The Eastern Stars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - SUGAR

  CHAPTER ONE - Like the Trace of a Kiss

  CHAPTER TWO - The First Question

  CHAPTER THREE - The Question of First

  CHAPTER FOUR - Who’s on First

  CHAPTER FIVE - The First Opening

  CHAPTER SIX - San Pedro Rising

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Draft Dodging

  PART TWO - DOLLARS

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Fourth Incarnation of San Pedro

  CHAPTER NINE - The City of Baseball

  CHAPTER TEN - Three Three-Brother Families

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Curse of the Eastern Stars

  CHAPTER TWELVE - San Pedro’s Black Eye

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Fickle Judgment from the Peanut Gallery

  APPENDIX ONE - The First Seventy-nine: Major League Baseball Players from San ...

  APPENDIX TWO - A Dominican Chronology

  Acknowledgements

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ALSO BY MARK KURLANSKY

  NONFICTION

  The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food—Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional—from the Lost WPA Files

  The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

  The Big Oyster: History on the Half-Shell

  Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea

  1968: The Year That Rocked the World

  Salt: A World History

  The Basque History of the World

  Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

  A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry

  A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

  ANTHOLOGY

  Choice Cuts:

  A Savory Selection of Food Writing

  from Around the World and Throughout History

  FICTION

  Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music

  The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Cod’s Tale

  The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi

  The Story of Salt

  TRANSLATION

  The Belly of Paris, by Émile Zola

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Mark Kurlansky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kurlansky, Mark.

  The Eastern stars : how baseball changed the Dominican town of San Pedro de Macorís / Mark Kurlansky.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18686-2

  1. Baseball—Dominican Republic—San Pedro de Macorís—History.

  2. Baseball players—Dominican Republic—San Pedro de Macorís—History. I. Title.

  GV863.29.D65K

  796.35707293’82—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  A MIS VIEJOS AMIGOS EL PUEBLO DOMINIC ANO, EN LA ESPERANZA QUE UN DÍA ENCUENTRE LA JUSTICIA Y PROSPERIDAD QUE USTED SE MERECE

  AND FOR TALIA FEIGA, WHOSE GREAT HEART IS BIG AS A MOUNTAIN

  (¡Tanto arrojo en la lucha irremediable

  Y aún no hay quien lo sepa!

  ¡Tanto acero y fulgor de resistir

  Y aún no hay quien lo vea!)

  (So much daring in the unresolvable struggle

  Even though there is no one who knows it!

  So much steel and flashing in resistance

  Even though there is no one who sees it!)

  —Pedro Mir, “Si Alguien Quiere Saber Cuál Es Mi Patria” “If Someone Wants to Know Which Country Is Mine”

  PROLOGUE

  Gracias, Presidente

  This is a book about what is known in America as “making it.” And like all such tales, it is also a story about not making it. In this Dominican town, San Pedro de Macorís, the difference between making it and not making it is usually baseball.

  If you do not make it, there is sugarcane—but only for half the year. Sometime between Christmas and the Dominican national holiday on February 27, depending on how rainy the summer was, the pendones—white feathery shoots—appear above the rippling green cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. In the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean, where many of the families of San Pedro’s sugar workers originated, the field is said to be “in arrow” because the pendones point upward. It means that the sugarcane is ripe for cutting and the cane harvest, the zafra, can begin.

  It is an exciting moment, because most people who work in sugar here have employment only during the four to six months of the zafra. In an election year, such as 2008, at the beginning of the harvest a sign goes up at the Porvenir sugar mill, which is controlled by the ruling party. It says, “Gracias, Presidente, por una nueva zafra,” Thank you, President, for a new cane harvest, as though he, Leonel Fernández, the New York-educated caudillo—running again as he had in 2004 and in 1996, which was the last time Dominicans believed he offered anything new, his face on posters everywhere with the smile of an encyclopedia salesman—had personally caused the sugarcane to grow.

  Some of the San Pedro mills—Santa Fe, Angelina, Puerto Rico, and Las Pajas—no longer operate. Four working mills remain, though not at full capacity: Quisqueya, Consuelo, Cristóbal Colón, and Porvenir. When the zafra is on, red glows can be seen from San Pedro along the northern horizon where the mill fires burn all night, cooking down cane juice. Porvenir, which in Spanish means “future,” was originally on the edge of the city like the others, but the town grew around it and now trucks full of grape-red sticks of cane must drive through the traffic-clogged center of town to deliver to the mill.

