The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  Young baseball players in San Pedro were fit, serious, and clean. Theirs was a disciplined youth. Their games, which took place every day all over town, were played with great seriousness. When a coach demonstrated a move, the boys would imitate it like ballet dancers learning a new step. This was not playing, it was working. Nevertheless, they were amusing games to watch, because the players had a thrilling combination of talent, determination, and undeveloped skills. A fly ball soared to center field and the center fielder, for no apparent reason, dropped the ball. But he had a good arm and threw quickly to shortstop. The shortstop, with bad hands but quick reflexes, also dropped the ball but quickly scooped it up and then tossed it to third base. The swift runner, who had been sprinting hard but was thrown a little off his step because he never expected to be running this far on a routine fly ball, was tagged out at third. One out—the same result had the center fielder caught the ball in the first place, but much more interesting.

  There were a lot of scouts in San Pedro, but there were also a lot of baseball games to watch. Dany Santana, a native Macorisano who scouted for the Tampa Bay Rays, estimated that there were between thirty and forty baseball fields in town that he regularly dropped in on. One way an ex-ballplayer could make money was to buy a small plot of land, build one or two baseball diamonds, and rent them out. If he spent some money and put in dormitories, a gym, and some other facilities, he might be able to rent it out to a major-league franchise for a high price. But there was a market for lesser facilities as well.

  Santana often scouted Astin Field, a ballpark of major-league dimensions, measuring four hundred feet from home plate to the center-field wall. During games or even practice, boys waited in the papaya trees around the walls, just as they did in the palms around Tetelo Vargas Stadium, for a foul ball or home run. The owner, Astin Jacobo, Jr., like many ballpark owners, was an ex-player, signed by scout Rafael Vásquez.

  Vásquez was a legend in San Pedro. Before he was a scout, he had been a pitcher from nearby La Romana; in 1976 he threw twelve pitches for a Pittsburgh Pirates scout and was signed immediately. His rise was phenomenally swift. In the Rookie League in Bradenton, Florida, he struck out five batters in a row and was immediately sent up to a Class A team. It took him only two years from signing until he played on a major-league team, the Seattle Mariners. But his major-league career lasted just one season, in which he pitched in only nine games for the Mariners, first as a starter and then as a reliever; then he was sent down to Triple A, never to rise again. What made him famous in San Pedro—what the name Rafael Vásquez meant to Macorisanos, lovers of Macorisano baseball trivia—was that he was the first Dominican pitcher ever to get a win against the New York Yankees.

  Vásquez went on to be a scout for the Kansas City Royals, for whom he signed Jacobo, who did not become a star, either. But Astin Jacobo was a famous name—perhaps more famous in the Bronx, where he was born, than in San Pedro. His father, Astin Jacobo, Sr., was from Consuelo, and like many people in Consuelo was a cousin of Rico Carty, whose paternal last name was also Jacobo. Astin Sr. scouted for the Houston Astros, but he was also one of the men who tried to organize the workers in Consuelo and consequently had to flee Trujillo. In the 1970s, the worst period for the South Bronx—when gunfire ignited fires that burned down whole blocks, and many buildings were abandoned—he settled in the Crotona neighborhood. There Jacobo, known as Jacob, became an activist in a troubled and impoverished community, saving buildings, getting City Hall involved, turning abandoned lots into gardens and baseball fields. There is still a street and a baseball field named after him.

  His son owned the field in San Pedro, and on most days there was baseball practice there and almost always a few scouts taking a look. On the concrete block of seats behind home plate was written “Scouts Only.”

  Dany Santana often went to Astin Field to watch a lean fifteen-year-old pitcher with a hard fastball and a nice breaking ball. Good breaking balls were unusual for young San Pedro pitchers. In his first two years with Tampa Bay, Santana signed twenty-eight players but distinguished himself with pitchers including Cristófar Andújar, Joaquín’s son, and Alexander Colome, also from San Pedro—a closer who at the age of sixteen was already throwing a 97-mile-per-hour fastball.

