The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [64]
CHAPTER NINE
The City of Baseball
In the handsome City Hall, on the second floor, was a room marked “Departamento de Cultura.” It was a cramped little room with tiled walls. The dimensions and lack of windows suggested that it might have once been a closet. There was enough space for a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs. Benancio Rodríguez Montaño, a thin, four-foot-tall elderly man with sunken cheeks and no teeth, was in charge. On the rare occasion when a visitor came to the Department of Culture, he would show them to a seat, pour a cup of strong, sugary Dominican coffee, and remain standing, which usually brought him to the visitor’s eye level.
Questions about baseball irritated him. “Everyone says this is the city of baseball players, but before that it was the city of poets. There was Gastón Fernando Deligne, Pedro Mir, and here, there is me,” he said proudly. “I am a poet too. Look, I was improvising just this morning.” Then he took out a dog-eared envelope covered with writing and recited in cadence his latest sixteen lines about loss and vanishing culture in a style vaguely reminiscent of Gastón Deligne.
He may have been right about the loss of culture—“the rose lost from the garden”—but it was clear to most anyone that San Pedro de Macorís, the city of poets, was now the city of baseball.
Not everyone in San Pedro was desperately poor. Most of those who weren’t were baseball players. They were easy to spot because they looked a little larger, a little better fed, and more muscular. If he was gangly, he was probably a shortstop. If you shook hands and his hand was large and powerful and the skin as coarse as a leather glove, he was probably a pitcher. They spoke American English and, in fact, they looked a little like Americans. This was why any large American in San Pedro was frequently asked, “Did you play baseball?” If you said yes—and most Americans have played a little baseball while growing up—invariably the next question was “Did you sign?”
The idea of playing baseball simply for fun had become a rare notion in San Pedro. In the hundreds of fields around town, many variations, like softball, plaquita, and cricket, were played for fun. Some played molinete, a Cuban variation on softball in which the underhanded pitch can travel more than 100 miles per hour. But even this was getting a little serious. Molinete in San Pedro had corporate sponsors, and the players were paid professionals.
Once baseball players started going to the U.S. and coming back with the money to buy mansions and SUVs, baseball was no longer about fun: it was about salvation, the one option that could work. Of course, most of the players around town had not made the major leagues, but many had made enough money somewhere in the game to start a business or take some kind of small step up.
It was no great trick to pick out those big, strong, American-trained and, more important, American-fed ballplayers. In the supermarket there was Ervin Alcantara, age twenty-seven. A few years earlier he had been practicing in a San Pedro field when a scout noticed him; in 2003 he was signed to the Astros. He played minor-league ball until 2007 and then was released. Now he was playing with the Estrellas. Since he never made it into the majors, his salary in the Dominican League was not very high, but it was still a lot better than a salary in the free zone. Also—and this seldom gets said—it was a lot more fun.
Everywhere in San Pedro, baseball connections were to be found. Ramón Pérez Tolentino, a pastry maker with a little shop in Consuelo, lovingly displayed in glass cases his work with white fluffy swirls and bright-colored jellies. He used to coach Manny Acta. Acta never made it to the majors as a player, but as manager of the Washington Nationals he became the first Macorisano to manage a major-league team and also the youngest manager in the majors. His old coach, the pastry maker back in Consuelo, now ran the Consuelo chapter of the Manny Acta Foundation, which supplied baseball equipment and training