The Eastern Stars (26 page)

Macorisanos believed in winning, and if the Estrellas were not winning it was their own fault. Julio García, the Cubs’ academy pitching coach, complained, “Everybody here is a manager. They all consider themselves baseball experts.” Not that it was any different in his native Cuba, where a spot is reserved in Havana’s Parque Central for angrily tearing apart the mismanagement of yesterday’s games. The spot is called the
esquina caliente
, the hot corner. There is no such spot officially reserved in San Pedro’s Parque Central, but that doesn’t stop Macorisanos from having a lot to say.

Dominicans are great fatalists, believing that the future is sealed supernaturally and beyond anyone’s control. They talk a lot about the role of curses, what is called in the Dominican Republic a
fukú
. Americans are different, but American baseball fans understand. Everyone on the North Side of Chicago knows that the Cubs are cursed. That particular curse, the curse of the billy goat, stemming from the ejection of a smelly goat from Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series, even sounds like a Dominican
fukú
. New Englanders knew well the curse of the Bambino that kept the Red Sox from winning a World Series for eighty-six years. And when it was revealed that a shirt of Red Sox slugger David Ortiz—it would have to be a Dominican player to make a good curse—was buried in the concrete of the new Yankee Stadium to curse them, the Yankees management took it seriously enough to pay thousands of dollars to weekend overtime workers to find it and dig it up.

Dominicans see curses at work everywhere. Trujillo used curses. Everyone dabbles in the supernatural. But not in baseball. The reverse of Americans, Dominicans see fatalistic, supernatural forces in life but only science in baseball. If the Estrellas kept losing, there was something wrong with management. Dominicans would not cling to their Indians, or Red Sox, or Cubs, and complain of Bambinos and goats. They just moved on to a team that knew how to win.

Bonny Castillo played twelve years for the Estrellas. “We find any way we can to lose,” he said. “In 1985 we were in the finals, beating Escogido 3 to 1. We lost the next three games. In 1982 we led the league in runs and batting. The team batting average was .305. We beat the Águilas and made the finals.” Then they went home to San Pedro to celebrate. The team’s two best starting pitchers were riding together, and on the bridge over the Higuama, entering San Pedro, they pulled out to pass a bus and hit an oncoming car. Both pitchers were through for the season.

 

G
riffin, who had been having notable success with the Angels in California, was expected to turn things around in San Pedro. And he hadn’t. Griffin knew he was a disappointment. “The fans think that because I’m involved, we are going to win for sure,” he said.

The problem with the modern Dominican League was not that different from the problem in the great showdown of 1937. Then it was a question of who had the money to bring in the most Negro Leaguers and Cubans. In the modern Dominican League it was a question of who had enough money to bring in the most major leaguers. And the answer was clearly Licey, a team that tried to have fifteen or more major-league players on their roster.

José Mercedes, with his roots in San Pedro, explained why he liked pitching for Licey. “Licey pays more and they treat the players well,” he said. “They treat you as family. I always heard this, but this was my first season and it’s true. They clinched the playoffs and they sent me a bottle of champagne.”

Major League Baseball is not a stranger to such inequality. There are tremendous differences in what organizations can afford. In 2008 the highest-paid player was Alex Rodriguez for the New York Yankees. His $28 million salary was more money than the entire roster, disabled list included, of his hometown team, the Florida Marlins. But the Marlins had won two World Series, as have other low-budget teams. The consistency with which the money teams, Licey and Águilas, won the championship was difficult to ignore.

At the start of the new century the Dominican League began addressing this inequality. A draft, similar to the major-league draft, was initiated in which the losing team had the first pick of available players. Griffin was among the many who thought that this would even out the results. But in the first six years of the draft, either Águilas or Licey won every year.

It was growing harder to get major-league players. The major-league clubs did not like their multimillion-dollar properties risking injury in the Dominican Republic in the off-season. It had happened too many times. Everyone remembered 1971 when Rico Carty, at the height of his skills, was out for a year from an injury playing for Escogido. The clubs started limiting the participation of their players. “When I was in the majors,” Bonny Castillo complained, “they let us play. They’re probably protecting their money.” Attitudes change when a few million dollars have been invested in the player.

Griffin claimed that the reason the Estrellas went on a losing streak at the end of the season was that they had lost their best players, including two San Pedro natives, Daniel Cabrera and Robinson Canó. Griffin had to use Cabrera judiciously because the Orioles would only allow him to pitch five games for the Estrellas. Now, at the end of the season, his five games were used up. Canó, one of the Estrellas’ most reliable hitters, could no longer play because the Yankees had allowed him to play in only ten games.

To Macorisanos this was not an acceptable explanation for their six-game slide at the critical end of the season. “It’s just an excuse,” said José Canó. “One player doesn’t decide a team.” And it was true that there were numerous other major-league players on the Estrellas, including Fernando Tatis. Griffin, it was felt, had not done what he had to do to win, although there was some disagreement around town about just what that would have been. The general feeling was that he had failed to assemble a good enough team.

Dominican League teams wanted the major leaguers not only because they wanted to win games but also because they wanted to earn money and these were the players who drew the crowds, especially when they played in their hometowns. Another reason why the crowd did not turn out in Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the critical game was that neither Cabrera nor Canó was playing.

Although the pay was low by Major League Baseball standards, star quality was important. When Griffin was a player, the Estrellas wouldn’t use him regularly until he won Rookie of the Year. Julio Guerrero, the very tall, lean, broad-shouldered pitcher from Porvenir, in his best year made Triple A for the Pirates for three weeks. That was enough to get him a salary of 40,000 pesos a month from the Estrellas the following winter. But when he dropped down from Triple A, the Estrellas paid him less. A top salary for a major leaguer was only about 300,000 pesos—about $10,000.

