The Eastern Stars (14 page)

However, players who were not born in the United States were not subject to the draft. They were declared “amateur free agents,” and there was no limit on hiring free agents, and you did not have to be a last-place team to be first to grab a top prospect. Foreigners became an unlimited source of new talent. This internationalized baseball, opening it up to Venezuelans, Colombians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Japanese. Today, more than a quarter of major-league players are foreign born, and the percentage will probably rise, since the minor leagues are about half foreign born. Moving beyond the limitations of the draft was the original reason, but then a wealth of talent was discovered and they were cheaper to sign than American drafted players of comparable promise.

The first country to profit from this search for nondrafting talent was the Dominican Republic. This was partly because, by the mid-1970s, baseball was accustomed to the idea of Latin players. There had been Cuban and Puerto Rican players, but Cubans were no longer available and Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens and therefore subject to the draft. With a tradition of baseball and the second-worst economy in the Americas—Nicaragua has recently fallen lower and bumped the Dominican Republic up to third—Dominicans were ready to be saved by baseball. When Major League Baseball went looking for foreign players, the first place they looked was the Dominican Republic.

San Pedro and other parts of the Dominican Republic became the feeding grounds of major-league scouts. A scout had to identify a young teenager, develop his ability, and get him signed—a process that sometimes took years—without another scout grabbing the prospect. And so these scouts were cruising the ball fields, often running into and trying to out-maneuver one another. Some, like Pedro González, were ex-players, but many of the more successful ones were not. Epifanio Guerrero, commonly known as Epy, from Santo Domingo, never made it as a player. His brother Mario, a shortstop, never got out of the minors, and neither of Epy’s two sons got beyond AAA ball. But Epy was the most famous Dominican scout, signing 133 young Dominicans, thirty-seven of whom—including George Bell and Tony Fernández—made it to major-league rosters.

At the start, Guerrero was scouting for the Toronto Blue Jays and his archcompetitor Rafael Avila was scouting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. From Los Angeles, the Dodgers—the same management that had opened the sport to black players in Brooklyn—pioneered Latino recruitment. Avila was a Cuban, a veteran of the ill-fated 1961 anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1970, when Avila moved to the Dominican Republic, there had still been only twenty-four Dominican players who had risen to the major leagues. But at a time when baseball was not very international, for twenty-four players to have turned up on major-league rosters in fourteen years from one small foreign country was a phenomenon.

At first the scouts tried to raid the military teams, where Marichal had been found. But this had the complication of getting the player released from the military. Then they looked at the Dominican League. Avila started working with Licey. But eventually they discovered an untapped wealth of very talented teenagers who lacked proper training, in the sugar fields of San Pedro. The scouts needed to find places to train the young players and feed them—they were all undersized and undernourished—without attracting too much attention. Avila built two rooms in Elvio Jiménez’s backyard and housed and fed fifteen players there, the forerunner of what came to be known as a baseball academy.

The competition for San Pedro ballplayers was lively. In 1976 a Cuban scout for the Cleveland Indians, Reggio Otero, picked up a fifteen-year-old
cocolo
from Consuelo named Alfredo Griffin, who had honed his skills playing every Sunday for the sugar mill where his stepfather worked. Epy Guerrero never forgot that Griffin had gotten away from him, and after three years of slowly rising in the Indians organization, he was able to get Griffin away to Toronto, where he started his career winning the Rookie of the Year Award.

 

A
lfredo Griffin, Pepe Frías, Julio Franco, Rafael Ramírez, and Tony Fernández were all shortstops from San Pedro who went to the majors in the ten years between Frías in 1973 and Fernández in 1983, and all became stars. Griffin, Frías, and Franco were from Consuelo. Soon San Pedro de Macorís, the city of
plántanos
, sugar, and poets, became known as the city of shortstops. To date, only thirteen of the seventy-nine Macorisanos who have played in the major leagues have been shortstops, compared with twenty-seven pitchers, mostly in recent years. But when this town was first getting noticed by the fans of professional baseball, it seemed that it was turning out more excellent shortstops than anything else, and even today when the name San Pedro de Macorís is mentioned, often the response is “That town with all the shortstops.”

