The Eastern Stars (13 page)

Back in the Dominican Republic, it was more complicated to sort out his contracts. Realizing what he had done, he said that he wanted to play for his hometown Estrellas Orientales. Trujillo was furious and Carty was taken to court—a Trujillo court. But in the end, a good ballplayer could be forgiven in a Trujillo court, and he was allowed to play for Estrellas.

The Braves sent Carty to play minor-league baseball in Waycross, Georgia, where he thought Jim Crow laws did not apply to him because he was a Latino. Like Pedro González, he ate a lot of chicken because he could say that. Later he learned how to order hamburgers.

In the United States, it was difficult to find familiar foods. In his autobiography, Felipe Alou wrote of being revolted by the coldness of the milk. In rural Dominican Republic, milk generally arrived unpasteurized and was boiled for safety and served warm. But chicken was the one familiar food they could find.

This story about only knowing how to order chicken is repeated over and over again by the early San Pedro major leaguers. Why was that the word they knew? Not all of them even knew that. San Pedro players tell stories of Dominican rookies favoring fast-food restaurants that offered photographs so they could simply point to the chicken picture or even walk in, flap their arms, and make chicken noises to indicate their orders. Poor Dominicans live on a diet of rice, beans, tropical fruits, root vegetables, and occasionally a chicken.

On the wide main curving street that runs by the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, there are many small restaurant-bars where fans can watch American baseball games on large-screen TVs. They serve mostly chicken. Chicken may have been, as González suggested, the word they set out to learn. Chicken is popular and good in San Pedro. As in much of the Caribbean, most of it is free-range, because sending chickens foraging is the most cost-effective approach in the tropics.

Not all Dominican players chose chicken. “Ham and eggs” was another phrase the Dominican players quickly learned to say. When José Mercedes got to the Orioles, he learned the phrase “same thing” and simply waited for someone else to order and then said, “Same thing.”

Carty was not as isolated as González had been, because there were some Dominicans in the Braves organization, even other Macorisanos—even one whose father had played cricket with Carty’s father. But only Rico made it to the majors.

Carty was liked and certainly respected by the other players, but he was always somewhat of an odd man out, a colorful character. They were puzzled by his habit of carrying his wallet in his uniform into the game because he was not confident that his money would be safe in the locker room.

He found American racism hard to understand. He could see that, as a Latino, he had a slightly better standing than American black players. So he always presented himself as a Latino. But American black players were resentful of this. Carty did not understand much about black America at the height of the civil rights movement. He called himself “Big Boy,” and the black players resented it because they did not want to see a black man call himself “boy.” He changed it to “Man”: “Beeg Mon.” But he never really understood the issue.

It was after the Braves moved to Atlanta that Carty got a taste of what it was like to be a black man in America. In September 1971, after Carty had established himself as a baseball star, he was driving in Atlanta with his brother-in-law, Carlos Ramírez, at about midnight. Ramírez was visiting from the Dominican Republic and spoke no English. Racial tension had been heightened in Atlanta by the killing of two white policemen in a black neighborhood. According to Carty, who described the incident in a 1975 interview with the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, another car pulled up with two white men. The two called out to a black man in the street, “Hey, nigger.”

Ramírez asked Carty in Spanish what was happening. When Carty told him, his brother-in-law asked, “Do they do that here?”

“ Yes,” Carty replied. “Sometimes between the blacks and whites.”

“Why?” Ramírez asked.

“I don’t know,” said Carty. “I just play ball and go home.” And the two laughed. Then the two in the other car started shouting “Nigger!” at the Dominicans. Still not understanding the ways of American racism, Carty shouted back in English, “You may be more nigger than me, because you are American and I’m not.”

