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By Root 553 0

major-league history, passing racist Cap Anson’s record by three years. He was the last player in baseball born in the 1950s. From 2004 until his retirement, he was the oldest player in baseball and made age records on a regular basis. On April 26, 2006, pinch-hitting for the Mets, he hit a home run against the Padres, making him the oldest major-league player ever to hit a home run. He hit another on September 30 and one more on May 4 of the following year. He was also the oldest player to hit a grand slam—a home run with the bases loaded. He was the oldest player ever to hit two home runs in the same game, and the oldest to steal two bases in the same game. He would have been the oldest player to steal a base except that, in 1909, Arlie Latham, age forty-nine, came out of retirement to play one game with the Giants and stole a base. Franco tried again on June 20, 2007, at age forty-eight while playing for the Mets against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. He got on base, beating forty-four-year-old pitcher Roger Clemens, but was picked off when he tried to steal second on him. Still, it went into the records as the oldest pitcher-batter baserunning duel in major-league history.

After he retired he returned to San Pedro not to live but just to pass some time playing dominos with old friends and his brother Vicente. He had his own house on a dirt street of new houses in a different part of town from his mother’s, although nothing in Consuelo is very far away. Ask anyone in Consuelo, and he would know where Julio Franco’s house was. It was a two-story pink stucco-and-stone house behind a high wall with a solid steel gate that was kept locked even on the rare occasions when Franco was there. It was a more luxurious house than most people in Consuelo had; few of the other players maintained houses there. But it was not an ostentatious mansion, because that was not the way people did things in Consuelo, even if they became rich. If you want a mansion, you have to build it somewhere else, as Sammy Sosa and Alfredo Griffin did.

When he was in Consuelo, Franco could be found in the back of the house on a red-tiled patio where a roof with a ceiling fan was held up by Grecian pillars. Julio sat there in a T-shirt and jeans, lean and fit and youthful looking at fifty, a middle-aged face on a twenty-five-year-old’s body, relaxed, home at last, playing dominos with two of his best friends, Vicente and Vicente’s friend Guillermo.

They slapped the domino tiles on the table hard, making the prerequisite loud clack, and kept score with chalk on the table edge.

“I come back here once or twice a year, sometimes at Christmas,” Franco said. “I like to stay in Consuelo. I go to the ballpark here, the gym. I like to stay here, surrounded by people I know.” Without warning he slammed a domino tile down, smiled at his brother, and started shouting, “I got him! I got him!” Julio liked to compete. He really liked to win.

No longer a player, his new ambition was to be a manager. He had a family in Fort Lauderdale, and moving back to San Pedro was nowhere in his plans.

“I could have kept playing,” Julio observed, “but nobody thinks a fifty-year-old can help a ball club. They would rather give a chance to a young prospect. I understand that.”

One of the reasons he would not stay in San Pedro was that in his twenty-five years in Major League Baseball he had earned millions of dollars, and everyone in San Pedro knew it.

“What I’m not going to do is give money to a guy on the street. I will give someone money for medicine, I will give money to a mother to buy milk. I’ll give a kid a glove and could take him to a ball game, but that’s as far as I go.”

He said that he was frequently asked for money “by people who call me a friend. My real friends never have to ask me. They know I would help them if they needed it. If you had a million dollars and you gave a dollar to a million people, the million-and-first person would complain. You’re not going to satisfy everyone.”

Sammy Sosa’s experience offers an example of this dilemma. At the height of his career