The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky Page A

Stars were mostly from Cuba. They took on the Cubans and Puerto Ricans of Licey and Escogido and beat them both, winning the 1936 championship.
    By 1936, Licey and Escogido were used to bringing the championship to the capital, with an occasional strong showing from Santiago. Losing to San Pedro came as a shock. And the Estrellas in San Pedro kept buying even more talent, giving them every hope of winning the championship again in 1937. Although Trujillo did not care about baseball, he did not like seeing the city that now bore his name lose. The general had no feelings for Licey or Escogido, both of whom lost their stadiums in Hurricane San Zenón. But Trujillo felt that Trujillo City should have a baseball team, and that team had better win.
    Trujillo’s brother José was a baseball fanatic—an emotionally unstable one who once lost his temper in a game and hit an American player. José and his sister had been the money behind Licey. Dr. José E. Aybar, a dentist, who had run Licey since 1929, had an endless source of money from the Trujillos to conduct a bidding war with Escogido over Cuba’s greatest talent. Now the dictator decided that there would be only one team in his city, that they would buy the greatest players on the market, and that they would beat San Pedro de Macorís for the championship. Dr. Aybar was put in charge of the Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo.
    Aybar then went to New Orleans, reportedly with suitcases full of money, and bought the best talent of the Negro League, including Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, the high-kicking right-handed pitcher who threw breaking balls that were so unique, he gave them his own names, such as the bat dodger, the jump ball, and the two-hump blooper. Some baseball writers claim he was the greatest pitcher of all time. Aybar also got “Cool Papa” Bell, a small, wiry center fielder said by some—Tetelo Vargas fans may disagree—to be the fastest runner in the history of baseball. According to legend, he once scored from first base on a sacrifice bunt, a dribble off the plate designed to move the runner to second. But Dr. Aybar had Trujillo’s money behind him. Reportedly, Paige was handed $30,000 in cash, an enormous amount of money at the height of the Depression, to divide as he saw fit between himself and eight other players. Top players in the Negro League, which was supposed to be high-paying baseball, were earning less than a thousand dollars for an eight-week contract.
    Word was spreading in the Negro League that the Dominican League paid better than their clubs. Nina also went shopping for players in the U.S. and brought four back to San Pedro. They arrived at the port by seaplane. Waiting for them was General Federico Fiallo, Trujillo’s military commander and a former pitcher for Licey in its 1906 opening season. Fiallo took the four players to Ciudad Trujillo to play for Trujillo’s team, and Nina had to return to the U.S. to find more recruits.
    Throughout the thirty-six-game season, all three teams went on a spending spree to bring in more and more stars. The 1937 season is remembered as the best baseball ever seen in the Dominican Republic, some of the best in baseball history—an epic battle played out with some of the all-time greatest players. Determined to beat San Pedro, Ciudad Trujillo, with its Americans and Cubans and one Puerto Rican, ended up with only one Dominican player on its roster. For the American players it was a novel experience. When Ciudad Trujillo lost, the military would angrily fire weapons in the air. The police would arrest Negro League players and keep them in jail the night before a game to prevent them from going out on the town. Paige later wrote, “I started wishing I was home when all those soldiers started following us around everywhere we went and even stood out in front of our rooms at night.” During one game against San Pedro, the manager told them menacingly, “Take my advice and win.” By the seventh inning