Carty was not his usual athletic self, because he was just recovering from a severe leg injury. Spotting a uniformed white policeman, he got out of his car and limped up to him and asked for his help, saying he had an injury and didn’t want any trouble from the two men in the car. But the two he was complaining about were plainclothes policemen. The police took out their guns and one of them said, “These are the cop-killing niggers.” He hit Ramírez over the head with his handgun, and then they began beating Carty with a blackjack, kicking him on the ground, then handcuffed and arrested him before finally one of the policemen recognized him.

The policemen were suspended; one already had a record of brutalizing black people, and the police chief and mayor apologized profusely. The attorney for the three suspended policemen said that it was a minor incident that had been blown up because it involved a famous baseball player. But in truth, Carty had been saved by his standing in baseball. The Atlanta press expressed concern that the finger injuries and black eye might somehow keep Carty from finishing the season.

Carty was what is known as a natural hitter, or, as they say in San Pedro,
nació para batear
, he was “born to bat.” His swing had both power and grace, and he had that mysterious ability to see pitches and put his bat where they were going. For seven years he maintained the highest lifetime batting average of any current player. At the time, few players were hitting well—a period known in baseball history as “the second dead-ball era.” The first dead-ball era, a time when hitters inexplicably were all slumping, was the first two decades of the twentieth century. The second dead-ball era, from 1963 to 1972, corresponded almost exactly with Carty’s career. The phenomenon is only partly explained by the fact that it was an era of great pitchers. Carty was, along with Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, Carl Yastrzemski, and only a few others, one of the rare great hitters of his time. The reverse of Marichal, who was underappreciated because of the wealth of great pitchers, Carty enjoyed great renown because so few others were hitting so well.

Had he stayed healthy, Carty might have been one of the all-time greatest hitters in baseball. In 1963 he had a brilliant rookie year, but the following year he had back problems. In 1967 he missed weeks of play from a shoulder injury caused by a bad slide into second base. In 1968 he seemed to run completely out of luck: that year he missed the entire season, spending 163 days in the hospital with tuberculosis. He missed fifty-eight games in 1969 with three shoulder separations. Often his injuries were sustained in the winter, playing for the Dominican League, which he insisted on doing every winter.

In 1970 he had a phenomenal batting average of .366, which was the best in the major leagues since 1957, when Ted Williams hit .388 for the Red Sox. Then, triumphant, Carty went home to San Pedro to play for the Estrellas, but he was traded to Escogido. While playing for Escogido, he broke his leg in three places and shattered his knee colliding with Matty Alou in the outfield. The Braves did not have their batting champion for the entire 1971 season. After the knee healed and a hip-to-calf brace was removed, he went back to Escogido and, in a game against Licey, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Pedro Borbón hit Carty on the left side of his face and broke his jaw.

Carty never did make tremendous amounts of money in Major League Baseball. A restaurant he started in Atlanta, Rico Carty’s Open Pit Barbecue, burned down when flames leaped out of the open pit after the restaurant had been operating only fifteen days.

He did wear rings that spelled out his name and uniform number in diamonds. When he was in Atlanta, he earned a reputation as a shopper after buying twenty-five pairs of shoes at one time. He also once bought six suits and another time twenty-four shirts. When a reporter asked him about this, he said, “I go into a store and I can’t help myself. I see all the beautiful things and I have to have them.”

In Carty’s best-paying year of his fifteen seasons in the majors—1977, at the end of his career—he received $120,000. Most years he earned half of that or less. But back in San Pedro he did not need a lot of money. He bought a large, comfortable house in downtown San Pedro for $45,000—a one-story ranch house large enough for his wife, four daughters, and son. In the 1960s, when his mother picked the spot, it was an undeveloped neighborhood on the edge of downtown, and Carty had to pay to get electricity brought in. He was a popular figure in San Pedro, the local boy from Consuelo who became a star. Most of the next generation of players, including Carty’s own nephew, Julio Santana, cite Rico Carty as their inspiration. In 1994, with neither political nor administrative experience, he was elected mayor of the town. This may not have been a measure of his popularity, since he was handpicked by Joaquín Balaguer, and Balaguer did not permit his candidates to be defeated. Carty explained, “Joaquín Balaguer is a good friend of mine, so when he asked me to run I could not tell him no.” He pledged as mayor to keep the youth of San Pedro supplied with bats and balls from the major leagues.

