The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris
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The intriguing, inspiring history of one small, impoverished area in the Dominican Republic that has produced a staggering number of Major League Baseball talent, from an award-winning, bestselling author. In the town of San Pedro in the Dominican Republic, baseball is not just a way of life. It's the way of life. By the year 2008, seventy-nine boys and men from San Pedro have gone on to play in the Major Leagues-that means one in six Dominican Republicans who have played in the Majors have come from one tiny, impoverished region. Manny Alexander, Sammy Sosa, Tony Fernandez, and legions of other San Pedro players who came up in the sugar mill teams flocked to the United States, looking for opportunity, wealth, and a better life. Because of the sugar industry, and the influxes of migrant workers from across the Caribbean to work in the cane fields and factories, San Pedro is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the Dominican Republic. A multitude of languages are spoken there, and a variety of skin colors populate the community; but the one constant is sugar and baseball. The history of players from San Pedro is also a chronicle of racism in baseball, changing social mores in sports and in the Dominican Republic, and the personal stories of the many men who sought freedom from poverty through playing ball. The story of baseball in San Pedro is also that of the Caribbean in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and on a broader level opens a window into our country's history. As with Kurlansky's Cod and Salt, this small story, rich with anecdote and detail, becomes much larger than ever imagined. Kurlansky reveals two countries' love affair with a sport and the remarkable journey of San Pedro and its baseball players. In his distinctive style, he follows common threads and discovers wider meanings about place, identity, and, above all, baseball. The Barnes & Noble Review In 1960, the U.S. government began an embargo against Cuba; five year later, Major League Baseball instituted the amateur draft. As Mark Kurlansky points out in The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, these two decisions helped make the Dominican Republic -- a small country that until 1956 had not produced a single Major League player -- the world's greatest per capita source of Major Leaguers. Dominican players became baseball's biggest bargain; last year, one in every ten Major Leaguers was Dominican.The story of Dominican baseball is complex and fascinating, a tale involving, among many other things, colonialism, macroeconomics, and incredible athletes. Kurlansky tries to narrow his focus to a single town, San Pedro de Macorís, known as a city of shortstops (and once known, Kurlansky notes, as a city of poets). This conceit doesn't quite work as intended. With the frame so restricted, we lose sight of more panoramic views, among them baseball's history in the country, and the history of the island itself. One catches glimpses of a single, compelling narrative of a people and a game that never quite emerges in Kurlansky's book.The reader does, however, encounter some wonderful characters: Ozzie Virgil, Sr., the first Dominican Major Leaguer -- and the first black player on the Detroit Tigers; Rico Carty, a batting champion beaten by Atlanta cops in 1971 in a racially charged incident and elected mayor of San Pedro de Macorís in 1994. More famously, there's Sammy Sosa, apparently an equivocal figure in his native country even before the steroid revelations. Today's players, of course, continue the story of Dominican baseball; The Eastern Stars makes one look forward to the next telling of the tale.--David Haglund