  When his young pitcher went to the mound, Santana took up position behind the backstop with a stopwatch. This was unusual. Scouts usually stood in that spot with a handheld radar gun the size of a hair dryer to check the speed of the fastball. But Tampa Bay scouts were influenced by Eddy Toledo, the veteran scout who signed twenty-seven major leaguers, mostly for the Mets, before switching to Tampa Bay in 2006. Eddy never used a radar gun and frequently said, “I have two eyes: one is to watch arm movement, the other is a radar.” Many organizations emphasize the speed of pitches—especially in the Dominican Republic, where many pitching prospects have only a fastball and a changeup. But Tampa Bay scouts under Toledo were more concerned with the fluidity and speed of the pitcher’s movement than the actual speed of the ball after release. A pitcher with a fast movement was difficult to steal bases on, and they believed that good arm movement was a harbinger of good future development.

  This youngster had a very good movement. It was also apparent without a radar gun that his fastball had considerable velocity.

  Then Santana spied a young outfielder he didn’t know.

  “How old are you?” he asked the boy.

  The boy began to glow. He was fifteen years old and a major-league scout was talking to him.

  “Are you from San Pedro?”

  He was. This was good because, being a Macorisano himself, Santana believed San Pedro players were a quality brand. Furthermore, the boy was from Santa Fe. Santana liked that because a lot of good players had come out of Santa Fe. So he patted the boy on the shoulder and sent him back to the outfield, the player’s stride showing new bounce and his black skin heating to a shade of mahogany.

  This was how Santana liked to work: identify talent at fifteen, watch him develop for a year and a half, sign him at sixteen and a half. It would be safer to sign prospects at twenty, but then the organization would not be able to play a hand in their development. Besides, by law all boys who are over sixteen become available for signing on July 2, and that is the day most of the good prospects are bought up by one organization or another.

  If a prospect is of age and not signed on July 2, he could be signed at any time of year, so when a scout found talent in a player who was over sixteen, he signed him quickly. That past winter Santana had seen a boy in a field in Barrio México, not far from Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Santana said he “reminded me of Tony Fernández, the way he used his glove.” He asked him to run and the boy hunkered down and performed a fast sprint. Then he asked him to show him how he swung the bat. The boy went into a batting stance and did a few swings for him. Santana signed him immediately with a $26,000 bonus, an average bonus at the time.

  The age limit had been established in 1984. Before that, it sometimes seemed that scouts were snatching children from their homes. Epy Guerrero boasted of signing thirteen-year-olds. Not that this was a good way to treat children, but on the other hand, it took a scout of rare skill to recognize a player’s potential at the age of thirteen. In 1986 it was recounted in The Washington Post that a terrified family reported their son missing and the Dominican commissioner of baseball located him hidden away by a scout in the training camp of a major-league team.

  It is part of the tradition of Dominican kleptocracy, this idea that Major League Baseball could come here as did the Spanish, as did the sugar companies and do whatever they wanted to do. It is an image that neither the Dominican government nor Major League Baseball wants. And so, periodically, regulations are made. The age-sixteen-and-a-half rule helped lessen the unfair treatment of teenagers. A better minimum age would have been eighteen so that prospects finished high school education before leaving. But most baseball players, except big hitters, have their best years when they are in their twen
ties. This is when they have the most speed running bases, the most agility for fielding, and the best arms for throwing and especially pitching. Most players take about four years to develop for the majors. Few Dominican players had finished high school when they went off to their professional baseball careers, but for that matter fewer than one in three Dominicans had a high school education anyway. When a sixteen-year-old boy signed with a major-league organization, he had little education and no other skills: succeeding in baseball became his only chance. An occasional Rafael Vásquez did it in much less time, but then he washed out in one season. A few, like José Reyes, did it in only three years and went on to be stars. But when Major League Baseball signed a prospect, they calculated that it would take four years to get him into a major-league game. Some players, like Alfredo Griffin, find their rhythm that first year. Others take a year or two more to start realizing their full potential.

