The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [38]
The rest of the time balls were made out of socks, also a San Pedro tradition. Socks are stuffed tightly into an outer sock, which is then sewn closed and dipped in water before playing to give it a little density. Socks, too, were hard to come by. When Julio Franco, the durable major-league shortstop, was growing up in Consuelo, he used to steal socks from his big brother, Vicente. This is another way of looking at the Puerto Rican assertion that Dominicans don’t wear socks.
For a time batillas were used. Bottled water came in large jugs with a big cap that could be used as a ball. But in recent years manufacturers have switched to lightweight plastic and the cap does not have enough weight for throwing.
Bats were another problem. The real bats were broken and glued, taped, or even nailed back together, but often a stick of tough tropical wood or even light sugarcane served instead. Sometimes a milk carton could be shaped into a glove—a fairly good glove if you knew how to shape it, especially if you were not catching anything harder than a wad of socks. If anyone had a real glove, he left it in the position on the field so that the other team could use it too. Dominican children were resourceful: girls skipped rope with palm fronds.
The best way to get bats and balls was to play on a team, and there were teams all over San Pedro. There were the sugar mills, and González did not limit himself to Angelina. One year he played on a team run by the Haitian vice consul, who was based in San Pedro to look after the many Haitians who cut cane there. Also on that team were Manny Jiménez and his brother Elvio, a shortstop, who would be a teammate of González’s again in 1964 with the New York Yankees. But Elvio’s major-league career lasted only one game.
In 1957, Ramfis Trujillo drafted not only Juan Marichal but several San Pedro players from the mills, including González and both Jiménez brothers. In San Pedro it was becoming clear that the Dominican military was a pathway to the major leagues. The army, navy, air force, and police all had teams that competed against one another, and still do. This was top-quality Dominican baseball, and players who did well on these teams got noticed. San Pedro youths in the sugar mills even today will point out that the military teams are a good opportunity because “that is how Juan Marichal got discovered.”
González, a large and affable man, signed with the Yankee organization in 1958, the year Marichal began his major-league career. He arrived in America speaking no English. There were few Spanish speakers to help him. “I ate ham and eggs for breakfast and the rest of the time chicken and french fries,” González recalled. “It was all I knew how to order.”
When he started in the majors in 1963, Dominicans were still not completely accepted. After distinguishing himself as a hitter in the minors, González started playing for the Yankees in 1963. He was the first Dominican to play for the Yankees. He was a novelty, nicknamed “Speedy González” after a vaguely racist Looney Tune stereotype: a Mexican mouse with a gold tooth and a big sombrero who spoke in an exaggerated singsong nasal accent—the Latino as a cartoon character. Or he may have been named not so much for the cartoon as for the 1962 hit single by singer Pat Boone that seems to be about this same cartoon mouse, but is really about nothing at all.
Because of injuries, González never lived up to his batting potential, but he was a smooth and artful infielder who made only thirty-one errors in his five years of Major League Baseball. In 1964 he covered five positions and made only three errors in sixty-six games.
As with Virgil, González’s skin color was a bigger issue than his ethnicity. “I remember when the Yankees came to play the Baltimore Orioles in 1963,” he said without a trace of bitterness in his voice. “The whole team stayed in the Sheraton in Baltimore, but they wouldn’t serve me in the restaurant. I used to have to go to