The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [83]
The house was a small rectangle with a corrugated metal roof, pleasant from the outside in its lemon yellow. The floor was a concrete slab painted with considerable artistry to resemble green marble. The rectangle was divided with Sheetrock into rooms and, like so many San Pedro homes, the doorways had curtains for doors. A television with powdery images was on most of the time. Alcadio glanced at it with no real interest. There was a stove, a refrigerator, a stereo, and running water some of the time.
In a tiny kitchen Alcadio’s wife, Isabel de los Santos, made food for an enormous extended family with eight children, their spouses, and their children. A favorite, as in most Macorisano homes, was pescado y domplin. This was Isabel’s recipe for fish and dumplings:
Grate the coconut and squeeze out the milk. Put in a pan and season with garlic, ajies, onions, and celery. Put the pan over fire and, once the liquid is boiling, add the fish. After fifteen minutes, remove from heat.
For the dumplings, gather the amount of flour you want to use. Add butter and salt. Little by little, add water until you get a compact dough. Put a pot of water to boil. Shape dough into little cylinders and put in boiling water. Leave for twenty minutes.
Three out of their four sons were shortstops with good arms, good hands, and considerable talent—three chances at salvation for the family. The first brother signed with the Oakland A’s and progressed to their Single A team in Canada, which released him. The second signed with the Diamondbacks and was released from their Single A team also. Neither one ever came home again. As José Canó observed, “They give you a plane ticket home and that’s it. Some Dominicans go to the airport and change the ticket for New York. Every Dominican has someone in New York.”
Isabel spoke of her sons in dry-eyed anguish: “I haven’t seen one of my sons in six years. The other I haven’t seen in five months. They can’t work. They are illegal but they stay. They say here there are no opportunities.”
“No opportunities,” Alcadio confirmed emphatically.
It was a painful reality for Dominican ballplaying families. The major-league infielder Fernando Tatis grew up in Miramar without his father, who had the same name. The father had signed with Houston when the son was too young to remember. He was released from Triple A but never came home; the son first saw his father in 1997 when he signed with the Texas Rangers and went to the United States. His father came to a game and introduced himself.
The Corporán family had one shortstop left to save them: Manuel. In 1989 the Baltimore Orioles signed him, along with Manny Alexander. They each got a $2,500 signing bonus, but while Alexander bought his bed, Manuel bought the expensive medicine his father needed, and used what was left over to buy food for the family. “I love my parents,” he said. “They gave me the best they could.”
For two years Manuel played shortstop for the Orioles in the Dominican Republic; then, without warning, he was released. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, his eyes almost tearing, fifteen years later. It was over. He never even made it off the island. “I had a dream,” he said. “I would play baseball in the major leagues and earn money for my family. They are poor people. My father can’t work. My mother has no work and I was going to buy them medicine and everything they needed.”
Manny Alexander was sent up and had a major-league career. He never became a superstar, but he could return to San Pedro an ex-major leaguer and a man of affluence. Manuel, on the other hand, cleaned machines at Porvenir for twenty pesos an hour, which was less than a dollar. Seeing the hopelessness of that, he worked for five years in the free zone as a quality-control inspector of blue jeans. He had gotten married and had two children to support, so he worked extra hours, but he could earn only about 900 pesos, which, as the peso declined against the dollar, ended up being around $30 a month. “I wasted five years of my life in that