The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [90]
Some games the fans get angry because they can’t understand the way I act, but part of my game, along with hitting homers and driving in runs, is fighting back. If I hit a home run with two men on and the next time up the same pitcher knocks me down, I’m going to get up and charge the mound. I don’t care whether it’s a home game and the place is sold out, or we’re in Cleveland and no one is watching, or the game is the TV Game of the Week. If a pitcher tries to intimidate me, I’m going to go out there to kick his ass. That’s the way I grew up playing the game.
Eighteen years later, in a 2008 interview in La Romana, Bell—now a middle-aged man—hadn’t softened in the least. “Every time I got hit I would kick their butt,” he stated.
You mean literally?
“Fuck yes. They are trying to intimidate you.”
Bell felt justified because he believed, as Pedro González had before him, that pitchers were hitting him intentionally because he was a Dominican. He would hear angry fans shouting pejorative comments about Dominicans. He always remembered a restaurant in Milwaukee in 1989 that refused to serve him and two other Dominican players.
“I understand,” Bell said. “You don’t like to get beaten by a foreigner, and I was a good hitter and I was black. It’s all part of the mix.”
But what was disturbing to other Macorisano players was Bell’s claim that charging the mound was something he learned in San Pedro—that it was the San Pedro way of playing baseball. A later generation of San Pedro players developed a sense that baseball had become something extremely valuable that they had to handle with considerable care.
Fernando Tatis, asked about Bell’s assertion that his aggressiveness was the San Pedro way, said, “Some people play like that and some people don’t. I don’t. I think you have to respect the game. It is what is going to give me and my family a better life.”
The better buscón programs emphasized that such antics are unprofessional and not good for them or for baseball.
George Bell was not the only San Pedro player with the Latin-hothead reputation. Pitcher Balvino Galvez, born on a batey, would have been infamous had his career lasted longer. He threw a hard fastball, often while sticking out his tongue. His control of the pitch was flawless, but the pitches started drifting when he had the pressure of runners on the bases. He pitched only one season in the majors, 1986 for the Dodgers. He then had a career in Japan, where he was known for his tantrums, more than once expressing his anger at an umpire’s call by throwing the ball at him. Galvez almost made it back to the majors in 2001, when he was slated to join the starting rotation of the Pirates. But at spring training he got into an argument with the pitching coach, Spin Williams. Galvez threw down his glove, stomped into the clubhouse, and without saying a word packed up and flew back to the Dominican Republic. He was immediately released, never again to play.
Joaquín Andújar was infamous for his erratic behavior. He once removed himself from the mound, complaining that his crotch itched, and after one game went badly he demolished a toilet with a baseball bat. In 1985 he took off after an umpire in a World Series, had to be restrained by his teammates, and started the following year suspended for ten days. Then there was a drug scandal that might explain the erratic behavior. In between the Chicago World Series fixing scandal of 1919 and the steroid scandal of the twenty-first century, the biggest scandal to shake baseball was the 1986 investigation into widespread amphetamine and cocaine use among important major-league players. During the investigation Andújar confessed to using cocaine.
Even in retirement back in San