The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [101]
For Macorisanos, Sosa had become the symbol of the idea that their players did not really come through for them. San Pedro’s heroes, like those of the Greeks, had flaws. If they were seen in San Pedro, as Rico Carty was, Macorisanos forgave them. But if they were rarely seen in town, then they had turned their backs and were not forgiven.
Sosa did not live in San Pedro. Instead he built a $5 million mansion in Santo Domingo. He would often tell American reporters how much he loved his hometown and how he had San Pedro scenes depicted on stained-glass windows in his mansion. But outside the window was not San Pedro.
Alexander, a young man in Consuelo, said, “I know Sammy Sosa. I know some of his family. In ’98 he built a big mansion in Santo Domingo. First he built a normal house in San Pedro, but once he built the mansion in Santo Domingo, we didn’t see him anymore.”
Sammy’s grandmother, Rosa Julia Sosa, still lived in a three-room cinder-block house in Consuelo. When the New York Daily News went to interview her in 1999, she complained that she hadn’t seen him in two years and asked the reporter for money.
After his retirement in 2007, Sosa abandoned his mansion in the capital for La Romana, where George Bell—who abandoned his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce—also lived. Joaquín Andújar, who also left his San Pedro mansion because of a divorce, left San Pedro entirely for Santo Domingo in 2008. San Pedro was finding it difficult to attract its wealthy ex-ballplayers.
La Romana and San Pedro, while both eastern sugar towns, were very different. Although both had considerable poverty, the river in La Romana was filled not with nineteen-foot fishing boats but with fifty-foot yachts. Bell built a new home at the guarded and gated La Romana resort of Casa de Campo, which had white stucco villas and seven thousand acres designed by Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta. Impossible for the casual visitor or neighborhood Dominican to enter, this private compound of mostly foreigners was the ultimate in wealthy exclusion. Perhaps of even greater interest to Bell, it had two golf courses planned by the celebrated course designer Pete Dye.
Bell played golf every Saturday and Sunday. Not surprising for a man who became a star because of his hand-eye coordination and smooth swing, he was a good golfer. So was Babe Ruth. Bell had a four handicap. “I could do better,” he said. “But as soon as you are good, no one plays with you, and it’s no fun.”
In middle age, Bell was still large, muscular, broad-shouldered, and fit—a tough-looking man with the handle of a handgun sticking up from the back of his blue-jeans waistband. He explained that he carried a gun because he didn’t “want anyone messing with me.” It was hard to believe anyone would, but he was a very wealthy man in a crime-ridden and impoverished land.
Bell, who had made about $2 million a year as a player, invested his money. He owned a construction company that built condominiums and a farm that used to produce dairy and then became a lemon plantation. For a while he rented it to his old team, the Blue Jays, as an academy, but they moved and he had trouble finding another team. That business was becoming very competitive. He lived a quiet life playing golf, fishing for marlin, and running his businesses.
“I don’t really spend my time with other baseball players,” he said. “I like to be alone. I was like that when I was playing, too. I don’t like to stay out late, don’t like to drink because I feel terrible the next day. I went to Alfredo’s disco for the inauguration and never went back. I don’t want to be out on the Malecón. I like to be home by nine o’clock. I don’t like people bothering me.”
Although his friend with the disco on the Malecón, Alfredo Griffin, was very different, he was one of the few baseball players with whom Bell maintained a friendship. Together they organized an annual charity golf tournament.
Mayor Tony Echavaría said of the local baseball stars, “Some make a lot of noise when they do things; others do it very quietly.