Mercedes said, “When I was playing in the major leagues, I didn’t even think about the money here. But any kind of baseball—you have to love baseball to play it.”

“But I’ll tell you something,” said Bonny Castillo in spring 2008. “Young players improve when they play winter baseball. Ervin Santana is having a better year for the Angels this year because he pitched for Licey last winter. He threw thirty innings. Young players need added experience.”

Young major-league players, not all of them Dominican, came down to the Dominican Republic to play winter baseball and improve their game.

 

I
n the Dominican Republic, time is an approximation. So even though the baseball games started late, many fans did not get there for the first inning. The poor were more punctual. The cheap seats, benches along right and left field, were filled at game time, but the better center seats, which could be as high as $6 or $7, only filled gradually during the course of the early innings.

The worst seats in Tetelo Vargas were in the press box. It was an enclosed room with a long window with rumbling air-conditioning. Being sealed off in air-conditioning gave the press a sense of superiority, and they sat in there drinking rum and beer and arguing about Middle Eastern terrorism. It was hard to concentrate on the game from the press room because, unable to hear the pop of the bat or the snap of the pitch hitting the mitt or the screams of the crowd, the people in the press box were not involved.

Noise was part of Dominican baseball, as with most things Dominican. Estrellas fans were equipped with incredibly loud green noisemakers. Vendors sold them. Estrellas fans wore green. The women wore it in such tight clothes that they appeared to have green skin. The women were dressed in their most spectacular and revealing outfits because the games were televised and in between plays the cameramen liked to zoom in on women who caught their eye. If you were done up right, you could get on television. That, too, was Dominican sports. The sports pages in the newspapers always featured cheesecake photos of women, with no further explanation offered.

When the Estrellas scored, the sound system trumpeted jungle-stirring elephant noise. Someone in an Estrellas uniform with an elephant head was on the field dancing merengue at propitious moments. Vendors sold homemade confections of wrenching sweetness. Between innings there were cheerleaders in skintight white and green with suggestive hip movements and a lot of skin showing in many different shades.

The Estrellas would have to win this game or be eliminated. Then they had to win the next game to come to a tie and force yet another game, which they would also have to win to be in the playoff. There was no room for mistakes now. Any loss in the next three games and Las Estrellas would once again go down in defeat.

As the Águilas came onto the field, old friends among them came over to Griffin and they hugged. Given the situation, Griffin seemed remarkably calm. He explained, “There is so much pressure in playing a game seven of a World Series that, once you’ve done that, you never feel pressure anymore.” Griffin was on three World Series-winning teams.

Griffin started right-hander Kenny Ray, mainly a relief pitcher, who had played with Kansas City but in recent years was struggling with injuries to his arm. The Águilas started with Bartolo Colón, a hometown hero in their Cibao region who started for Griffin’s own Angels, for whom he had won pitching’s highest honor, the Cy Young Award, in 2005. Despite this seemingly unequal match, Ray pitched well, and with some good hitting the Estrellas had a 4-to-3 lead in the middle of the game. Elephant sounds were heard. Then the Águilas scored four runs. But to the trumpeting of plastic horns, the Estrellas came back with two more runs. The Estrellas had their last chance in the eighth inning, when they were down by only one run, 7 to 6. They loaded the bases with only one out. Then they did a typical Estrellas maneuver: they hit into an inning-ending double play. Another disappointing year for the Estrellas Orientales.

 

 

 

W
hen George Bell was a teenager playing in Santa Fe, he fell while avoiding a flying bat and hit his right eye on the corner of a bench. The discoloration under his right eye never went away, and so Bell always looked as though he had just been in a fight and gotten a black eye. When he was a player, the press constantly asked him about his black eye. This was in part the image of a Dominican player—a brawler—but it was also who George Bell was. Once when he was playing for the Blue Jays in Toronto’s Sky Dome, he delivered an unmistakable gesture with his middle finger to some 50,000 booing fans. Bell was booed a lot, and he always said that it was bigotry directed against him because he was a Dominican. But some of the fans said that it was because he was a bad outfielder. He often failed at critical plays and was booed for that. Eventually, over his angry protests, he was taken out of the field and made a designated hitter who only stepped in to bat for the pitcher. Batting was what made him valuable.

Boston Globe
columnist Dan Shaughnessy once wrote, “Baseball fans hear the name ‘George Bell’ and they think of tantrums, bumps with umpires, confrontations with pitchers and public pouts.” He went on to say that Bell would “never get the recognition he deserves as long as he wears the badge of the Loco Latin.” The “Loco Latin” badge has kept many Dominicans from getting their due, but Bell was particularly insensitive to this problem. Bell played baseball as a contact sport. Not only was he known for running over catchers and even basemen—an accepted practice to make them drop the ball—but he was also notorious for “charging the mound.” If he was hit by a pitch, he ran up to the pitcher’s mound and threw a punch at the pitcher. At least once he tried out the karate kick he had learned in karate school back in San Pedro. In his autobiography,
Hard Ball
, published in 1990 when he was still a player, he attempted to explain this behavior:

Eighteen years later, in a 2008 interview in La Romana, Bell—now a middle-aged man—hadn’t softened in the least. “Every time I got hit I would kick their butt,” he stated.

You mean literally?

“Fuck yes. They are trying to intimidate you.”

Bell felt justified because he believed, as Pedro González had before him, that pitchers were hitting him intentionally because he was a Dominican. He would hear angry fans shouting pejorative comments about Dominicans. He always remembered a restaurant in Milwaukee in 1989 that refused to serve him and two other Dominican players.