The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [48]
Fernández also found work tending the stadium grounds, which made a boy well positioned to get balls. The Estrellas called him “Cabeza,” head, because they thought his head was too big. In reality, like a lot of Dominican kids, his body was too small. But Fernández’s head was also a great asset: he had an understanding of the game that went far beyond his years.
Everyone knew Cabeza, and several scouts had their eyes on him. He tirelessly practiced fielding ground balls and other infield skills. But the scouts’ interest cooled when they learned that Fernández had bone chips in one of his knees, a disabling condition: while injuries are part of the game, no one wants to start off with an injured prospect. Guerrero, who always had surprising ways to grab promising players, took Fernández to a hospital in Santo Domingo and paid for the operation. After his recovery, Guerrero signed him.
Fernández had a seventeen-season major-league career, one season less than Griffin. Fernández was not only a great fielder but a solid hitter, known for his triples, and he was a smart and swift base runner. He was famous for a strange but impressive maneuver, the kind of flourish for which shortstops become popular: he would leap to catch the ball and, while still in midair, toss it underhanded to first base.
Julio César Franco grew up in Consuelo playing with socks and milk cartons. His father’s name was Robles, but Julio—like Alfredo Griffin and many other Dominicans—chose to use his mother’s name. His father worked in the Ingenio Consuelo, pulling the carts that loaded cane into the grinder for 230 Dominican pesos a month. In those days the peso was worth almost a dollar. Later he got a better job as a welder earning 450 pesos a month, an excellent sugar-mill salary.
“It was everybody’s ambition to make the majors,” Franco recalled. But among the boys he grew up and played with in Consuelo, Franco was the only one who succeeded. There were a lot of games, especially on weekends, but very few programs in which a teenager could get training in baseball’s many basic skills. However, he did manage to find a program run by a man named Antonio García, whom everyone knew as simply “El Chico.” El Chico was known in Consuelo as a stern disciplinarian. He educated the San Pedro teenagers in the very American rules of the major leagues, including being on time. They would play two games a day. One week the games would be in Consuelo; the next week they would be held in downtown San Pedro, and the Consuelo players would walk miles to get there. The first game would start at nine a.m., and after the game there would be lunch at the home of someone who lived nearby—a player or a coach—before the second game at three p.m. In the early 1970s, food was inexpensive in San Pedro because it was an agricultural community. After the second game they would all walk back to Consuelo.
Most players didn’t have gloves; when it was their team’s turn at bat, the fielders who had them left their gloves at their positions so their counterparts could use them. The “rich” kid of the neighborhood was Carlos Rymer, not because his family was really wealthy but because he had relatives in New York who sent equipment. All of the players would use it, but if Carlos got mad he would take his equipment and leave, shouting, “Game over!” Rymer signed as a pitcher with the Atlanta Braves, but more than thirty years later Franco could not conceal his boyish glee when pointing out that Rymer never made it out of Atlanta’s minor-league