The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [45]
At the start, Guerrero was scouting for the Toronto Blue Jays and his archcompetitor Rafael Avila was scouting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. From Los Angeles, the Dodgers—the same management that had opened the sport to black players in Brooklyn—pioneered Latino recruitment. Avila was a Cuban, a veteran of the ill-fated 1961 anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1970, when Avila moved to the Dominican Republic, there had still been only twenty-four Dominican players who had risen to the major leagues. But at a time when baseball was not very international, for twenty-four players to have turned up on major-league rosters in fourteen years from one small foreign country was a phenomenon.
At first the scouts tried to raid the military teams, where Marichal had been found. But this had the complication of getting the player released from the military. Then they looked at the Dominican League. Avila started working with Licey. But eventually they discovered an untapped wealth of very talented teenagers who lacked proper training, in the sugar fields of San Pedro. The scouts needed to find places to train the young players and feed them—they were all undersized and undernourished—without attracting too much attention. Avila built two rooms in Elvio Jiménez’s backyard and housed and fed fifteen players there, the forerunner of what came to be known as a baseball academy.
The competition for San Pedro ballplayers was lively. In 1976 a Cuban scout for the Cleveland Indians, Reggio Otero, picked up a fifteen-year-old cocolo from Consuelo named Alfredo Griffin, who had honed his skills playing every Sunday for the sugar mill where his stepfather worked. Epy Guerrero never forgot that Griffin had gotten away from him, and after three years of slowly rising in the Indians organization, he was able to get Griffin away to Toronto, where he started his career winning the Rookie of the Year Award.
Alfredo Griffin, Pepe Frías, Julio Franco, Rafael Ramírez, and Tony Fernández were all shortstops from San Pedro who went to the majors in the ten years between Frías in 1973 and Fernández in 1983, and all became stars. Griffin, Frías, and Franco were from Consuelo. Soon San Pedro de Macorís, the city of plántanos, sugar, and poets, became known as the city of shortstops. To date, only thirteen of the seventy-nine Macorisanos who have played in the major leagues have been shortstops, compared with twenty-seven pitchers, mostly in recent years. But when this town was first getting noticed by the fans of professional baseball, it seemed that it was turning out more excellent shortstops than anything else, and even today when the name San Pedro de Macorís is mentioned, often the response is “That town with all the shortstops.”
A shortstop is one of the most important players on a team—certainly the star of the infield. He roams between second and third base, between infield and outfield. Because most hitters are right-handed, they tend to hit toward the left, and so the shortstop is in more plays than anyone else. If it were a left-handed world, the shortstop would have been placed between first and second. It is a role that requires great athleticism because he is involved in tight critical plays, including double and triple plays. Often by the time a ground ball has gone the distance to reach the shortstop, there is little time to beat the runner on a long throw to first base. A shortstop’s moves often appear spectacular, and good shortstops usually become fan favorites.
Since the youth of San Pedro dreamed of being stars, they dreamed of being shortstops. But also, since they had hard lives and poor nutrition, Macorisanos tended to be small, with powerful throwing arms, which is the classic shortstop—or at least it was until large men such as Cal Ripken,