply another Dominican. In a 2001 interview, Sports Collectors Digest even used Juan Marichal’s old moniker, calling Griffin “a Dominican dandy.”

  Baseball became a serious enterprise all over San Pedro wherever there was poverty, which was almost everywhere. Epy Guerrero found another smooth shortstop in Barrio Restauración, the one-story tin-roofed neighborhood of crumbling pavement behind the outfield wall of Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Tony Fernández was one of the street urchins who shimmied up palm trees to watch the Estrellas play and to occasionally grab a fly ball for later use. Some would even bring a net to grab the flies. Fernández played informal games along the side of the stadium with a sock, or a real ball if he could snag one. Today boys still play sock baseball in the same spot.

  Fernández also found work tending the stadium grounds, which made a boy well positioned to get balls. The Estrellas called him “Cabeza,” head, because they thought his head was too big. In reality, like a lot of Dominican kids, his body was too small. But Fernández’s head was also a great asset: he had an understanding of the game that went far beyond his years.

  Everyone knew Cabeza, and several scouts had their eyes on him. He tirelessly practiced fielding ground balls and other infield skills. But the scouts’ interest cooled when they learned that Fernández had bone chips in one of his knees, a disabling condition: while injuries are part of the game, no one wants to start off with an injured prospect. Guerrero, who always had surprising ways to grab promising players, took Fernández to a hospital in Santo Domingo and paid for the operation. After his recovery, Guerrero signed him.

  Fernández had a seventeen-season major-league career, one season less than Griffin. Fernández was not only a great fielder but a solid hitter, known for his triples, and he was a smart and swift base runner. He was famous for a strange but impressive maneuver, the kind of flourish for which shortstops become popular: he would leap to catch the ball and, while still in midair, toss it underhanded to first base.

  Julio César Franco grew up in Consuelo playing with socks and milk cartons. His father’s name was Robles, but Julio—like Alfredo Griffin and many other Dominicans—chose to use his mother’s name. His father worked in the Ingenio Consuelo, pulling the carts that loaded cane into the grinder for 230 Dominican pesos a month. In those days the peso was worth almost a dollar. Later he got a better job as a welder earning 450 pesos a month, an excellent sugar-mill salary.

  “It was everybody’s ambition to make the majors,” Franco recalled. But among the boys he grew up and played with in Consuelo, Franco was
the only one who succeeded. There were a lot of games, especially on weekends, but very few programs in which a teenager could get training in baseball’s many basic skills. However, he did manage to find a program run by a man named Antonio García, whom everyone knew as simply “El Chico.” El Chico was known in Consuelo as a stern disciplinarian. He educated the San Pedro teenagers in the very American rules of the major leagues, including being on time. They would play two games a day. One week the games would be in Consuelo; the next week they would be held in downtown San Pedro, and the Consuelo players would walk miles to get there. The first game would start at nine a.m., and after the game there would be lunch at the home of someone who lived nearby—a player or a coach—before the second game at three p.m. In the early 1970s, food was inexpensive in San Pedro because it was an agricultural community. After the second game they would all walk back to Consuelo.

  Most players didn’t have gloves; when it was their team’s turn at bat, the fielders who had them left their gloves at their positions so their counterparts could use them. The “rich” kid of the neighborhood was Carlos Rymer, not because his family was really wealthy but because he had relatives in New York who sent equipment. All of the players would use it, but if Carlos got mad he would take his equipment and leave, shouting, “Game over!” Rymer signed as a pitcher with the Atlanta Braves, but more than thirty years later Franco could not conceal his boyish glee when pointing out that Rymer never made it out of Atlanta’s minor-league system. Then again, none of his other childhood teammates did either. Few do.

  By Franco’s time, Major League Baseball knew about San Pedro and the scouts were out looking. “If you were an outstanding player,” he recalled, “word got around and you got recognized.”

  Franco “got recognized” by another legendary Dominican scout, Quiqui Acevedo. Acevedo was ready to sign him to the Philadelphia Phillies when Franco was seventeen. He was to stay in a hotel in Santo Domingo and begin his baseball training. But Franco’s mother thought that he was too young to drop out of school and start his career. Yes, it was an opportunity, but he would not have an education, he would be taken away at a young age, and the odds were against his ever getting to the major leagues. Families in San Pedro were beginning to understand that most boys who got signed would not succeed.

  But after three months, Julio’s older brother, Vicente, persuaded their mother to let Julio go to Santo Domingo and take a chance at stardom. She agreed, only on the condition that Julio be brought back home every weekend. And so Franco signed with the Phillies for $4,000, which was only slightly less than what his father earned in a year on his good salary. Like most young Macorisanos who first get their hands on some Major League Baseball money, he gave it to his mother.

  Franco trained at the University of Santo Domingo, “the oldest university in the Americas,” he proudly pointed out many years later. George Bell, a lean but broad-shouldered and muscular kid from the Santa Fe sugar mill in San Pedro, was also there, as was Juan Samuel from Barrio Restauración, where Tony Fernández grew up. All were signed by Acevedo to the Phillies.

  George Bell was born in a neighborhood near the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, but he grew up in Santa Fe, where his father was an engineer on a locomotive that carried the cane from the fields to the mill. In the dead season he worked in the mill as a mechanic. The Bell family, like Julio Franco’s in Consuelo, had a modest but above-average income; in San Pedro they were considered middle-class. Bell’s father’s salary of 360 pesos a month—minimum wage was 90—was the envy of most Santa Fe workers. The sugar mill provided them with a three-bedroom house for their family of seven. Franco’s mother sold food to sugar workers out of her home.

