The Eastern Stars

by Mark Kurlansky

  None of this is good news for Dominicans. When a few innovators such as the Dodgers and Giants and Blue Jays went looking abroad for new talent, the Dominican Republic easily dominated their attention. It still does, but now there are programs to develop players all over the world—not just in Latin America and Asia but in Australia, where the first recorded game was in Melbourne in 1857; in Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa, where it has been played since the 1930s; and even Great Britain, although the British are not being easily lured.

  Even within Latin America it is getting more competitive. Major League Baseball has become particularly interested in Nicaragua, a country that in recent years has edged out the Dominican Republic for the distinction of being the second-poorest nation in the Americas. The unassailably poorest, Haiti, seems too convulsed in its own tragedy for baseball. And inevitably the day will come when the United States government will make peace with Cuba and stop requiring Cubans to desert their country—that is to say, defect—if they want to work in the United States. Once the U.S. allows Cubans to spend their summers playing baseball in the U.S. the way Dominicans and other Latin Americans do, Major League Baseball will be awash with talent from what is probably the richest vein of baseball players in the world.

  Even within the Dominican Republic, San Pedro had more competition. By 2008 only Santo Domingo, a city three times the size of San Pedro, had produced more major-league players than San Pedro, and only barely: 103 compared with 79. San Pedro had provided one out of every six of the 471 Dominican-born major-league players. But even though the pipeline—the academies and the minor-league system—was full of Macorisanos, San Pedro’s share was declining. Increasingly, players were coming from the poorest region of the country, the southwest, where there was not the rich soil of impoverished San Pedro but only an arid desert where people lived in sun-parched wooden huts and struggled for food and water. Major leaguers started coming from Bani, Azua, and even—like shortstop Julio Lugo—from Barahona, one of the poorest towns in this poor country. People in Barahona needed a way out even more desperately than Macorisanos.

  Still, it would be hard for a town to break the record of little San Pedro de Macorís, where seventy-nine major leaguers originated between 1962 and 2008. San Pedro has given the sport of baseball the most major-league players of any small town in the world. During those same years, New York City, with one of the oldest and strongest traditions in baseball history, produced 129 major-league players—not even twice as many—from twenty-seven times the population. And of course that included many Dom Yors such as Alex Rodriguez.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Fickle Judgment from the Peanut Gallery

  On the main street of Consuelo, amid stores and other one- and two-story commercial buildings, was one large two-story house bulging and drooling white wrought-iron curlicues from its many door gates, window grates, and balcony rails. On the second story was an elderly woman in a rocking chair watching the street life below. It was eighty-seven-year-old Felicia Franco, the mother of Julio Franco, who chose to take her name rather than his father’s. She had three sons. Julio was the only major leaguer. Older brother Vicente Franco was said to be a good pitcher for Consuelo in the 1960s, but he threw out his arm. He lived there with his mother. The third son never played and now lived in New York.

  When Julio played in a game that was on television, friends and neighbors used to pack into the roomy house. In 1985, only three years into his long career, Julio built the house for his mother. Her husband, who was dead, could never have built a house like this. He had been a jack-of-all-trades in the mill—what the mills called, borrowing a baseball term, as a utility man.

  With the typical disloyalty of a San Pedro fan, she was a die-hard Licey supporter. Her reason was simple: “They’re the best. They’re going to win again this year,” she correctly predicted, even though the Estrellas were in first place at the time.

  Although he didn’t live there, the house was mostly about Julio. There was a large photo of young Julio in a Texas Rangers uniform with the team’s owner at the time, a young and, as always, uncomfortable-looking George W. Bush, who had inscribed the photo to Julio: Let’s win together. There was also an even larger photo of Julio with the elder President Bush, looking, as always, somehow in pain. They were posing in front of a washing machine as though they were doing their laundry together—which seemed hard to believe.