  Street kids, the ones who survive by shining shoes or washing the windshields of the cars that stop at traffic lights, run behind the trucks and pull off canes to suck. Sometimes they hold a stick of cane in a batter’s stance. On the street, San Pedro boys regularly coil into a batter’s stance anyway. Having a stick in hand, some
can’t resist taking a practice swing with a small rock—a dangerous habit in the crowded parts of town. But if they were to make a mistake and hit a rich man’s shiny large SUV, chances are the wealthy driver hiding behind the smoked glass would be a baseball player who not that many years before had himself been whacking around stones with a stalk of sugarcane.

  The road out of town that leads to the other mills begins at the green, white, and ocher Estadio Tetelo Vargas, home of the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. San Pedro’s long-suffering and always promising baseball team, founded in 1910, is older than many of the major-league clubs in America. With a center-field wall at 385 feet, Tetelo Vargas is a major-league-size field, though with fewer seats, more like a Triple A stadium. Behind the outfield wall, the drooping fronds of tall palms can be seen, and in the distance, sticking up behind right field, the smokestack of Porvenir.

  The road alongside the stadium goes straight north—a rutted pockmarked remnant of the once paved two-lane route that has hosted too many trucks, which now dangerously zigzag around potholes. The road leads through the rural zone that is still San Pedro to whole villages that have grown up around the mills after which they were named: Angelina, Consuelo, Santa Fe . . . Soon—still in San Pedro—the road seems like a causeway over a vast vegetable sea with lapping silver and green waves of sugarcane. Some already-cleared fields look as if they had gotten bad haircuts. Leggy white birds called galsas graze there until sunset, when they nest in the trees at the fields’ edges.

  At lunchtime the galsas were still in the fields and the cane cutters in Consuelo were under the trees, resting in the shade from a broiling midday sun. Cutting cane is the worst job in the Dominican Republic, the hardest work for the least pay. It has always been said that no Dominican would ever do such work—never even want to be seen doing it. Desperate people from other sugar-producing islands with dying sugar industries were brought in to cut the cane. And so places like Consuelo have a polyglot culture with West Indian English and Haitian Creole as commonly spoken as Spanish and often mixed in the same sentence.

  But that was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Dominican Republic was an underpopulated country with a booming sugar industry. Today it is the reverse, and the job market is becoming desperate. In this field the resting cane cutters were born Dominican.

  No one really cared how long a lunch break they took. They would not stop for long, because they were paid by the ton, not the hour. But they needed some rest, especially while the sun was high.

  There were several varieties of cane grown here, and this field had been planted with what is called Angola pata de maco. It is a hard red stalk that takes a mighty whack from a machete, the stroke repeated hundreds of times in the course of a day. But it is not the toughness of the cane that cutters care about: it is the density and water content. Some types of cane are considerably heavier than other types, and a cutter negotiated to get a field like this, with “good cane,” because they were paid by weight.

  They were paid 115 pesos for chopping a ton of cane and piling it into open railroad cars with rods along the sides to hold the stalks in. One hundred fifteen pesos was about $3.60 in 2009 dollars. In one day, two cutters working together could fill a car, which held four tons. A locomotive that passed by regularly would haul the car off to the mill. In the sugar industry the Dominican cane cutter, left to do everything himself without the use of machines, is considered one of the least-productive cane cutters in the world. This is not from a lack of work but rather from the intensity of the work. Efficiency of labor, a normal concept in the development of most industry, did not exist in Dominican sugar. Equations such as the number of man-hours to produce a ton of sugar were of little interest to the unregulated adventurers who came to the Dominican Republic to produce sugar. The cost of labor was so low, the quantity of sugar that could be produced so enormous, and the profits so staggering that no one was pondering better means of production. After the initial decades when the sugar men arrived and built their state-of-the-art mills, there was not even a great effort to upgrade equipment.

  So, while everywhere else the fields are set on fire so that the leaves burn away before harvesting, in the Dominican Republic the single cutter must chop the tough green stalk close to the ground, then chop it into three equal parts and toss them into a railroad car. In Jamaica, where the cane is burned first and the cane cutter does not do the loading, the cutter averages seven tons a day. A good cutter in San Pedro could cut two tons a day.

