The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [39]
At bat, González was often hit by pitches. He believed it was intentional: “Pitchers used to bean black players. The managers would say ‘get the black guy.’” Surprisingly, González insisted that Charles Dressen, a legendary Hall of Fame manager for Brooklyn who was managing Detroit at the time, “always told them hit the black guy.” A hit batter moves to first base, but he will have been intimidated—which is known in baseball as “having his power taken away.” Racists believed that blacks could be easily intimidated, and so pitchers often threw at them. Longtime club owner Bill Veeck openly criticized the practice.
But González tried not to make trouble, concentrating instead on building his career. “I learned a lot because I was in love with baseball and I worked my tail off,” he recalled. One time, tired of the stinging blow of fastballs, he lost his temper. Toward the end of the 1965 season, while batting for the Cleveland Indians against Detroit Tigers pitcher Larry Sherry, two pitches in a row barely missed him. It is not certain that Sherry was trying to hit González—often a pitcher will throw inside very close to the batter to force him to move back off the plate—but González was furious. Bat still in hand, he ran up to the pitcher and swung at him, hitting Sherry’s arm before being restrained. González was fined $500 and suspended for the rest of the season, which was not many games. He did not injure Sherry the way Marichal had injured Roseboro, and it was not a notable game—González was not a famous player like Marichal—but for those who noticed, it was another hot Latin Dominican running amok, even though baseball had a long tradition of cool northerners doing similar things.
González did not make a huge amount of money. Most baseball players didn’t in the 1960s. One of his best years, 1966, the Cleveland Indians paid him $15,000 for the year. He probably made more money in baseball after he retired. He could do this because as a former major leaguer, he was somebody. In 1964 he had even played in a World Series. He went on to manage Tampico in the Mexican League and then the Estrellas back in his hometown. His Estrellas were filled with future major leaguers from San Pedro, including Julio Franco, Alfredo Griffin, and Rafael Ramírez.
Later González became a well-liked fixture around San Pedro as a scout for the Atlanta Braves. “I just look around and keep kids off the street,” he said. “They might turn out to be good players too.” A successful man who sent his children to the local medical school, he was proof for young Macorisanos that you can build a life if you make it to the majors.
San Pedro slipped into the major leagues almost unnoticed until its first star, Ricardo Adolfo Jacobo Carty, known as Rico Carty. The first hint of his cocolo roots was the pronunciation of his nickname, “Beeg Mon”—an accurate description, as Carty was a muscular six feet, three inches tall. He was from Consuelo, where there is a Carty Street, running from the church to the fenced-off sugar mill, named after his mother, Oliva Carty, who was a midwife. By the twenty-first century there were more than one hundred Cartys in Consuelo, a subdivision with about 45,000 people. They were originally French-speaking sugar workers from Saint Martin but with roots in other islands as well. When Rico spoke his fluent English, it was hard to discern if his accent was French, Spanish, or West Indian. Probably it was all three.
Carty has said in interviews that when he was growing up in Consuelo there were two choices: cut cane for the mill or work in the mill. Carty’s father worked in Ingenio Consuelo for sixty years. He loved boxing and cricket. Rico was born in 1939, and when he was a child the older men in Consuelo played cricket. The boys tried it too, but the lure of baseball, encouraged by the mills, was irresistible. The Carty family lived in mill housing behind the ingenio, simple wooden houses in a little Caribbean