The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [95]
One of San Pedro’s ugliest baseball scandals came in 1997, when a scout, Luis Rosa, who worked in San Pedro, was arrested not only for illegally taking cuts from players’ bonuses but also for demanding sex from fifteen young prospects at the Giants’ San Pedro training camp by Porvenir. The initial complaint was filed by a twenty-year-old right-handed pitcher, Yan Carlos Ravelo, who said, “Luis Rosa took advantage of our poverty and our desperation for an American visa to make us his slaves.”
Luis Rosa was not a small-time scout. He had signed Ozzie Guillén, Roberto and Sandy Alomar, Juan González, Iván Rodríguez, and many other Dominican major leaguers. In a country where homosexuality was usually an unspoken taboo, this was a messy case written about in The New York Times and other foreign newspapers. While Rosa maintained his innocence, the case was a tremendous embarrassment involving some of the biggest names in Dominican baseball. Rosa had been working for the San Francisco Giants, a pioneering team in introducing Dominican players to Major League Baseball: Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers had starred for the Giants. Juan Marichal had to deal with the case because he was now the Dominican government’s secretary of sports and recreation. Joaquín Andújar testified on behalf of the boys.
By 2008 the steroid scandal was full-blown and there seemed little escaping it—not in the Dominican Republic, not even in San Pedro de Macorís. What was most awkward for San Pedro and Dominican baseball in general was that one of the leading arguments that Sammy Sosa was a steroid user was the fact that he had been so small when he signed and then he became such a large burly man. This was true of so many Dominican players. Was it really a sign of steroid use?
“Everybody who comes to America to play this game in the minors is always skinny,” Sosa argued. “When they get to the major leagues they start eating good and doing things better. If you eat better and work out better you are supposed to gain some weight.” He said that he filled out when he got to Texas because he was eating so much better. “What’d he eat,” quipped Rick Reilly, “Fort Worth?”
It was a disturbingly familiar story in San Pedro, and became even more embarrassing once it was revealed that Sosa really had built himself up with steroids.
In the Dominican Republic, steroids are sold cheaply and without prescription in most pharmacies. Also, in the Dominican Republic there are many talented young players whose chances of getting into the millionaire club are impeded by the slightness of their builds. Add the fact that most of these youths had an entire family counting on them, and this was a scenario for steroid abuse. In the year 2000, a New York Times reporter went into a dozen pharmacies—some in San Pedro and some in Santo Domingo—and found only two that were not willing to sell some version of testosterone without a prescription. This is not surprising, since there is very little effort to control the sale of pharmaceuticals in the Dominican Republic. In fact, investigations of steroid abuse in Major League Baseball have found that the drugs are often obtained in the Dominican Republic. Major-league players often talk among themselves about how those who go down to the Dominican Republic to play winter ball gain easy access to steroids. In 2009, when New York-born infielder Alex Rodriguez confessed to having used steroids, he said he obtained them from his cousin in the Dominican Republic. In San Pedro the most easily obtainable steroids are ones designed to be used by veterinarians on animals, usually horses.
Major League Baseball responded in 2004 by testing in the academies. That year eleven percent of the signed players in the Dominican academies tested positive. Clearly