  So signing a player at sixteen meant that he would probably hit his athletic stride at about the age of twenty-two. Physically they might be ready to reach full potential at age twenty if they could be signed at age fourteen, but sixteen was still workable. Another factor in the equation was the widespread and unproven belief, both by Dominican and American baseball people, that Dominican boys took longer to mature.

  These teenagers who gambled everything on Major League Baseball signed a contract, got a signing bonus, and appeared to be on their way. But statistically their complete success remained very unlikely. A few hundred Dominicans are signed in a year, and probably only about three percent, maybe a dozen players, will ever play in a major-league stadium. And there is very little money in baseball between the signing bonus and the first major-league season.

  First they are taken to the club’s training ground in the Dominican Republic: the academy. From there they play a series of exhibition games known as Dominican Summer League. This is a last look before sending them to the United States. If they do well and are not released, they are then shipped to the States, usually to a remote, rural place, because that is where minor-league baseball is played. Sometimes they are brought to spring training first, but then they go to the Rookie League. Then, if they advance, they go to a Class A team. Sometimes, before getting there, players go to a subdivision, Class A Short Season. If they do well, they are moved up to Class A. From there they advance to Double A, unless they are released first. From there, things get even tougher. The last level, Triple A, is not far behind major league—except for the size of the stadium, the salaries, the perks. Triple A is full of major-league players. It is where major leaguers are sent to work out their problems or to get in some practice games while recovering from injuries. Some but not all major leaguers get back to the big leagues. A few new recruits get called up from Triple A to the major-league team. Some of those fail under pressure and are sent back down, but at least those few get to say they were in the major leagues. Most don’t even get to Triple A.

  The job of handing new prospects their signing bonus checks fell to a Dominican employee of Major League Baseball, Aaron Rodríguez. “What I love about it,” said Rodríguez, “is that the first thing most kids do with their money is improve their parents’ house. If it was wood it becomes blocks, or they paint it. But I always tell them to save a part of it. I tell them, ‘You are not big leaguers, and this is the biggest amount of money you are going to see until you get in the major leagues, and you may not get to the majors.’”

  They earned nothing while training at the academy. Dominican Summer League paid $600 a month, which was better than the sugar mills or the free zone or a resort-hotel job but not life changing. Even when they got to the U.S., minor-league players earned little. Not until the majors was there another chance at significant money. Usually the lecture was not necessary. Most of the young Dominicans bought something for their family. In many cases, a signing bonus alone is enough to change an entire family’s future.

  Alberto Medina worked as a welder on the big machines in Consuelo for sixteen pesos a day. His father was a field supervisor earning four pesos a day. Medina said, “If a kid gets a signing bonus of $25,000, that’s a million pesos! He isn’t poor anymore.”

  In the first few years of the twenty-first century, $25,000 was an average signing bonus, already ten times as much as Rico Carty, George Bell, and Sammy Sosa were paid.

  In 2008, 423 young Dominicans signed major-league contracts and were paid a total of $41,057,000 in signing bonuses. Both the number of players signed and the total amount of bonus money steadily increase from year to year. On July 2, 2008, under intense competition, a sixteen-year-old pitcher from Puerto Plata, Michael Inoa, received a $4.5 million signing bonus from the Oakland A’s. He was a six-foot-seven-inch right-hander throwing faster than 90 miles per hour. Height is increasingly valued in pitching, especially after the impressive career of Randy Johnson, who was six feet, ten inches tall and threw 100 miles per hour. A taller pitcher has long arms and releases the ball significantly closer to home plate, giving the hitter a split second less to identify the pitch. But also being longer and higher, he can get more torque on the throw because he is coming down from a higher position, which is why the pitcher’s place was raised to a mound in the first place.

