The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [51]
It was a bit easier for George Bell than the others because he was comfortable in English, but he was ill prepared for life in Helena, Montana, in 1978 when the Phillies sent him there. When the electricity went off he was not surprised, because electricity regularly goes off in San Pedro; but when the lights did not come back on, someone had to explain to him about paying an electric bill.
While a black man was fairly unusual in Helena in 1978, Bell said, “I didn’t have the problems of black Americans because I was a Latino. Helena girls liked the way I spoke Spanish. The Latinos were not treated like the blacks. I walked down the streets, went into stores, people were nice, and the countryside was beautiful.”
“It was okay for George Bell,” said Julio Franco. “He spoke English and he was in Helena. I was in Butte. There were Latin guys in Helena but not Butte. In 1978, I went to spring training in Sarasota, Florida. There were Spanish-speaking people around. There was a pool and a Ping-Pong table and a pool table. It was really nice. Then they said we were going to Montana. I didn’t even know where Montana was, but I looked out a window and saw snow on the mountains. I didn’t even own a coat! It was freezing cold there.”
In what was becoming something of a cliché for Dominican ballplayers, Franco often resorted to eating Kentucky Fried Chicken because it was easy to order. However, he also bought food and cooked in the dormitory where he was living. There was one Spanish-speaking player who knew English, a Puerto Rican named Carlos Cabassa. He taught Julio to speak English and then things got a little easier. But one of the players went to a local disco one evening, “and the cowboys beat him up and then we weren’t allowed to go there. We learned never to go out at all.”
Sammy Sosa was born in a shack on a well-trimmed unpaved street in Consuelo. The small, crumbling, toffee-colored structure still stands, a different family occupying it, around the corner from F Street where Julio Franco was born in a house about the same size, number 14, which was why Julio always wore that number. Like many homes in the Dominican Republic, these had only occasional electricity and running water that was not drinkable. Sosa’s father drove a tractor, clearing harvested cane fields. It was not as good a job as the ones inside the mill, but it was much better than cutting cane. Sammy’s mother, like George Bell’s, earned money cooking and selling food out of her home.
When Sammy was six, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sammy’s mother tried hard to support her three children. They moved to Santo Domingo and then back to central San Pedro, where Sammy wandered the streets with a shoe-shine box, competing with hundreds of other poor kids in search of customers.
Sosa’s brother Luis was a boyhood baseball fanatic, but not Sammy. His heroes were not Juan Marichal and Rico Carty but Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler. Like Alfredo Griffin and many other boys, he had fought a great deal on the streets in Consuelo. When he got to central San Pedro, he discovered a boxing school and started working out on the bags and sparring. His mother convinced him to give it up.
When Sammy was thirteen, an American businessman in whose shoe factory he worked took a liking to him and brought him a gift from the United States: a blue glove that cost a hundred dollars. In his eighteen seasons in the major leagues, Sosa always played with a blue glove. He joined a youth organization team that played in a park named after Rico Carty. With his powerful throwing arm, he could accurately fire the ball to basemen to tag out runners. He hit home runs. Some of the local experts watching these games did not believe he was only fourteen. Sosa had power but no skills, and predictably every hit went to deep right field. But a coach named Héctor Peguero began teaching him how to change his leg position and swing a little early to hit the ball just before it arrived so that it would pop off to left field, a technique known as pulling