• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 576 0

Santiago named its team Sandino after Augusto César Sandino. The year before, three years after leaving the Dominican Republic, the U.S. invaded and occupied Nicaragua and Sandino became a folk hero throughout Latin America for his armed resistence to U.S. occupation. But once Trujillo—a product of U.S. military anti-insurgency efforts—came to power, the name Sandino was no longer allowed and, conforming to the Santo Domingo teams, the Santiago team became the Águilas, the Eagles, and then the Águilas Cibaeñas, the Cibao Eagles. Only San Pedro de Macorís did not have an animal. True to their tradition as the city of poets, they called their team Las Estrellas del Oriente, the Stars of the East. But they needed an animal, too, to give fans an image to use in the spectacle that erupts in Dominican stadiums. And so they declared their mascot to be an elephant so that fans could trumpet like elephants when the Estrellas scored a home run. Noise is important in Dominican culture.

These four teams—the Tigres del Licey, the Leones del Escogido, the Águilas Cibaeñas, and the Estrellas Orientales—from these three towns became the core of Dominican professional baseball. They played long seasons against one another, with grueling final contests for the Dominican championship.

The games in Santo Domingo, Santiago, and San Pedro drew huge crowds and were avidly covered by sportswriters, who always used pseudonyms to protect themselves from the ire of fans. For a few years it was an amateur passion, what is known by Dominicans as baseball’s romantic era. But the clubs could make so much money at these packed stadiums that inevitably the romance was soon overtaken by commerce, and baseball became a professional sport. Players sought the highest salary in a circuit that included not only the four Dominican teams but the teams of Cuba and Puerto Rico and a few other Latin American countries as well as the Negro League in the United States. And players from these foreign teams, especially the Negro League, the Cuban League, and the Puerto Rican League, also came to the Dominican Republic to play.

The most famous player of the Dominican League was Juan Esteban Vargas, known as Tetelo Vargas. Born in Santo Domingo in 1906, he was a phenomenally fast runner nicknamed “the Dominican Deer.” He broke a world record rounding a baseball diamond in 13:25 seconds. There is an unconfirmed rumor that he once beat Olympic track star Jesse Owens in a sprint. Vargas played all three outfield positions, shortstop, and second base, and was a great hitter with a strong throwing arm. He played for Escogido, for the Negro League in New York, for Puerto Rico, for Mexico, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for Colombia, for Canada, and finally, past the age of retirement, for the Estrellas in San Pedro. This was the world of Dominican ballplayers. Vargas was never allowed in the major leagues because he was black, but in Puerto Rico in the 1940s he played in a tournament against the Yankees during their spring training and batted .500, getting seven hits in fourteen at-bats. In 1953, playing for the Estrellas at the age of forty-seven, he was the Dominican League batting champion with an average of .353.

With professional careers like Tetelo Vargas’s the cane workers of San Pedro had even more motivation to play their sugar-mill games hard and well and maybe someday leave the mill for Estrellas or the other teams or even the Negro League.

Trujillo was not a baseball fan, but that did not mean he wasn’t interested in controlling it. His son Ramfis and other family members and many of his generals liked the game. Besides, his concept of governance was to own everything, so that the profits went to himself and the rest he could distribute as he pleased to those who said, “Gracias, Presidente.”

When sugar prices started to rise in the late 1940s, he took over mills to get the profits. By the mid-1950s he controlled two-thirds of the sugar production in the country, mainly for his personal profit. Among his assets were the San Pedro mills of Porvenir, Quisqueya, Santa