The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [102]
Most of the ex-players, whether they had money or not, had charitable foundations. Supporting youth programs was a favorite activity. Rico Carty had played baseball before ballplayers became fabulously wealthy, but he had a large house and a good car and lived better than most Macorisanos. And he had the Rico Carty Foundation, which was located in a beat-up downtown building. Inside the dank and dark offices, no phones were ringing and no one was working. They were playing dominoes—a tough-looking group of men. The furniture was flimsy and the doors were blackened from fingerprints. The scene was reminiscent of the local party offices under Balaguer where patronage was dispensed to supporters and punishment to opponents. One of the domino players, a burly, overweight black man with a shaved head and enormous hands, was Rico Carty.
Carty explained that the Rico Carty Foundation needed money.
What does the foundation do?
“Helps poor people,” he explained. “Gives them medicine, things like that.”
He wanted to be paid $500 to be interviewed. “It’s not for me,” he protested without prodding. “It’s for the foundation.”
He was offered more than $500 worth of medicine, but he insisted on cash and looked sad and disappointed when he realized he wasn’t going to get it. “I’ve given a hundred interviews,” he said in a cranky tone, “and what do I have to show for it?”
Most of the ex-players had their own ideas about helping their town. Tony Fernández had a six-hundred-acre farm on the outskirts of San Pedro that he used as a retreat for orphans, with dormitories, chapels, meeting rooms, and a baseball diamond. He also built an orphanage. Orphanages were his primary concern. He pushed the importance of education. But most of the male orphans he talked to about education were hoping to impress him with their baseball talent so they could someday get signed.
While Fernández focused on orphanages, Soriano built a baseball field in his old neighborhood by the Quisqueya sugar mill. It was like this all over the Dominican Republic. Pedro Martínez, who grew up near Santo Domingo, built churches—one Catholic and one Baptist—in the capital.
The public likes to make heroes out of athletes, and in San Pedro, heroes who will make their poor town prosper at last. But heroics is a lot to expect from someone snatched away without education at age sixteen and handed fame and wealth at a dizzying speed while living in a world of unworldly men devoted to perfecting a boy’s game. Since the public has exaggerated expectations for these ballplayers, they develop an exaggerated sense of their own importance that they find very difficult to fit into reality once they stop playing. Doug Glanville, an ex-major leaguer himself, wrote in The New York Times in April 2008, “Most baseball players develop a special kind of shell that forms around them as their careers unfold. It probably isn’t that different from an egg shell. It’s fragile, but no one is really allowed inside until the player is ready to share his secrets, or until something terrible happens causing the protective layer to crack. Inside the player justifies his need to be secluded. He perceives that the court of public opinion will either build him up or tear him down. . . . So he uses this barrier to protect himself from the fickle judgments of the peanut gallery and to make it through his world.”
For all their money, the best baseball players could hope for was to become what was known in the Dominican Republic as gente de segundo, the highest social class money can buy. It takes generations to be Dominican upper class. A lot of the big money in San Pedro still came from old sugar families like the Vicini Cabrals, possibly the wealthiest and most powerful family in the country. The dynasty was founded by an Italian immigrant, Juan Bautista Vicini, who came to San Pedro in the 1870s and was one of the early architects of the Dominican sugar boom. Cristóbal Colón was among the Vicini sugar mills. The Hazín family emigrated from Lebanon in the late nineteenth century, also got into sugar,