  Cutters worked from seven in the morning to five at night, but in the middle of the day, when the sun was highest, they needed shade, food, and rest. It would be easy to imagine that men who did such work would be big, solidly built, muscular workers, but that would require an ample protein diet, which they didn’t have. Elio Martínez, one of the cutters, was not a large man. He was lean and of middling height and had a soft voice. He was fifty-seven years old and had been cutting cane since he was sixteen. His father, who had also been a cane cutter, and his mother were both Haitian.

  For lunch he was drinking cane juice, which, though of little nutritional value, was sweet and refreshing, and the sugar gave a momentary energy boost and made an empty stomach feel full. Part of the trick was to find the ripest stalk, and he felt through the hundreds of reddish stumps sticking out from the two-ton pile in a full wagon ready to be hitched to the locomotive. When he found a juicy one, recognizable by touch and its dark maroon color, he grabbed on and yanked the five-foot stick out of the wagon. He held it horizontally with his left hand and with his right lifted a hard wood stick, which he smacked several times into the center of the cane. Then he turned the cane and struck a few more blows until the fibers in the middle appeared slightly mashed. Then he leaned his head back and, holding the cane with both hands, twisted it until green juice poured into his mouth as though from a faucet. He repeated the process with several carefully chosen canes.

  About five miles away, in the center of San Pedro, was a two-story apartment building constructed in the style of a motel. It had a chain-link gate so that it could be locked to protect the apartments, the large late-model SUVs parked in front of the building, and the privacy of the well-known tenants.

  A fit-looking man in a bass-fishing T-shirt was on the lawn by the building with a bottomless metal cage. “Watch this, this is funny,” he said to another muscular man. One end of the cage was propped off the ground with a plastic water bottle with a blue nylon string tied to it. The man in the bass-fishing T-shirt sat fifteen feet away, holding the string. He had spread corn under the cage for bait. Some pigeons were approaching it.

  His name was Manny Alexander, and he had grown up not far away in downtown San Pedro. His family was so poor, their small house so crowded, that he shared a bed with several brothers and sisters. Then, in February 1988, when he was sixteen years old, he signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles as a shortstop. The Orioles organization paid him a signing bonus of $2,500, a small bonus today but a respectable one in 1988.

  “The first thing I did was I bought a bed,” Alexander recalled. “I wanted a small bed all to myself. Then I got a radio, some clothes, food.” More toys followed. Although his major-league career was not illustrious and he was not a top-salaried player, in his eleven years in the majors he did earn more than $2 million, which, here in San Pedro, could go a very long way.

  Had he been working, this would have been lunchtime. But Manny was on no particular schedule. He wanted to show his pigeon trap to his friend José Mercedes. Mercedes was born in El Seibo, northeast of San Pedro, but had been living here since the late 1980s. He was a pitcher who also signed with the Orioles. His major-league career began at the age of twenty-three in 1994 and lasted only nine years. But that was enough time to earn several million dollars. He was relaxing this day after having started the night before for the Santo Domingo team, Licey, which had defeated the home team, the Estrellas Orientales, further diminishing San Pedro’s fast-vanish
ing lead in the final games of the season. Licey had a largely major-league pitching staff.

  Manny squatted on the ground, string in hand, waiting to yank the bottle out and trap the pigeons as soon as they mustered the foolhardy courage to venture under the cage to eat the corn. The birds were inching toward the trap with jerky steps when suddenly a new bright copper-colored Ford van pulled up, blasting a merengue, which is the accepted way to play the national music. The pigeons, lacking a Dominican sensibility, left in a panic.

  On the back of the vehicle in large figures was the number 47, the uniform number of the pitcher Joaquín Andújar. Andújar was an exceptional pitcher who had helped the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series in 1982 with successful starts in two games. Curiously, many of the former ballplayers had smoked windows on their cars so that the driver could not be identified, as though to preserve their anonymity, but then they placed their numbers on the outside to make sure that everyone would know who they were. Many of the former major leaguers in San Pedro drove large, expensive cars. However, the real status was not the value of the cars but the cost of the gasoline they ate up. Most people in San Pedro could not have afforded to drive one of these cars if it were given to them.