  George Bell was pure cocolo. His father’s father was from the little British colony of Anguilla, where he had lived with a woman named Bell from the volcanic island of Montserrat, also British. According to family legend, Anguilla had so little that when Franco’s paternal grandfather went to Santo Domingo to buy a machete and saw that the island was bigger and wealthier than his, he took a job cutting cane in San Pedro. His son, George’s father, took George’s paternal grandmother’s name. George’s mother’s family was from Nevis, and George grew up speaking that uniquely San Pedro English with an accent that is part West Indian and part Spanish.

  Bell said of his childhood in Santa Fe, “We played ball—any kind of ball.” His father’s first love was cricket. “I remember when I was eight years old, my dad took me to a baseball field to see a cricket match. He and his friends played a lot of cricket and a lot of golf.” There was a golf course in Santa Fe for the sugar executives.

  The boys of Santa Fe played a game they called cricket with a sock ball and four players in two-man teams: one to bowl and one to bat. The bowl was underhanded or sidearm, and there was an old license plate on the ground that served as a wicket. If the bowl hit the plate, you were out. There were three outs to a side. If you hit from one side to the other, it was a run. They played twelve-run games. A variation on this game, called plaquita and sometimes two-man baseball, is still played by the youth of San Pedro—cocolos as well as Spanish Macorisanos. They carve their own wooden cricket bats with machetes, the all-purpose tool of the cane fields.

  When playing baseball, George always got hits and always won. He also boxed a little in the neighborhood—“Baseball and boxing were the only sports,” he noted—and with his exceptionally strong body, athletic reflexes, and aggressive personality, it could have been said that he was a natural fighter. But Bell didn’t like boxing as much as he liked baseball, and since his father played for and managed the sugar mill’s team in Santa Fe, George grew up with it, starting as a batboy.

  In the 1970s, television came to San Pedro, which meant the opportunity to watch American baseball broadcasts. The notable increase in top-ranked San Pedro players in the 1970s and 1980s was due to many factors; one was the fact that this was the first generation to grow up watching major-league games. If someone in the neighborhood had a television set, everyone would come over to see the game. In 1971 the Bells got a TV.

  When George was fourteen years old, his family moved to a larger house in San Pedro. Just as the streets in Santo Domingo were a little tougher than those in San Pedro, the streets of central San Pedro were a little tougher than those of Santa Fe, Consuelo, and Angelina: if a teenage boy wandered into a different barrio, he would be jumped and beaten. There were no guns or knives, and Bell would say years later that it was not as dangerous as a poor neighborhood of New York, but he learned early on to stick to his own barrio, not go out alone, and concentrate on baseball.

  In San Pedro, talented young players found other talented young players. Fifteen-year-old Bell came to know Tony Fernández, the kid with the great hands and a bad leg who was always hanging around Tetelo Vargas Stadium practicing fielding ground balls. Increasingly, San Pedro was a place to play baseball. Out in the cane fields or in the center of the city, there were baseball diamonds everywhere. On weekends, boys would play nine hours a day. According to Bell, about two of those hours were spent arguing about plays. But that, too, was baseball.

  On weekends, instead of fighting, San Pedro boys who loved baseball would take on the next barrio in a series of five three-inning games. Each team contributed twenty pesos, and the losing team would go to the street stands and buy oranges, tropical fruit, ice cream—whatever treats they could find—and the two teams would have a party. To give themselves an incentive not to waste time bickering, the teams would give twenty pesos for the umpire to hold. If he decided that the boys were arguing too much, he could keep the money.

  Bell’s special talent was hitting. When he was twelve years old, he was paid to hit on a team for sixteen-year-olds. As he got older he played for the Ingenio Santa Fe team against Julio Franco at Consuelo. Bell played second base, third base, and outfield. He loved third base, his father’s position, but it demanded more fielding skills than he had. However, he was also drawn to the outfield, where his hero, Ric
o Carty, had played; in fact, Bell grew up to be a similar player: primarily a hitter. San Pedro was not just about shortstops.

  Pedro González watched Bell play for Santa Fe, thought he was an interesting prospect, and brought him to a program in San Pedro. But it was Quiqui Acevedo who signed him with the Phillies for a $3,500 bonus.

  Young Sosa was only five feet, nine inches tall, and very thin, and Acevedo wondered if he was ever going to develop a major-league body. Julio Franco, George Bell, Juan Samuel, Jose Moreno . . . by 1980, they had all been shipped off from their training program in Santo Domingo to American ballparks—along with dozens of others who would never make it to the majors. Juan Samuel was another Macorisano who would make baseball history by being awarded the Rookie of the Year title; in fact, he was the first player in history to reach double digits in doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases his first four seasons in the major leagues and was only one triple short of doing it again his fifth year.

  Those four—Franco, Bell, Samuel, and Moreno—all had stellar major-league careers, even though leaving their island and living in America was not easy for any of them.

  It was a bit easier for George Bell than the others because he was comfortable in English, but he was ill prepared for life in Helena, Montana, in 1978 when the Phillies sent him there. When the electricity went off he was not surprised, because electricity regularly goes off in San Pedro; but when the lights did not come back on, someone had to explain to him about paying an electric bill.

  While a black man was fairly unusual in Helena in 1978, Bell said, “I didn’t have the problems of black Americans because I was a Latino. Helena girls liked the way I spoke Spanish. The Latinos were not treated like the blacks. I walked down the streets, went into stores, people were nice, and the countryside was beautiful.”