  Julio Franco had one of the longest careers in major-league history, spanning twenty-five years from April 1982 until September 2007, when he retired at age forty-nine. He maintained an impressive career batting average of .298, getting a hit one out of every three times at bat for twenty-five years. His total of 2,586 hits was the most by any Dominican major-league player. He held a number of gerontological records. He was the oldest regular-position player—an everyday player—in major-league history, passing racist Cap Anson’s record by three years. He was the last player in baseball born in the 1950s. From 2004 until his retirement, he was the oldest player in baseball and made age records on a regular basis. On April 26, 2006, pinch-hitting for the Mets, he hit a home run against the Padres, making him the oldest major-league player ever to hit a home run. He hit another on September 30 and one more on May 4 of the following year. He was also the oldest player to hit a grand slam—a home run with the bases loaded. He was the oldest player ever to hit two home runs in the same game, and the oldest to steal two bases in the same game. He would have been the oldest player to steal a base except that, in 1909, Arlie Latham, age forty-nine, came out of retirement to play one game with the Giants and stole a base. Franco tried again on June 20, 2007, at age forty-eight while playing for the Mets against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. He got on base, beating forty-four-year-old pitcher Roger Clemens, but was picked off when he tried to steal second on him. Still, it went into the records as the oldest pitcher-batter baserunning duel in major-league history.

  After he retired he returned to San Pedro not to live but just to pass some time playing dominos with old friends and his brother Vicente. He had his own house on a dirt street of new houses in a different part of town from his mother’s, although nothing in Consuelo is very far away. Ask anyone in Consuelo, and he would know where Julio Franco’s house was. It was a two-story pink stucco-and-stone house behind a high wall with a solid steel gate that was kept locked even on the rare occasions when Franco was there. It was a more luxurious house than most people in Consuelo had; few of the other players maintained houses there. But it was not an ostentatious mansion, because that was not the way people did things in Consuelo, even if they became rich. If you want a mansion, you have to build it somewhere else, as Sammy Sosa and Alfredo Griffin did.

  When he was in Consuelo, Franco could be found in the back of the house on a red-tiled patio where a roof with a ceiling fan was held up by Grecian pillars. Julio sat there in a T-shirt and jeans, lean and fit and youthful looking at fifty, a middle-aged face on a twenty-five-year-old’s body, relaxed, home at last, playing dominos with two of his best friends, Vicente and Vicente’s friend Guillermo.

  They slapped the domino tiles on the table hard, making the prerequisite loud clack, and kept score with chalk on the table edge.

  “I come back here once or twice a year, sometimes at Christmas,” Franco said. “I like to stay in Consuelo. I go to the ballpark here, the gym. I like to stay here, surrounded by people I know.” Without warning he slammed a domino tile down, smiled at his brother, and started shouting, “I got him! I got him!” Julio liked to compete. He really liked to win.

  No longer a player, his new ambition was to be a manager. He had a family in Fort Lauderdale, and moving back to San Pedro was nowhere in his plans.

  “I could have kept playing,” Julio observed, “but nobody thinks a fifty-year-old can help a ball club. They would rather give a chance to a young prospect. I understand that.”

  One of the reasons he would not stay in San Pedro was that in his twenty-five years in
Major League Baseball he had earned millions of dollars, and everyone in San Pedro knew it.

  “What I’m not going to do is give money to a guy on the street. I will give someone money for medicine, I will give money to a mother to buy milk. I’ll give a kid a glove and could take him to a ball game, but that’s as far as I go.”

  He said that he was frequently asked for money “by people who call me a friend. My real friends never have to ask me. They know I would help them if they needed it. If you had a million dollars and you gave a dollar to a million people, the million-and-first person would complain. You’re not going to satisfy everyone.”

  Sammy Sosa’s experience offers an example of this dilemma. At the height of his career he was being paid $10 million a year to play baseball, and after his home-run derby with Mark McGwire he started earning millions of additional dollars in advertising appearances and celebrity endorsements. He became an industry besieged with offers. Possibly the weirdest was from the man who wanted Sosa to send him his soiled undershirts after each game to be encased in Lucite and sold as memorabilia. Other ideas included a soft drink and Sammy Sosa Salsa.

