The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [85]
Enrique’s father was a chicken farmer who dispensed medical assistance in rural areas. Senovia’s father worked in the cane fields. Enrique and Senovia had bettered their lives and hoped their three sons would do the same.
But the sons loved baseball.
Enrique claimed that he was a good player, although he never signed anywhere. He played every position. “In my day you played everywhere,” he remarked.
The sons caught it from the father. They started playing at the age of six. Enrique said, “For them baseball is like food. They live baseball. We love baseball. We also know it can give a better life. But we also love it. It’s our life.”
But this was not their plan. “We thought our children would be doctors or engineers,” Enrique explained. “But they always wanted baseball.” He gave a smile of resignation, but Senovia looked worried. She was sorry that Abner had dropped out of school but shrugged: “It is his big dream.” She said she hoped he could still study. Enrique quickly added that while Abner was in Summer League in Boca Chica, he went every afternoon to Santo Domingo to study English. But this course was a required part of the Indians’ academy program.
Meanwhile they were watching the launching of their next son, Esdra, also a star student. He began playing at the age of five in the Escuela de Béisbol Menor de Santa Fe. No rolled socks or stick bats at the baseball school in Santa Fe. They started small boys off with real baseballs and bats and gloves, even uniforms. The school ran through age eighteen. Despite what Enrique and Senovia said about education, they would not have started Esdra at this school if they had not wanted him to be a baseball player. The school was run by Herman Martínez, who grew up behind the center-field wall of Tetelo Vargas Stadium and played in the minors for the Baltimore organization. Asked what the goal of the school was, Martínez replied without hesitation, “To get kids signed to Double A teams.”
He said of Esdra, “As soon as his parents told him to play, all he wanted to do was play baseball.” Martínez, who was a scout at various times for the Mets, the Detroit Tigers, the Cleveland Indians, the Montreal Expos, and the Atlanta Braves, regarded Esdra as his best prospect. “He comes from a good family, well-educated people,” he said. Only then did Martínez mention the strength of Esdra’s throwing arm.
Lean but over six feet tall, with long arms for throwing and long legs for running, Esdra played center field with a strong right arm and was a good hitter—although, like many fifteen-year-olds, impatience often caused him to strike out.
Once Esdra was fifteen he was moved to a more advanced program, where he held his own against sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. The program was called RBI, for Riviviendo el Béisbol en el Interior de Ciudades, Revitalizing Baseball in Inner Cities, a program devised in South Central Los Angeles in 1989 but sponsored in San Pedro by CEMEX. Having, on average, gotten two players signed a year since 2005, it was considered one of the best programs. Their practice field was the Tetelo Vargas Stadium.
The head coach was the tough and fit Rogelio Candalario, whose pitching career ended in Double A with a broken arm. Their pitching coach had coached Pedro Martínez when he pitched for the Dodgers.
Increasingly in this and other programs, when teams rated players, they did it with money: rather than talking about the great arm, the fast and smart baserunning, the beautiful and natural swing of the bat, they talked of the signing bonus. To say a player received a $300,000 bonus was a way of saying he was a good player. Increasingly in San Pedro, a great ballplayer was one who signed for a lot of money. By extension, some would say of Esdra, “His brother signed for $350,000,” as though to say, “He has a good bonus in his genes.”
By the spring of 2008 a number of scouts