The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [65]
Danilo Rogers was a cocolo who grew up in downtown San Pedro. His grandfather was from Anguilla and had come to San Pedro to work at Ingenio Consuelo. He became a “mixer,” a technician who made white sugar. Danilo played ball and signed with the Atlanta Braves, playing left field on the A and Double A teams. He never made it to the majors, but he put away enough money to start a pleasant, airy restaurant serving Dominican food. His specialty was mofongo, a very Dominican dish, although, typically, the Puerto Rican sugar people brought it here. It is made from mashed plantains, fried in fat and garlic. Anyone who complained that mofongo is too heavy satisfied the Dominican definition of a gringo. Here is Danilo’s recipe:
Fry plantains with pork, beef, chicken, whatever you want to do it with. Also chicharón, the fat layer under the skin of pork. Crush the chicharónes and plantains in a pilón, a Caribbean mortar and pestle for mashing bananas, with butter, garlic, salt and pepper.
Young baseball players in San Pedro were fit, serious, and clean. Theirs was a disciplined youth. Their games, which took place every day all over town, were played with great seriousness. When a coach demonstrated a move, the boys would imitate it like ballet dancers learning a new step. This was not playing, it was working. Nevertheless, they were amusing games to watch, because the players had a thrilling combination of talent, determination, and undeveloped skills. A fly ball soared to center field and the center fielder, for no apparent reason, dropped the ball. But he had a good arm and threw quickly to shortstop. The shortstop, with bad hands but quick reflexes, also dropped the ball but quickly scooped it up and then tossed it to third base. The swift runner, who had been sprinting hard but was thrown a little off his step because he never expected to be running this far on a routine fly ball, was tagged out at third. One out—the same result had the center fielder caught the ball in the first place, but much more interesting.
There were a lot of scouts in San Pedro, but there were also a lot of baseball games to watch. Dany Santana, a native Macorisano who scouted for the Tampa Bay Rays, estimated that there were between thirty and forty baseball fields in town that he regularly dropped in on. One way an ex-ballplayer could make money was to buy a small plot of land, build one or two baseball diamonds, and rent them out. If he spent some money and put in dormitories, a gym, and some other facilities, he might be able to rent it out to a major-league franchise for a high price. But there was a market for lesser facilities as well.
Santana often scouted Astin Field, a ballpark of major-league dimensions, measuring four hundred feet from home plate to the center-field wall. During games or even practice, boys waited in the papaya trees around the walls, just as they did in the palms around Tetelo Vargas Stadium, for a foul ball or home run. The owner, Astin Jacobo, Jr., like many ballpark owners, was an ex-player, signed by scout Rafael Vásquez.
Vásquez was a legend in San Pedro. Before he was a scout, he had been a pitcher from nearby La Romana; in 1976 he threw twelve pitches for a Pittsburgh Pirates scout and was signed immediately. His rise was phenomenally swift. In the Rookie League in Bradenton, Florida, he struck out five batters in a row and was immediately sent up to a Class A team. It took him only two years from signing until he played on a major-league team, the Seattle Mariners. But his major-league career lasted just one season, in which he pitched in only nine games for the Mariners, first as a starter and then as a reliever; then he was sent down to Triple A, never to rise again. What made him famous in San Pedro—what the name Rafael Vásquez meant to Macorisanos, lovers of Macorisano baseball trivia—was that he was the first Dominican pitcher ever to get a win against the New York Yankees.
Vásquez went on to be a scout for the Kansas City Royals, for whom he signed Jacobo, who did not become a