  In San Pedro, where Sosa’s wealth was well known and, no matter how rich you are, you are even richer in the minds of the poor, he was constantly criticized for not giving enough. This was partly because he talked so much, especially to the U.S. press, about how much he was giving. The reason he was questioned about his contribution to hurricane relief in 1999 was that he had made such a show of giving it, and yet people felt they weren’t seeing it. Mayor Cedeño claimed that Sosa had raised money in Japan to rebuild one thousand homes destroyed by Hurricane George but the money never turned up in San Pedro. Sosa said that the deal with the Japanese fell through over disputes about who would build the homes.

  Sosa responded to Mayor Cedeño’s accusation, saying, “Never is it enough. I want the people in the United States to know I’ve done the best I can to help my people. I can only do so much. I can’t do everything.”

  Sosa always did things with big displays and a lot of noise. In his 1998 “Up with People” tour, he went to San Pedro with a lot of press and handed out gifts on the street. In 1999, Sosa, the former shoe-shine boy, took two hundred shoe-shine boys in Santo Domingo to lunch, to which Macorisanos responded that he had failed to do anything for their shoeshine boys.

  But it seemed that almost anything Sammy did turned to scandal. In 1998 he gave New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani the bat with which he had supposedly hit his sixty-sixth home run that season. Governor George Pataki got number fifty-nine. But the Baseball Hall of Fame revealed that they had both of those bats, and Sosa admitted to having gotten a little carried away with the moment. “The Mayor was so nice to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to disappoint him.”

  In 2000, Fortune magazine reported that Sosa’s Plaza 30/30 was assessed at $2.7 million and had been donated to his foundation for a tax savings of at least $1 million. Aside from a clinic, which was always packed with poor people and where, Sosa claimed, 150 children were inoculated a day and dental care was provided, the principal tenant was his sister, who operated a boutique, a beauty salon, and a disco but paid no rent. The magazine reported that Sosa was not putting money into the foundation and it was near bankruptcy even though his friend and onetime competitor Mark McGwire had contributed $100,000 to it. In 2001, Art Sandoval, the administrator of Sosa’s charitable foundation, claimed that the entire foundation, including Plaza 30/30 and its clinic, had been set up as a tax scheme that saved Sosa millions. While legal wrongdoings were never proven, even in an IRS investigation, the damage to Sosa’s image remained in the minds of many Macorisanos.

  In 1999, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) planned to give Sosa their International Brotherhood Award but then complained that he had demanded a private jet to pick him up in Santo Domingo, fly him to the awards in New York, and then fly him to Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson fight. Also, according to CORE, Sosa wanted them to provide him with a luxury hotel suite and two other rooms for associates, buy him five ringside seats at the fight, set up a fund-raising dinner with CORE contributors, and guarantee at least $60,000 in contributions for Dominican hurricane relief. He also wanted to bring memorabilia to sell at the awards event. They could not come to terms and Sosa did not attend. CORE national chairman Roy Innis said that Sosa “has to learn how to deal with his fifteen minutes of fame.” And that was exactly the problem: baseball stars are famous and they do earn millions, but only for a great moment.

  For Macorisanos, Sosa had become the symbol of the idea that their players did not really come through for them. San Pedro’s heroes, like those of the Greeks, had flaws. If they were seen in San Pedro, as Rico Carty was, Macorisanos forgave them. But if they were rarely seen in town, then they had turned their backs and were not forgiven.

  Sosa did not live in San Pedro. Instead he built a $5 million mansion in Santo Domingo. He would often tell American reporters how much he loved his hometown and how he had San Pedro scenes depicted on stained-glass windows in his mansion. But outside the window was not San Pedro.

  Alexander, a young man in Consuelo, said, “I know Sammy Sosa. I know some of his family. In ’98 he built a big mansion in Santo Domingo. First he built a normal house in San Pedro, but once he built the mansion in Santo Domingo, we didn’t see him anymore.”

  Sammy’s grandmother, Rosa Julia Sosa, still lived in a three-room cinder-block house in Consuelo. When the New York Daily News went to interview her in 1999, she complained that she hadn’t seen him in two years and asked the reporter for money.

