The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [23]
According to official history, the first organized game between Cuban club players was on a ball field in Matanzas that still exists called Palmar del Junco on December 27, 1874. Unlike Abner Doubleday’s game in Cooperstown, it is well documented that this game between a Matanzas team and the Habana Base Ball Club did take place. But it is not clear that it was the first organized game between clubs. Historian Roberto González Echevarría suggests that it may simply have been the first game to have been written about in the press. Historians like the story of Cuban baseball beginning in Matanzas because it was a port where American ships docked, and Cubans, like Dominicans, have always been drawn to the idea of baseball being a contest in which the locals stood up to the Americans.
But the 1874 game at Palmar del Junco was between Cubans. Havana won by the astonishing score of 51 to 9. Hitting skills developed earlier than fielding skills, and early games often had such scores. Emilio Sabourín, one of the revered martyrs of Cuban independence, played left field for Havana that day and hit eight home runs. Sabourín was one of the early promoters of not only Cuban baseball but also Cuban independence. He founded and managed one of the three Havana clubs that played fourteen series between 1878 and 1892. His club won nine of them. But the worst fears of the Spanish were confirmed when it was discovered that the money Sabourín had raised by organizing baseball games was sent to the independence movement. In 1895 he was arrested and baseball was once again banned. Sabourín was shipped to an infamous military prison in Ceuta, on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar. The left fielder, sometimes called the “father of Cuban baseball,” died there two years later.
In the 1890s, Spain was fading from the three islands and America was taking hold, and so soccer, the once popular Spanish sport, fell out of favor and was replaced by the American sport, baseball.
As in Cuba and the United States, it is not clear where baseball began in the Dominican Republic. Certainly, in the late 1870s baseball-loving Cuban independentistas and American baseball enthusiasts met to develop a sugar industry in San Pedro de Macorís. In San Pedro it is said that the first Dominican game was played there in 1886. But many historians and people in Santo Domingo refute this. Sugar makers were not the only Cubans to come to the Dominican Republic, and San Pedro was not their only destination. At the same time that sugar makers were building San Pedro, Ignacio Aloma and his brother Ubaldo came to Santo Domingo. They were ironworkers who built balconies and grillwork. In 1891 they formed two baseball clubs with Cuban and American players and even a few Dominicans. The two teams were known to Dominican fans by their colors, the Rojos and the Azules. Another Cuban started two teams in La Vega, in the north near the Cibao, and they were also known as the Reds and the Blues. In Cuba there were also red and blue teams, but the labels were particularly meaningful in the Dominican Republic, where politics for many decades had revolved around the Red and Blue parties.
In the 1880s, when the big new ingenios were being put into operation in San Pedro, experienced baseball players were not easily found. The normal way to establish a baseball club in both the U.S. and in Cuba was to find athletic young men and teach them the game. And it occurred to the Americans, the Cubans, and the Puerto Ricans that in their mills they had the potential for ball clubs. They began teaching the game to sugar workers. Each mill could have its own club and they could play each other. Soon they would have an eight-club league just in the San Pedro sugar industry.
In Santo Domingo, baseball was a game for the wealthy elite. As in Havana, upper-class Dominicans sent their sons to schools in the U.S. and they came back playing baseball. This was very different from