A shortstop is one of the most important players on a team—certainly the star of the infield. He roams between second and third base, between infield and outfield. Because most hitters are right-handed, they tend to hit toward the left, and so the shortstop is in more plays than anyone else. If it were a left-handed world, the shortstop would have been placed between first and second. It is a role that requires great athleticism because he is involved in tight critical plays, including double and triple plays. Often by the time a ground ball has gone the distance to reach the shortstop, there is little time to beat the runner on a long throw to first base. A shortstop’s moves often appear spectacular, and good shortstops usually become fan favorites.

Since the youth of San Pedro dreamed of being stars, they dreamed of being shortstops. But also, since they had hard lives and poor nutrition, Macorisanos tended to be small, with powerful throwing arms, which is the classic shortstop—or at least it was until large men such as Cal Ripken, Jr., and Alex Rodriguez started playing the position.

Griffin’s family came from Nevis. His father, Alberto Reed, was a musician and a dockworker in Santo Domingo. They lived in Villa Francisca, a poor crumbling and crowded one-story neighborhood in the old part of the capital near the Ozama River. Reed performed at a nearby night-club called Borojol. He played in a musical tradition that reached its height in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s with singers who earned international reputations such as Tito Rodríguez and Beny Moré. The music was called
son
, an Afro-Cuban hybrid. Eventually
son
would mutate into salsa, but before that happened, in the 1940s, Arsenio Rodríguez introduced big conga drums to
son
; by the time Alberto Reed was playing, conga drumming was an important part of the band. This made a huge impression on young Alfredo, who developed a permanent love for conga drums.

When Alfredo was only eight years old, the rough, fetid streets of the capital, in which boys from rival barrios fought one another for dominance, got even rougher. A U.S. invasion followed a coup d’état, and a civil war meant street battles with high-caliber automatic weapons. Alfredo’s unmarried mother, Mary, a Macorisana, wanted to leave the dangerous town, where young Alfredo liked to run loose and watch both the violence and food distribution by American soldiers. She took her three sons and left Reed and moved back with her family in her native Consuelo. She later became involved with the sugar worker whom Alfredo still refers to as his stepfather. Although Alfredo always used his mother’s name, clearly Reed was an important influence. People in Consuelo who recall growing up with Alfredo say that their earliest memories are not of him laboring in the mills, because he didn’t work there, or playing on the Consuelo ball team on Sundays, for which he was paid, but of Alfredo playing the conga in a band and entertaining at
cocolo
parties and fiestas. Other things they remember are that he earned money shining shoes and that he was a tough street fighter.

Griffin credits the mill with making Consuelo a place that produces baseball players. “They all come from here,” he said, “because we played ball for the mills every Sunday.” Certainly Consuelo, a small subdivision that has produced eleven major leaguers as of 2009, is per capita the most productive neighborhood in modern baseball history. Griffin first learned baseball playing street ball in Santo Domingo, but he is not certain he would have ended up a baseball player if he had stayed in his tough city neighborhood. None of the boys he grew up with there played pro ball, and some of them ended up in jail.

Were it not for baseball, Alfredo Griffin might have become a very different person, but Alfredo had an uncle, Clemente Hart, who was a cricket player turned baseball player and played for the Estrellas. Hart steered Alfredo toward Consuelo baseball. Soon Ingenio Consuelo was paying him to play on their team. Managed by a former major leaguer, Pedro González, this was not the usual company team: it had Alfredo Griffin, Nelson Norman, Rafael Ramírez, Rafael Santana, and Julio Franco—all future major leaguers. This was a team that scouts watched.

In fact, Consuelo played in a league consisting of six mill-sponsored teams, the Circuito de los Ingenios, which played a thirty-game season in the dead season and which scouts closely monitored. The mills supplied uniforms with the name of the
ingenio
across the chest. Well known for the quality of their baseball, the league games were the primary entertainment in the sugarcane communities.

