The Eastern Stars (24 page)

Being a catcher, José’s father could work with his son on his pitches, which they did three days a week. Four months later he was signed by the Atlanta Braves, and at the age of nineteen he was pitching for a Single A team in Anderson, South Carolina.

Now he was an American-fed ballplayer, no longer a thin 145 pounds but a large, powerful man who stood six feet, three inches tall and threw hard, with a good breaking ball and a good changeup. For the next two years he pitched in the farm system, all the time enduring pain in his right throwing arm. No one would ever know how painful it was. Canó just endured it in silence: he was not going to complain about it and risk getting released again. He couldn’t count on getting picked up a third time. Finally, when he could not endure the pain anymore, he told management and they sent him to a doctor. But the doctor could find nothing wrong and recommended three weeks’ rest. They released him and he was back in the Dominican Republic.

He would not let his story end there. He played in the 1985 Dominican League for the La Romana Azucareros and his arm felt good all winter. He started to wonder why his arm hurt in America but never troubled him when he pitched at home. He pitched well and the Houston Astros offered him a contract, but there was no signing bonus: it was clear by then that he was a risky property. Canó had no objections; he just wanted to play and get his shot at the majors. He was getting older and it was now beyond a question of pay. He had to be able to come home a member of the club, a major-league ballplayer.

He pitched well in the 1987 season but still didn’t tell anyone how uncomfortable his arm felt. He was sent to the Florida state league, where he won twenty-five games and lost three, a phenomenal record. He was throwing a fastball at 97 miles per hour. There was talk of him going to the big leagues. In 1988 he made it to the Houston Astros, a big leaguer at last. But it was discovered that he needed shoulder surgery, and so he didn’t pitch that season.

Finally, on August 28, 1989, at the age of twenty-seven, José Canó pitched his first major-league game. This was his moment to show the world how good he was. Facing the Chicago Cubs, he pitched so well that they kept him in for the entire game, which he won. Complete games had become a rarity. Major-league teams have on their rosters batteries of middle relievers, setup men, and closers. A pitcher who gets to the seventh inning has done well. Nine innings is just too hard on a pitcher’s arm, especially a power pitcher like Canó. But he did it. If he had been twenty-one instead of twenty-seven, it might have been the beginning of a promising career.

The next game he started in, he lost. He was used a few times as a reliever. He played in six games in all with a win-loss record of 1 and 1. And then his career was over. The following year he injured his back; the season after that management watched him in spring training and decided to release him.

Canó started playing for the Azucareros in the Winter League and with the Mexican League in the fall. He played for a few years in Taiwan. But he never got back to the U.S. He was careful with the money he earned in baseball. He bought a house and a building that he rented out for income.

José had four children, two sons and two daughters. The daughters he sent to college. But he had other plans for the boys. He named both sons after major leaguers: his first son after Jackie Robinson and his second after himself. From an early age he taught them baseball. José thought he was just being like every San Pedro father. “Every father looks at the big leagues and says, ‘My son could be one of them,’” he said. “The kids play twenty-four hours a day. Kids here get up in the morning and they work, and if they have free time they play baseball; and if they watch television they don’t watch cartoons, they watch baseball.”

When Robinson was a small boy, José would take him to the park to play baseball and passersby would say, “Look at that kid! He’s going to be a big leaguer.” But Macorisanos are always on the lookout for the next big leaguer.

José wanted his oldest son to be a pitcher, but having seen how his father had struggled—the constant pain, the arm and shoulder packed in ice—Robinson just didn’t want to do it. By the time he was sixteen, his father realized that he was a natural left-handed hitter—too good a hitter to be a pitcher. In the American League, pitchers don’t even bat, but even in the National League, they are only in every fourth or fifth game; relief pitchers play only a few innings.

Robinson finished high school and, like his father, signed with the Yankees when he was eighteen years old. Twenty-one years later it was not the same game. Instead of $2,000 to spend in a shopping mall, Robinson signed for $150,000, which by then, though better than average, was not even considered a huge bonus. Bidding was not competitive. There was not a lot of interest in him because he did not run well.

He called his father at eleven at night to tell him he was signing and the size of the bonus. Robinson told him, “You don’t need to worry about money. I’m going to have a lot of money. I’m going to be a big leaguer.”

The family already had a house, so Robinson bought himself a car and saved the rest of the money. Not as tall as his father, he, too, was a skinny boy until he went to America and got built up, which put power behind his smooth swing. He played his first game in Yankee Stadium in 2005 and was immediately a batting star, hitting over .300. He was not a slugger who constantly hit home runs; however, he did hit more than sixty in his first three years (his father in his only season hit two, but that was respectable for a pitcher). Robinson was a consistent hitter getting on base, driving in runs. In 2008 he drove in the last run to be scored in historic Yankee Stadium before it was torn down.

His prediction about money came true: in 2008 alone he earned $3 million—considerably less money than a few of his teammates made, but a phenomenal mountain of wealth in San Pedro. He was likely to amass a fortune by the time his major-league career ended. But in some ways he remained a small-town kid from San Pedro, living quietly in Fort Lee, New Jersey, shunning the life of a Manhattan celebrity enjoyed by some of his teammates.

Robinson was an emotional player, given to batting slumps and slow-starting seasons. He probably would have felt very isolated in an earlier generation. Charlie Romero remembered, “The mail doesn’t work here. When I was playing baseball, my parents didn’t know how the season went until I came home in the fall. Your first year or so you are homesick. When you have a bad day, a bad game, you want to hear your mother’s voice telling you it’s okay. Now they have cell phones.”

It was not his mother’s voice that Robinson Canó heard after a bad game, and the voice was not always telling him it was okay. After one game Robinson called his father’s cell phone.

“How’d you do?” José asked.

