The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [30]
In 1951 the Dominican League was reorganized as professional baseball again. Tetelo Vargas, now in his mid-forties, settled in San Pedro to play for the Estrellas; with his bat, it was a contending team. But that first year Licey beat Escogido for the title. The next year Águilas beat Licey and then in 1953 Licey beat Águilas, establishing a competition between those two teams that has dominated the league. The following year Estrellas won, beating Licey. By then baseball was integrated and there was no more Negro League. Dominican teams started hiring major-league players to play winter baseball. The Estrellas got Roger Maris, but they were not very impressed with him. Although Maris was a famously serious and hardworking player in the major leagues, Macorisanos complained that he did not play hard the way they did in San Pedro. That summer he went back to the Yankees and beat Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run season record.
Between 1951 and 2008, in the fifty-four championships—with time off for coups and invasions—thirty-nine have been won by either Licey or Águilas, with Águilas having one more championship than its competitor and the Eastern Stars winning only twice, in 1954 and 1968. They became a heartbreaking club, much like the twentieth-century Red Sox, with a history of collapsing just before victory. Twelve times they made it into the final series but lost.
In 1959, the Estrellas Orientales got a new home, a stadium on the edge of town by the rural road that led to the sugar fields. It was named for Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s murderous, baseball-loving son. There was originally some question of the paternity of Ramfis, whose real name was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez. Ramfis’s mother, María Martínez, had had him while she was married to a Cuban who insisted that he was not the father of the baby. María left him and became Trujillo’s third wife. From an early age a family resemblance became apparent, as young Ramfis—Trujillo gave him the nickname from a character in the Verdi opera Aïda—delighted in obliterating farm animals with a large-caliber pistol. Trujillo had proudly named Ramfis a colonel at the age of four. A lover of baseball and polo, he was also given to inflicting particularly barbaric forms of torture on people he believed to be his enemies.
It was a double insult for San Pedro to have its stadium named after this killer, both because of his brutality and because Ramfis had always been an outspoken fan of Escogido. After his father was assassinated, San Pedro changed the name of the stadium to Estadio Tetelo Vargas. But the masters of the republic continued to stake their claim to San Pedro’s baseball stadium. At the entrance is a plaque to Joaquín Balaguer for renovations in 1993, and next to it one to President Leonel Fernández for renovations in 1999. One of the trappings of president was to get your name on the Tetelo Vargas Stadium.
CHAPTER FIVE
The First Opening
It was not the home team but Major League Baseball in the U.S. that made the world realize that this little sugar town produced great ballplayers. Three things happened in the mid-twentieth century that opened the major leagues to San Pedro de Macorís.
The first thing that happened was an end to the so-called color line in Major League Baseball, the segregation that had created the Negro League. Originally baseball was integrated, but a movement grew to exclude African-Americans. It was led by Cap Anson in the 1880s. Anson was one of the greatest players of his day, with a twenty-seven-year career—mostly for the Chicago White Stockings, who later became the Cubs—during which he became the first player with three thousand hits. He was so influential in baseball that his racism infected the entire game. On numerous occasions Anson refused to play because there were black players either on his team or the opposing one. Famously, in 1883 he objected to playing with the catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker, a well-educated son of a doctor and considered the first African-American major