The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [35]
In 2006, when ten percent of major-league players were Dominican, a reporter from The Miami Herald asked José Reyes, the young Dominican shortstop for the Mets, about Ozzie Virgil, the first Dominican to play in the majors. Reyes did not know who Virgil was.
Dominicans only very slowly started being signed with Major League Baseball. After Virgil in 1956 came Felipe Alou in 1958, then his brother Matty in 1960. Julián Javier, a sure-handed infielder and swift baserunner, debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1960. Also in 1960, Diomedes Olivo started pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates at the age of fourteen. In 1961 his brother Chi-Chi started pitching for the Braves. Rudy Hernández, a pitcher who spent most of his career in the minors, was called up and pitched twenty-one games for the Washington Senators, also in 1960. The first Dominicans—Virgil, the Alous, the Olivos, Marichal—were all from small towns. The only exception was Hernández, who was from Santiago. Four out of the first seven were pitchers. None of the seven were from San Pedro. The first were found in places where the first Dominican scouts knew to look, such as the Pan American Games and the military teams built up by the Trujillo regime. Virgil was found because he was in New York, Felipe Alou because as a pre-medical student at the University of Santo Domingo he played for a college team that happened to be coached by Horacio Martínez, who had recently signed on to scout for the New York Giants.
Of the first seven, the one who established the most enduring image of a Dominican ballplayer in both positive and negative ways—an image that would impact on both players and fans—was Juan Antonio Marichal Sánchez, from the small northern village of Laguna Verde near the Haitian border.
Marichal was an intimidating pitcher with what in the 1960s was already an old-fashioned delivery: an elaborate windup that sent one leg straight in the air and made it impossible for the batter to get any inkling of what type of pitch he was about to release. He had mastered a wide variety of different pitches, which added to the batter’s confusion.
He came from a tough world. He was a discovery of Ramfis Trujillo, who grabbed the young Marichal to play for the team he was developing in the Dominican air force. The dictator’s son watched Marichal pitch one game and drafted him into the air force on the spot. Although working for a homicidal maniac can be frightening, the Trujillos favored the military and paid their recruits well.
Marichal became a major-league pitcher in 1960 for the San Francisco Giants and was stellar from his first game. His career earned run average was 2.89, one of the lowest in the history of the game. The earned run average, or ERA, measures the average number of earned runs—runs that are the pitcher’s fault—scored in a game. In an age when ball clubs have huge pitching staffs and a starting pitcher seldom stays in the game for more than seven innings, it is astonishing to recall the night of January 2, 1963, in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, when Marichal pitched sixteen innings against Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn until finally Willie Mays hit a home run off of Spahn.
Marichal seemed to have the attention of the entire Dominican Republic each time he pitched. According to legend, the first Americans to realize there had been a coup d’état in Santo Domingo in 1965 were the Western Union operators at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It was their job to wire each play to the Dominican Republic when Marichal was pitching. Something cataclysmic must have happened to block scores. In fact, the government-controlled communications had been seized by conspirators.
Marichal would have seemed more spectacular if he had not pitched in an age of spectacular pitchers. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson all pitched at the time. During Marichal’s career, the top annual pitching prize, the Cy Young Award, was