The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [98]
Even within the Dominican Republic, San Pedro had more competition. By 2008 only Santo Domingo, a city three times the size of San Pedro, had produced more major-league players than San Pedro, and only barely: 103 compared with 79. San Pedro had provided one out of every six of the 471 Dominican-born major-league players. But even though the pipeline—the academies and the minor-league system—was full of Macorisanos, San Pedro’s share was declining. Increasingly, players were coming from the poorest region of the country, the southwest, where there was not the rich soil of impoverished San Pedro but only an arid desert where people lived in sun-parched wooden huts and struggled for food and water. Major leaguers started coming from Bani, Azua, and even—like shortstop Julio Lugo—from Barahona, one of the poorest towns in this poor country. People in Barahona needed a way out even more desperately than Macorisanos.
Still, it would be hard for a town to break the record of little San Pedro de Macorís, where seventy-nine major leaguers originated between 1962 and 2008. San Pedro has given the sport of baseball the most major-league players of any small town in the world. During those same years, New York City, with one of the oldest and strongest traditions in baseball history, produced 129 major-league players—not even twice as many—from twenty-seven times the population. And of course that included many Dom Yors such as Alex Rodriguez.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fickle Judgment from the Peanut Gallery
On the main street of Consuelo, amid stores and other one- and two-story commercial buildings, was one large two-story house bulging and drooling white wrought-iron curlicues from its many door gates, window grates, and balcony rails. On the second story was an elderly woman in a rocking chair watching the street life below. It was eighty-seven-year-old Felicia Franco, the mother of Julio Franco, who chose to take her name rather than his father’s. She had three sons. Julio was the only major leaguer. Older brother Vicente Franco was said to be a good pitcher for Consuelo in the 1960s, but he threw out his arm. He lived there with his mother. The third son never played and now lived in New York.
When Julio played in a game that was on television, friends and neighbors used to pack into the roomy house. In 1985, only three years into his long career, Julio built the house for his mother. Her husband, who was dead, could never have built a house like this. He had been a jack-of-all-trades in the mill—what the mills called, borrowing a baseball term, as a utility man.
With the typical disloyalty of a San Pedro fan, she was a die-hard Licey supporter. Her reason was simple: “They’re the best. They’re going to win again this year,” she correctly predicted, even though the Estrellas were in first place at the time.
Although he didn’t live there, the house was mostly about Julio. There was a large photo of young Julio in a Texas Rangers uniform with the team’s owner at the time, a young and, as always, uncomfortable-looking George W. Bush, who had inscribed the photo to Julio: Let’s win together. There was also an even larger photo of Julio with the elder President Bush, looking, as always, somehow in pain. They were posing in front of a washing machine as though they were doing their laundry together—which seemed hard to believe.
Julio Franco had one of the longest careers in major-league history, spanning twenty-five years from April 1982 until September 2007, when he retired at age forty-nine. He maintained an impressive career batting average of .298, getting a hit one out of every three times at bat for twenty-five years. His total of 2,586 hits was the most by any Dominican major-league player. He held a number of gerontological records. He was the oldest regular-position player—an everyday player—in