The Eastern Stars (23 page)

This might have been a tantalizing story for other young Macorisanos thinking about the Japanese academy, except for the fact that, once the Yankees discovered him in Japan, Soriano found that it was extremely difficult to get out of his Japanese contract. In the end he had to officially resign from professional baseball to get out and become available to the Yankees.

The Japanese do not want to be another stepping-stone to the American major leagues. Kake said, “They leave us for the major leagues for the money, but more than that for the prestige. It’s a big problem.”

Nevertheless, the Japanese in search of Dominican talent signed an average of five or six players a year.

 

C
harlie Romero was asked why so many ballplayers were produced in San Pedro. He smiled and then sighed. “I ask that question to myself all the time. They have even done studies on it. No one can come up with a real answer. It’s like Brazil, where you always see the kids kicking a ball. Here the kids are always throwing something. Or catching, or hitting.”

But the answer may lie in Romero’s own story. He was raised in a
batey
not far from the Angels’ academy, a village of a few hundred sugar workers who all worked for a mill owned by the American giant Gulf+Western. His father was a cane worker from Antigua. “I was poor,” said Romero, “but I really enjoyed my childhood. I had a responsible father who made sure there was food on the table every day. Growing up in a
batey
, most kids work at an early age. When they are ten, after school and during school breaks boys work in the fields to make some money. They do cutting and planting. You have to plant them one at a time; a row was about here to the wall. [He pointed about 350 feet to the end of the outfield.] In the early 1980s they were paying twenty-five cents a row. Working in a sugar field is one of the worst jobs you can do. You just make enough money to survive; there is no saving and going to Hawaii on vacation. That’s not going to happen. But we didn’t know anything else.”

Two things led him to a better life. He had a father who insisted that his four children finish high school; he did well and skipped a year and finished at age sixteen. And he took up track and field. A fast sprinter, he ran the hundred-yard dash and the quarter mile.

When Romero was seventeen years old, Epy Guerrero saw him run and asked if he wanted to play baseball. By the following September he was signed with the Blue Jays. He was trained in the fundamentals, although he remained essentially a one-tool player: a great base runner. While still in the minors he tore a ligament in his knee and never made it to the majors.

Romero reflected, “Most of the Dominican kids who have made it to the majors have come from the
bateys
. These kids really work. You don’t want to go back where you came from, so you give a little extra.”

Police in the Dominican Republic, like most other Dominicans, are poorly paid and are always hungry. They supplement their meager incomes by periodically stopping cars and in a soft, sweet voice asking for a tip or, sometimes, a fine, depending on which line they think the customer would be most moved by. Who could say no knowing the homicidal tendencies of the Dominican police force? And they were usually satisfied with a few pesos.

One afternoon in San Pedro, the police stopped a large, shiny black SUV—a Mitsubishi Montero. That was their mistake. They must have been out-of-town cops, because even though the windows were smoked glass and they could not see who was inside, everybody knew that in San Pedro a Montero was the car of choice of
peloteros
, especially former major leaguers. The driver lowered the window, and one of the policemen started his talk and a passenger said to him, “Don’t you know who this is?”

The policeman stopped in confusion and the driver, a large, powerfully built man with a deep, soft voice, said, “I’m José Canó.”

The policemen were still confused, and so the passenger helped them: “The father of Robinson Canó.”

“Robinson Canó!” The two policemen nearly saluted and the conversation quickly turned, as it often did here, to baseball.

To be someone in the Dominican Republic, you didn’t really have to be someone, you just have to have somebody in your family who is someone. One of the important advantages of being someone was that the police would leave you alone.

José Canó, with considerable talent and even more determination, had struggled mightily, and he had traveled a very long distance. But really it was his son, Robinson, who made him a someone. But that was something he had earned too.

Canó was from Boca del Soco, the mouth of the Soco River. Of the numerous rivers in San Pedro, the Soco is one of the few that are not tributaries of the Higuamo. Its mouth is on the other side of San Pedro. The river is a beautiful, wide, curving tropical river with blackish-brown water and banks overgrown with thick greenery. Unlike the Higuamo, there is little built on those jungle-thick banks: looking around the bend from the mouth suggests a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. In reality, though, the Soco wanders down from the heart of sugar, the cane fields, and the cattle farms in the center of the island.

To cross the Soco and get to the little fishing village on the other side, Macorisanos had to cross a narrow two-lane metal bridge of the kind of minimal construction that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tossed off overnight.

Vendors lined up by the side of the road selling the small, black, whitefleshed fish caught in the brackish waters of the channels. What had become the big item along this roadside was crabs—very ugly land crabs with boxy black and gray bodies and protruding eyes. They sold them in strings of twelve.

Across the river was a series of sheds and ramshackle houses around a large square field, a cricket field. It was a
cocolo
neighborhood with a good number of Haitians as well. It had been a neighborhood of fishing and crabbing even before the
cocolos
and the Haitians arrived.

Andre Paredes, twenty-six years old, had been doing this since the year 2000, although he was at least the third generation in his family to catch crabs in Boca del Soco. Every year more people wanted crabs, which at first he thought would be good for business. But the result was that more and more hungry people came to Soco to dig crabs and sell them by the side of the road. Now there was more demand but fewer crabs. This was true of the fish in Soco also: more people wanted to buy them, so the prices went up, so more people fished until there were fewer fish to catch.

