The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [46]
Griffin’s family came from Nevis. His father, Alberto Reed, was a musician and a dockworker in Santo Domingo. They lived in Villa Francisca, a poor crumbling and crowded one-story neighborhood in the old part of the capital near the Ozama River. Reed performed at a nearby night-club called Borojol. He played in a musical tradition that reached its height in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s with singers who earned international reputations such as Tito Rodríguez and Beny Moré. The music was called son, an Afro-Cuban hybrid. Eventually son would mutate into salsa, but before that happened, in the 1940s, Arsenio Rodríguez introduced big conga drums to son; by the time Alberto Reed was playing, conga drumming was an important part of the band. This made a huge impression on young Alfredo, who developed a permanent love for conga drums.
When Alfredo was only eight years old, the rough, fetid streets of the capital, in which boys from rival barrios fought one another for dominance, got even rougher. A U.S. invasion followed a coup d’état, and a civil war meant street battles with high-caliber automatic weapons. Alfredo’s unmarried mother, Mary, a Macorisana, wanted to leave the dangerous town, where young Alfredo liked to run loose and watch both the violence and food distribution by American soldiers. She took her three sons and left Reed and moved back with her family in her native Consuelo. She later became involved with the sugar worker whom Alfredo still refers to as his stepfather. Although Alfredo always used his mother’s name, clearly Reed was an important influence. People in Consuelo who recall growing up with Alfredo say that their earliest memories are not of him laboring in the mills, because he didn’t work there, or playing on the Consuelo ball team on Sundays, for which he was paid, but of Alfredo playing the conga in a band and entertaining at cocolo parties and fiestas. Other things they remember are that he earned money shining shoes and that he was a tough street fighter.
Griffin credits the mill with making Consuelo a place that produces baseball players. “They all come from here,” he said, “because we played ball for the mills every Sunday.” Certainly Consuelo, a small subdivision that has produced eleven major leaguers as of 2009, is per capita the most productive neighborhood in modern baseball history. Griffin first learned baseball playing street ball in Santo Domingo, but he is not certain he would have ended up a baseball player if he had stayed in his tough city neighborhood. None of the boys he grew up with there played pro ball, and some of them ended up in jail.
Were it not for baseball, Alfredo Griffin might have become a very different person, but Alfredo had an uncle, Clemente Hart, who was a cricket player turned baseball player and played for the Estrellas. Hart steered Alfredo toward Consuelo baseball. Soon Ingenio Consuelo was paying him to play on their team. Managed by a former major leaguer, Pedro González, this was not the usual company team: it had Alfredo Griffin, Nelson Norman, Rafael Ramírez, Rafael Santana, and Julio Franco—all future major leaguers. This was a team that scouts watched.
In fact, Consuelo played in a league consisting of six mill-sponsored teams, the Circuito de los Ingenios, which played a thirty-game season in the dead season and which scouts closely monitored. The mills supplied uniforms with the name of the ingenio across the chest. Well known for the quality of their baseball, the league games were the primary entertainment in the sugarcane communities.
Teams also developed in the various barrios of central San Pedro, which formed a league. The top San Pedro team would play the top ingenio team at Tetelo Vargas Stadium for the September season finale. The ingenio players and their families would cram into buses and go to the stadium, where the playoff took place in front of a screaming crowd of about nine thousand fans. In October the zafra would begin, the workers would take off their uniforms and return