  After his retirement in 2007, Sosa abandoned his mansion in the capital for La Romana, where George Bell—who abandoned his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce—also lived. Joaquín Andújar, who also left his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce, left San Pedro entirely for Santo Domingo in 2008. San Pedro was finding it difficult to attract its wealthy ex-ballplayers.

  La Romana and San Pedro, while both eastern sugar towns, were very different. Although both had considerable poverty, the river in La Romana was filled not with nineteen-foot fishing boats but with fifty-foot yachts. Bell built a new home at the guarded and gated La Romana resort of Casa de Campo, which had white stucco villas and seven thousand acres designed by Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta. Impossible for the casual visitor or neighborhood Dominican to enter, this private compound of mostly foreigners was the ultimate in wealthy exclusion. Perhaps of even greater interest to Bell, it had two golf courses planned by the celebrated course designer Pete Dye.

  Bell played golf every Saturday and Sunday. Not surprising for a man who became a star because of his hand-eye coordination and smooth swing, he was a good golfer. So was Babe Ruth. Bell had a four handicap. “I could do better,” he said. “But as soon as you are good, no one plays with you, and it’s no fun.”

  In middle age, Bell was still large, muscular, broad-shouldered, and fit—a tough-looking man with the handle of a handgun sticking up from the back of his blue-jeans waistband. He explained that he carried a gun because he didn’t “want anyone messing with me.” It was hard to believe anyone would, but he was a very wealthy man in a crime-ridden and impoverished land.

  Bell, who had made about $2 million a year as a player, invested his money. He owned a construction company that built condominiums and a farm that used to produce dairy and then became a lemon plantation. For a while he rented it to his old team, the Blue Jays, as an academy, but they moved and he had trouble finding another team. That business was becoming very competitive. He lived a quiet life playing golf, fishing for marlin, and running his businesses.

  “I don’t really spend my time with other baseball players,” he said. “I like to be alone. I was like that when I was playing, too. I don’t like to stay out late, don’t like to drink because I feel terrible the next day. I went to Alfredo’s disco for the inauguration and never went back. I don’t want to be out on the Malecón. I like to be home by nine o’clock. I
don’t like people bothering me.”

  Although his friend with the disco on the Malecón, Alfredo Griffin, was very different, he was one of the few baseball players with whom Bell maintained a friendship. Together they organized an annual charity golf tournament.

  Mayor Tony Echavaría said of the local baseball stars, “Some make a lot of noise when they do things; others do it very quietly.”

  Most of the ex-players, whether they had money or not, had charitable foundations. Supporting youth programs was a favorite activity. Rico Carty had played baseball before ballplayers became fabulously wealthy, but he had a large house and a good car and lived better than most Macorisanos. And he had the Rico Carty Foundation, which was located in a beat-up downtown building. Inside the dank and dark offices, no phones were ringing and no one was working. They were playing dominoes—a tough-looking group of men. The furniture was flimsy and the doors were blackened from fingerprints. The scene was reminiscent of the local party offices under Balaguer where patronage was dispensed to supporters and punishment to opponents. One of the domino players, a burly, overweight black man with a shaved head and enormous hands, was Rico Carty.

  Carty explained that the Rico Carty Foundation needed money.

  What does the foundation do?

  “Helps poor people,” he explained. “Gives them medicine, things like that.”

  He wanted to be paid $500 to be interviewed. “It’s not for me,” he protested without prodding. “It’s for the foundation.”

  He was offered more than $500 worth of medicine, but he insisted on cash and looked sad and disappointed when he realized he wasn’t going to get it. “I’ve given a hundred interviews,” he said in a cranky tone, “and what do I have to show for it?”

  Most of the ex-players had their own ideas about helping their town. Tony Fernández had a six-hundred-acre farm on the outskirts of San Pedro that he used as a retreat for orphans, with dormitories, chapels, meeting rooms, and a baseball diamond. He also built an orphanage. Orphanages were his primary concern. He pushed the importance of education. But most of the male orphans he talked to about education were hoping to impress him with their baseball talent so they could someday get signed.