The crabs burrowed straight into the ground for about a foot and then turned at a sharp right angle. A crabber looked for a crab hole and then dug a second hole with a machete. If this was done right, the crab would now find itself in a tunnel with two exits. Sometimes the crabber could just reach down the hole and grab the animal. Or he could stick a hook down to grab it. If the crab ran, it would come out the other hole and the crabber could still get it. In the dry season there was one crab to a hole, but in the wet season three or four would be found in the same hole. There were several theories on why. One popular and implausible theory—Dominicans usually prefer the implausible—was that they huddled together in the rainy season because they were afraid of thunderstorms.

A good crabber used to catch five or six dozen in a day around the village of Soco. But then too many crabbers came and the crabbers had to hike for miles over rugged terrain into the mountains to find crabs.

The locals in Soco eat crabs, often in coconut. Cooking with coconut was a
cocolo
idea that had become typical of San Pedro. This was the recipe of Raquel Esteban Bastardo, who was married to José Canó’s cousin. Squeezing the liquid out of coconuts is still common practice in San Pedro, although few Americans would have the patience.

The Canós were fishermen, the only alternative to being crabbers in Soco. The fishermen lived in Boca del Soco, on the eastern side of the river. José’s father would get him up at two every morning, and they would row their deep-welled, open-decked wooden boat out into the river. A man stood on either end of the boat, holding a net. They dragged a net while rowing, which demanded tremendous skill because the rowers had to maintain an even speed to keep the net extended behind the boat. At noon they would row in and sell whatever had turned up in the net. Some days the ten hours would not yield a single fish.

An exceptional day on such a boat might land one hundred pounds of fish, which today would earn them about $125, a fat paycheck in San Pedro. But that rarely happened. Half that much was more likely. There were fewer and fewer fish near shore. Most locals blamed this on too many fishermen. But in North America, studies of climate change show northern species moving toward the arctic, subtropical species moving toward temperate areas, and tropical species moving toward the subtropics. What will that leave in tropical waters? Today, to get a good catch, fishermen have to mount little fifteen-horsepower engines on their boats and go to sea to a fishing ground seven hours away. They stay there in the calm Caribbean Sea for five days to catch enough fish to make it worth the cost of gasoline and ice.

In good weather Soco seemed empty, a quiet town of women and children, because the men were all off fishing. It was a village of unpaved streets and small Caribbean wooden houses, some of which seemed to have been slapped together out of scraps. Other houses, such as one handsome little dwelling on a corner, freshly painted a bright blue, were constructed a little better. That was the house of Canó’s mother, and as everyone in town knew, the Canós had money. But it wasn’t always like that.

José remembered his father, a catcher, as a good ballplayer. But he never made it into professional baseball. Life would have been different if he had, because he was trying to support his fourteen children on fishing. Three of the fourteen tried to go into baseball. Charlie Canó was a shortstop who signed with the Dodgers but never made it past the minor leagues. Another brother, David, was never signed at all. Then there was José.

He started playing on the dirt streets of Soco when he was five years old. His was a typical San Pedro story. He and his teammates had socks for balls, sticks for bats, and no gloves at all, but socks are not very hard on the hands. There was no diamond. When a car came they had to stop the game, but in Soco that didn’t happen often.

This was San Pedro and there were scouts everywhere, and one day a scout from Florida watched José playing shortstop and walked up to him and said, “How would you like to be a major-league ballplayer?” At that moment his life changed, although it did not all work out the way he had imagined.

He was signed to the Yankees at age eighteen, a little late, with a signing bonus of $2,000. Two years younger and he might have gotten twice as much. But the bonus was all right, because it was 1980 and ballplayers did not expect big bonuses; the important thing was that he had leaped the first hurdle to his major-league career. He had not yet gotten fed and trained in America: although he was tall, he weighed only 145 pounds. The scout had been impressed with his throwing arm and signed him as a pitcher, calculating that in the U.S. they could bulk him up to give him more power.

Soon José was in Bradenton, Florida, with $2,000 in his pocket, richer and farther from home than he had ever been. He went to a shopping mall and bought small presents for his parents and thirteen siblings, and his signing bonus was spent.

He could say three things in English: “Yes,” “Thank you,” and “I got it!” José remembered, “We would go to the restaurant and point at something on the menu, not knowing what it said and not liking it when we got it. We loved Big Macs and especially Whoppers with cheese. Man, we loved those Whoppers. But we would order Whoppers at McDonald’s and Big Macs at Burger King. We could never get them straight. Then we learned how to call Domino’s and order a pizza, but we only knew how to say one kind, ‘pepperoni with double cheese.’ So that is what we always got.”

He did not get along with the manager of his farm team, a short Cuban who, according to José, “treated Dominicans like shit. He would grab me by the collar when I did something wrong and shout, ‘Do you know what your’re doing?’ I complained to the scout who signed me.”

After one month José was released. That was the end of it. His career was over at age eighteen, only weeks after it had started. “They never gave me a chance,” he said. “I didn’t know you could get released so quickly. I was crying. All they said was ‘We are going to release you.’ No explanation. They just give you a ticket home.”

The day he was released, the team was playing an away game and the other players were on the bus. He had to get on the bus and say good-bye to his teammates. Some of them told him that this was not the end of his career, because he was young and had a good throwing arm. But José knew that organizations were wary of players who had been released.

Back in Soco his father said, “Don’t worry. We are going to work.” His father was a fisherman and knew what hard work was. The next morning he woke José at five, not particularly early by their fishing standards. They both got on his motor scooter and rode a few miles. Then José was told to get off and start running home. His father followed along on the bike. In this way, every day before breakfast José ran two miles or more in the dark, when it was still cool enough to run.