  Some of the scouts compared Inoa to Randy Johnson. But Johnson was taller and he was left-handed. Left-handed pitchers are more valuable because they are rare. A six-foot-seven-inch right-handed pitcher from San Pedro had recently made it into baseball record books. On August 22, 2007, Daniel Cabrera, pitching for the Orioles, let a three-run lead slip past him and the Texas Rangers went on to win 30 to 3, the worst loss in Major League Baseball history since 1897.

  The Inoa bonus created a whole new level of daydreams among Dominican teenagers. Real wealth could be attained without a career, with only a signing bonus. Part of the reason was the rule concerning sixteen-year-olds. Every year there was a new crop of players who were to become available on July 2. All the scouts knew who they were before that date and had decided how far they were prepared to go in order to get which player. In 2008, Inoa was the one they were talking about most. The Red Sox had given more than a million-dollar bonus to a pitcher the summer before, and the talk was that the club that wanted Inoa was going to have to ante up even more.

  This kind of climate has done much to boost signing bonuses well over the $100,000 level, and they keep going up. In the 1990s, with bonuses increasing, scouts began thinking that there was more money in signing bonuses than in a major-league paycheck for scouting. Herman Martínez, a player from San Pedro who had turned scout, said of scouting, “You don’t get rich, but you can live on it.” But then a better opportunity started to appear, and Martínez, like many other scouts, left scouting to start a baseball school.

  The idea was not originally Dominican. After the draft was established in the U.S., men known as bird dogs began earning a living by training promising youth for the draft. In the Dominican Republic they became known as buscones, from the Spanish verb buscar, to look for. A buscón looked for promising youth, sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old, and worked with them every day for years, feeding them, training them, teaching them what they needed to know until they were ready, then got them a major-league tryout. When one of their boys signed, they got a percentage of the bonus. The percentage was not fixed: it was typically a quarter and sometimes as much as a half of the bonus.

  Not only was there the possibility of earning more money as a buscón than a scout, but to the way of thinking of some scouts, buscones were having all the fun. In the days of Avila and Guerrero, a scout scoured the wild Dominican countryside, sometimes sleeping in a jeep because there were no hotels. Now someone was leading them to prospects. The buscones were the ones who got to buscar.

  One of the first buscones in San Pedro plowed up the garden in front of his house to use as a training field. Soon they were occupying bigger fields and parks, renting or buying spaces. Bringing in millions a year, signing bonuses had beco
me the biggest business in San Pedro.

  Apollinaire Batista, like many Consuelo natives, was the son of a Haitian cane worker. Batista was a buscón. He supplied all his own equipment, trained teenagers until they were ready to be seen by major-league scouts, and arranged tryouts. If they signed, he said, he took five percent of the bonus, which was an unusually small cut. After the player was signed he found a new prospect, so that he was always working with a small group. He liked to get them at the age of twelve so that he had four years to develop them and they could be ready the moment they were old enough. The younger a prospect, the more money he fetched. So buscones wanted to present all their players as young as possible. But they also had to make sure they were ready, because a second or third tryout gets harder to arrange. Batista had players who were not ready until the age of twenty, which meant a significantly smaller bonus. “You can’t show them until they are ready,” he pointed out, shrugging.

  The boys worked out in the morning and went to school in the afternoon. Batista’s goal was to get every boy that he took on signed to a major-league organization. In his best year he got five boys signed. Francisco de los Santos, a seventeen-year-old right-handed pitcher who threw faster than 90 miles per hour and also had a good changeup and several breaking balls, was signed by the Mets in 2008. His bonus was $25,000, which was a considerable amount of money in Consuelo, even though by 2008, the year of the $4.8 million pitcher, $25,000 indicated only a modicum of excitement on the part of the Mets. Bartolo Nicolas, a young outfielder, signed with the Blue Jays for $20,000. Once those two were signed, Batista had another seven ready to show to scouts.