Teams also developed in the various barrios of central San Pedro, which formed a league. The top San Pedro team would play the top
ingenio
team at Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the September season finale. The
ingenio
players and their families would cram into buses and go to the stadium, where the playoff took place in front of a screaming crowd of about nine thousand fans. In October the
zafra
would begin, the workers would take off their uniforms and return to the mills or the fields, and professional baseball—the Estrellas—would take back the stadium.

San Pedro’s amateur leagues and their playoffs gave scouts many games in which to look for prospects. Young ballplayers initially tried out for love of the game, but they quickly became aware that they were being considered for the majors.

Cleveland Indians scout Reggie Otero, a Cuban, spotted fifteen-year-old Griffin playing second base. This was one Otero would not let Epy Guerrero grab for the Toronto Blue Jays, so Otero quickly developed Griffin as a shortstop, signed him in 1973, and sent him off to the Cleveland farm system by the age of sixteen.

Despite his
cocolo
background, Griffin spoke little English and lived a lonely existence in America, away from family and friends for the first time. For three years in the minors he got occasional starts with the Indians. In his first major-league at-bat, in 1976, he got a hit. The following winter he went back to San Pedro, to the Estrellas, where he developed skills as a switch-hitter. The ability to bat either left- or right-handed is a great advantage, because pitchers usually do better against batters who bat on the side from which they throw. A switch-hitter can bat on the opposite side no matter who is pitching, so Griffin returned from San Pedro a more valuable hitter.

After three years in which he played only occasionally, Griffin was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for Victor Cruz. According to legend, Epy Guerrero stole him. But the truth is that the Blue Jays simply made a great trade. Cruz had been an excellent relief pitcher for Toronto, and Toronto fans could not understand why the Blue Jays would give up a top pitcher for an unknown who was not greatly appreciated in Cleveland.

But Griffin was noticed immediately in his new home. When the press saw him working out in 1980, he became the talk of spring training. They used words like “smooth” and “ballet of the infield” to describe his defensive skills. His first year in Toronto—his first complete season playing, because Cleveland had kept sending him down to the minors—Griffin won Rookie of the Year, the coveted Jackie Robinson title.

When a young man from San Pedro got his hands on Major League Baseball money, he almost always did something for his family, and especially his mother. But in Griffin’s day a signing bonus wasn’t enough. Griffin did not see money until Toronto; once he had his first full season there, he built a large house for Mary Griffin on Carty Street in Consuelo. Later he put some earnings into a long gray stone house with a fountain in Rico Carty’s newly developed neighborhood in central San Pedro.

Over an eighteen-season major-league career, Griffin became known as a reliable hitter, a fast enough runner to score numerous triples, a nearly unstoppable base stealer, and a smooth-handed, award-winning infielder who played in several World Series for both Toronto and the Dodgers and then went on to be an infield coach for the California Angels. In between seasons he played for the Estrellas. He seemed to relish his winters back in San Pedro: his comfortable house, the music, and the discos—including the one he bought by the waterfront. He even enjoyed going back to Consuelo, where his mother still lived.

Griffin projected a different kind of image of a Dominican in the major leagues. He was known as a leader and a peacemaker, a player with the kind of temperament that holds ball clubs together. He always made a special effort to help rookie players adapt to the team. Griffin always insisted that this wasn’t new for Dominicans and that Rico Carty had helped him. Among his prized baseball souvenirs was an autographed photo of the Beeg Mon. But the American press seemed not to notice that Griffin contradicted the stereotype: for them he was simply another Dominican. In a 2001 interview,
Sports Collectors Digest
even used Juan Marichal’s old moniker, calling Griffin “a Dominican dandy.”

 

B
aseball became a serious enterprise all over San Pedro wherever there was poverty, which was almost everywhere. Epy Guerrero found another smooth shortstop in Barrio Restauración, the one-story tin-roofed neighborhood of crumbling pavement behind the outfield wall of Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Tony Fernández was one of the street urchins who shimmied up palm trees to watch the Estrellas play and to occasionally grab a fly ball for later use. Some would even bring a net to grab the flies. Fernández played informal games along the side of the stadium with a sock, or a real ball if he could snag one. Today boys still play sock baseball in the same spot.