Robinson said, “One for four,” or one hit in four at-bats.

“That’s not good enough,” José told his son. “If you can hit him once, you should be able to at least twice—maybe not four times, but at least twice. He’s going to think that you won’t expect the same thing, because you already hit it. So he will do it again to fool you.” It is an advantage for a hitter to have a pitcher for a father.

José’s other son, Joselito, was another skinny Dominican boy waiting to get American-fed. This time José was determined to produce a pitcher. Joselito showed early signs of a strong arm, mastering breaking balls when he was quite young. And he was left-handed.

But, like his brother, Joselito had watched his father suffer and did not want to be a pitcher. He was not yet fifteen years old when this lanky boy showed a gift for smooth-handed fielding, a powerful throwing arm, and the kind of flowing swing that can’t be taught. Plus, he could bat from either side of the plate: he was a natural switch-hitter.

José had a number of business interests around San Pedro, including a little club, Club Las Caobas, named for an unpaved street next to the field where the Porvenir softball team played. It was a round, fenced-off, open-air dance space with a bar—a breezy place to go in the evening and play dominos and drink and dance. On the back wall, dominating the club, was a larger-than-life-size mural of Robinson Canó at bat in Tampa spring training.

José was also a
buscón
. He ran the José Canó Baseball Academy, which worked out every morning before school. From its founding in 1999 through 2008, the academy got twenty players signed. Canó spent $1,500 a month keeping his academy running in an old ball field in Barrio México near the Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Over the outfield wall, in the distance, the twin smokestacks of the Cristóbal Colón mill could be seen. He periodically went to New York to visit his son and pick up used balls and other discarded equipment from the Yankees.

José not only trained his players, he taught them. One of the things he told them was: “If you have five pesos to buy something, make sure it’s food.”

“Salami,” suggested one of the young players.

“Salami is not food. Neither is cake,” he said.

Among the most promising prospects at this academy was Joselito Canó, because of his talent as well as his good family background. Major League Baseball had come to like the idea of Dominican baseball families. It had started early and well with the Alou brothers. The Canós had become a San Pedro family that had made it—at last.

Along one side of Ingenio Porvenir was a swayback one-story neighborhood on an unpaved street. It was referred to as a
batey
, which it had once been, but it was no longer surrounded by cane fields, only housing. Still, it was where sugar workers who labored long hours inside the mill were housed, in order to be next to their workplace. Most of the residents were
cocolo
and still spoke a West Indian English-Spanglish.

The neighborhood was within walking distance of the sea, although it was a serious hike. There the locals set nets, which they called fish bags. They left them for a few days, then salted down their catch to make salt fish, a West Indian staple. In the fall the local
cocolos
raised pigs in the urban neighborhood to eat at Christmastime. They made a strong but smooth distilled corn alcohol and aged it by burying it in the ground, and for Christmas they made strong guavaberry.

“Everybody gets drunk for Christmas,” declared a man known in the neighborhood as Ñato. His favorite recipe was a dish he called English steamed fish. (When
cocolos
used the term
English
, they meant the English-speaking Caribbean.) This was his recipe, in his own words:

The best-known house in the
batey
was a turquoise-painted part-wood-and-part-concrete shack with a corrugated metal roof belonging to Ñato, whose real name was Felito James Guerrero. His mother was from San Pedro and his father from Antigua. Ñato’s father had come to San Pedro to cut cane at the age of seventeen but managed to get a better job inside the mill as a mechanic; when he died in San Pedro, an elderly man, he had been back to visit his family in his native Antigua only once. It was a typical San Pedro
cocolo
story.

The dark three-room shack where Ñato lived smelled of liniment. A steady stream of teenage baseball players, one with a strained thigh, one hit by a ball on the elbow, lined up there. This was where coaches and managers sent players with physical problems. Sammy Sosa came to him when he was just starting. In 2008, while playing for the Estrellas Orientales, Robinson Canó came by with a problem.

Most of the people in the neighborhood worked for Porvenir half of the year and sold fruit on the street or did whatever else they could to earn money during the dead season. Ñato had seen baseball as his way out and struggled as a second baseman and a catcher. But no one signed him. As a boy a boxer had taught him to work on injuries and give massages, and he started doing that for boxers in the off-season. Then he started helping the
cocolo
cricket players of the neighborhood and even some basketball players. But it was inevitable that Ñato’s business, being located in San Pedro, would mostly involve working with baseball players. In 2000 he stopped working for Porvenir to do his therapy full-time. He charged about ten dollars for a two-visit treatment.

Around the corner from Ñato’s home, on a street whose pavement was so crumbly that it, too, would soon be unpaved—stood a small yellow concrete house with white wrought-iron gates. It was in the shadow of the tall smokestacks of Porvenir, and facing the sign thanking the president for the new
zafra
. The Corporáns lived there. There was no need for Alcadio to thank the president because—after working most of his life for Porvenir and reaching the level of supervisor—he no longer had the strength for a new
zafra
or anything else. A sinewy but frail man who seldom spoke, he stumbled around the house’s cramped rooms with his heart condition: a warm, friendly man but exhausted, worked nearly to death at the sugar mill.

The house was a small rectangle with a corrugated metal roof, pleasant from the outside in its lemon yellow. The floor was a concrete slab painted with considerable artistry to resemble green marble. The rectangle was divided with Sheetrock into rooms and, like so many San Pedro homes, the doorways had curtains for doors. A television with powdery images was on most of the time. Alcadio glanced at it with no real interest. There was a stove, a refrigerator, a stereo, and running water some of the time.

In a tiny kitchen Alcadio’s wife, Isabel de los Santos, made food for an enormous extended family with eight children, their spouses, and their children. A favorite, as in most Macorisano homes, was
pescado y domplin
. This was Isabel’s recipe for fish and dumplings: