The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [72]
But this was inevitable as the power of Major League Baseball to change a Dominican life became ever more dramatic. Bonny Castillo, known as Manny in the U.S. when he played Major League Baseball in the early 1980s, coached newly signed prospects for Tampa Bay in the Dominican Republic. He said, “When I was playing, $15,000 was my best-paid year. I make more money now as a coach than I ever made as a player. The minimum wage got to $35,000 and now it is $400,000. If you make $400,000, you come home a rich man if you only play four or five seasons. You get in the big league, you’ve got it made.”
Toledo’s example of what he liked was signing José Reyes for the Mets. Reyes, who exuded a love of baseball in the way he played, got a $13,000 signing bonus. “José Reyes was a special case,” said Toledo. “I signed him in Santiago at a restaurant lunch with his family and friends. When he left and walked toward the parking lot, I said to someone, ‘Look at that. There’s a specialness you can see. It’s like a halo.’”
But Toledo admitted that he did not often see halos. So he looked for how easily the player moved to see if he was a natural athlete, and he looked at the kind of body the boy had and imagined what it could look like with the addition of protein and conditioning. If it was a pitcher, he looked for long arms, big hands, and broad shoulders. He pointed at a tall, thin young pitcher throwing on the mound with long arms and legs. “He’s got a perfect body,” he observed. “A lot of room to fill out.” And then he shouted with great enthusiasm, “That kid could tie his shoes standing up!”
He and a lot of others also looked for aggression—aggressive pitchers and aggressive batters. Eddy Toledo recalled spotting Mets superstar pitcher Dwight Gooden as a boy: “I said, ‘He’s Bob Gibson. He competes, the aggression is there. His body is just not finished.’ ”
José Serra, scout and Latin American supervisor for the Cubs, said, “The secret of scouting is that, more than anything, he has to be a kid who wants to be something special.” The Cubs’ academy was in a huge complex out in the fields on a dirt road off the highway between San Pedro and Boca Chica. The complex housed academies with dormitories, workout rooms, staffed dining rooms, and other facilities for four different major-league teams, and was expanding in the hopes of drawing one or two more. As the scouting became more intense, success depended less on secrecy and more on outbidding competitors, and to adjust to this new reality, the organizations were increasingly clustering together in these large multiteam complexes rather than hiding away in small individual camps in the fields. This particular complex was built by former ballplayers, including Junior Noboa, a Dominican from Azua in the desertlands of the southwest, the poorest part of the Dominican Republic. Noboa, in an unspectacular eight years on various major-league teams, hit only one home run and never commanded huge paychecks. But he understood that for very little money he could buy a plot of undeveloped tropical brushland, clear it, build a few simple concrete buildings, landscape some baseball diamonds, and rent it for handsome prices to major-league organizations.
Others followed. In San Pedro there was increasingly tough competition among ex-players, including George Bell, who had bought plots and were looking for major-league organizations to rent them. Salomón Torres, a native Macorisano, was most remembered for his first major-league season, 1993, when in the last game he gave up three runs in as many innings and cost the Giants first place in the division. In San Pedro he was also remembered for losing control of a fastball in 2003 and hitting fellow Macorisano Sammy Sosa in the head and shattering his batting helmet. But Torres also took a part of his major-league earnings, cleared a cane field on the edge of San Pedro, built diamonds and dormitories and offices, then rented it to the Atlanta Braves and the Texas Rangers. He called it Baseball Towers, a play on his name, Torres,