The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [81]
His prediction about money came true: in 2008 alone he earned $3 million—considerably less money than a few of his teammates made, but a phenomenal mountain of wealth in San Pedro. He was likely to amass a fortune by the time his major-league career ended. But in some ways he remained a small-town kid from San Pedro, living quietly in Fort Lee, New Jersey, shunning the life of a Manhattan celebrity enjoyed by some of his teammates.
Robinson was an emotional player, given to batting slumps and slow-starting seasons. He probably would have felt very isolated in an earlier generation. Charlie Romero remembered, “The mail doesn’t work here. When I was playing baseball, my parents didn’t know how the season went until I came home in the fall. Your first year or so you are homesick. When you have a bad day, a bad game, you want to hear your mother’s voice telling you it’s okay. Now they have cell phones.”
It was not his mother’s voice that Robinson Canó heard after a bad game, and the voice was not always telling him it was okay. After one game Robinson called his father’s cell phone.
“How’d you do?” José asked.
Robinson said, “One for four,” or one hit in four at-bats.
“That’s not good enough,” José told his son. “If you can hit him once, you should be able to at least twice—maybe not four times, but at least twice. He’s going to think that you won’t expect the same thing, because you already hit it. So he will do it again to fool you.” It is an advantage for a hitter to have a pitcher for a father.
José’s other son, Joselito, was another skinny Dominican boy waiting to get American-fed. This time José was determined to produce a pitcher. Joselito showed early signs of a strong arm, mastering breaking balls when he was quite young. And he was left-handed.
But, like his brother, Joselito had watched his father suffer and did not want to be a pitcher. He was not yet fifteen years old when this lanky boy showed a gift for smooth-handed fielding, a powerful throwing arm, and the kind of flowing swing that can’t be taught. Plus, he could bat from either side of the plate: he was a natural switch-hitter.
José had a number of business interests around San Pedro, including a little club, Club Las Caobas, named for an unpaved street next to the field where the Porvenir softball team played. It was a round, fenced-off, open-air dance space with a bar—a breezy place to go in the evening and play dominos and drink and dance. On the back wall, dominating the club, was a larger-than-life-size mural of Robinson Canó at bat in Tampa spring training.
José was also a buscón. He ran the José Canó Baseball Academy, which worked out every morning before school. From its founding in 1999 through 2008, the academy got twenty players signed. Canó spent $1,500 a month keeping his academy running in an old ball field in Barrio México near the Tetelo Vargas Stadium. Over the outfield wall, in the distance, the twin smokestacks of the Cristóbal Colón mill could be seen. He periodically went to New York to visit his son and pick up used balls and other discarded equipment from the Yankees.
José not only trained his players, he taught them. One of the things he told them was: “If you have five pesos to buy something, make sure it’s food.”
“Salami,” suggested one of the young players.
“Salami is not food. Neither is cake,” he said.
Among the most promising prospects at this academy was Joselito Canó, because of his talent as well as his good family background. Major League Baseball had