 

B
ut then something else happened to open the door of Major League Baseball even wider for the boys of San Pedro and produced perhaps the most important generation San Pedro has ever sent out.

 

 

 

B
y the 1970s, boys had been playing baseball in San Pedro for nearly a century without dreaming that it could change their lives. But after the first few major leaguers—especially once Rico Carty became a star—baseball turned into something much more serious than a sport: it could be the salvation of an entire family. What had changed was not so much San Pedro but Major League Baseball.

Until 1976, once a player signed a contract with a franchise, he was theirs until they did not want him anymore and traded him or released him. When a contract expired, the franchise always had the option to renew it. The rule, known as the “reserve clause,” came into effect in 1879. An owner could even cut a player’s salary by twenty percent. In 1969, after distinguishing himself as a hitter and outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals for twelve years, Curt Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Cardinals had traded three players for three Phillies. But Flood refused to go, saying he didn’t like the Phillies, their stadium, or their fans. The Phillies were infamous for racism. The manager, Ben Chapman, had led his team in shouting racist insults at Jackie Robinson. Flood sued baseball and got former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg to argue his case, which went to the Supreme Court. Among Goldberg’s arguments was the claim that the current system unfairly repressed wages. The Court ruled against Flood.

But many people felt that Flood, who had been active in the civil rights movement, was fighting a just cause. He had written to the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, in 1969: “I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Since he was black, the comparison to slavery was evident, and his struggle was seen as one for civil rights at a time when there were many such struggles in America. It was not seen as being about money. Had he let himself be traded, his $100,000 salary would have been one of the top paychecks in baseball. The celebrated sportswriter Red Smith, writing in
The New York Times
, satirized: “ ‘ You mean,’ baseball demands incredulously, ‘at these prices, they want human rights too?’ ”

Yes, they did.

In 1975 two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, refused to sign their contracts, and after they had played a season without contracts it was ruled that they then had the right to be free agents.

A player who becomes a free agent by fulfilling his contract puts himself on the market and can go to the team he chooses, often the highest bidder. If a player has been doing well, this can produce highly competitive bidding. This has made agents important because, with millions of dollars at stake, there is often considerable negotiating. Before free agents, players negotiated contracts with management on their own.

Regardless of the high principles that had guided Flood, one of the results was that baseball became a game of millionaires. Salaries like Flood’s $100,000 became laughable. Before there were free agents, in the Rico Carty years, the average salary in the major leagues was $52,300. Carty’s salaries, which seem meager today, were above average. But by 1980 the average had leaped to $146,500. A decade later it was more than $800,000. By 2008 the average was $3 million a year. Signing bonuses, an extra one-time bonus on signing the first contract, also went up; the once token handouts for the most promising players are now in the millions.

At this same time, with jets replacing trains for traveling teams, Major League Baseball began a process of expanding from sixteen teams in the Northeast and Midwest to the current thirty around the country, and this, too, created a hunger for fresh young talent. The most important source of new young players was the draft, in which every franchise got to pick from a pool of undeveloped talent. The lower the standing of a club in the previous season, the higher the pick in the draft so that the last-place teams got the first picks.

But the draft was a highly regulated operation, and teams were limited in the number of draft picks they could take. This placed the player in a good negotiating position. A very promising prospect could refuse the offer. Then he had to wait a year, but a year later he would probably be worth more money to whoever got him. In the meantime the franchise had wasted a pick, because they were limited to the players they drafted whether those players signed on or not. So it might be in the club’s interest to sweeten the deal—fatten the bonus—in order to get the prospect signed, which was why bonuses had been going up.