The Eastern Stars by Mark Kurlansky Page B

they were behind by one run. “You could see Trujillo lining up his army,” Paige said later. “They began to look like a firing squad.” Ciudad Trujillo scored two runs that inning to take a one-run lead and then Paige pitched two scoreless innings.
    As sometimes happens today in the major leagues, Ciudad Trujillo spent the most money and they won. The capital erupted with loud merengue and dancing in the streets. More than elation over the victory, the players felt relief, because no one could be sure what the murderous and mentally unstable Trujillos might do if they lost. Paige said, “I hustled back to our hotel and the next morning we blowed out of there in a hurry.”
    But it all cost too much money. The plan was to switch to winter baseball so they could raid U.S. teams in the off-season without upsetting American managers. Trujillo did not like to upset the Americans. But San Pedro had no money to bring back the American and Cuban stars, and without the threat from San Pedro, Trujillo wasn’t going to pay for a big-roster Ciudad Trujillo team. No one had any money left, and for more than ten years the league didn’t play professional ball at all. The best Dominican players went abroad. It was amateur ball that kept Dominican baseball alive. And it was widely recognized that the best amateur baseball in the country was in the cane fields of San Pedro de Macorís. Even Santo Domingo’s leading baseball historian, Cuqui Córdova, acknowledged that in the 1940s most of the best Dominican players were poor sugar workers playing mill games in San Pedro.
    After the zafra was over, some of the cane cutters had work weeding and hoeing the fields. But when Trujillo bought up the refineries, he eliminated this type of work and used chemicals to kill weeds. Then times were even harder in the San Pedro fields. But they could grow their food in gardens and they could keep themselves together by playing baseball.
    In 1951 the Dominican League was reorganized as professional baseball again. Tetelo Vargas, now in his mid-forties, settled in San Pedro to play for the Estrellas; with his bat, it was a contending team. But that first year Licey beat Escogido for the title. The next year Águilas beat Licey and then in 1953 Licey beat Águilas, establishing a competition between those two teams that has dominated the league. The following year Estrellas won, beating Licey. By then baseball was integrated and there was no more Negro League. Dominican teams started hiring major-league players to play winter baseball. The Estrellas got Roger Maris, but they were not very impressed with him. Although Maris was a famously serious and hardworking player in the major leagues, Macorisanos complained that he did not play hard the way they did in San Pedro. That summer he went back to the Yankees and beat Babe Ruth’s sixty-home-run season record.
    Between 1951 and 2008, in the fifty-four championships—with time off for coups and invasions—thirty-nine have been won by either Licey or Águilas, with Águilas having one more championship than its competitor and the Eastern Stars winning only twice, in 1954 and 1968. They became a heartbreaking club, much like the twentieth-century Red Sox, with a history of collapsing just before victory. Twelve times they made it into the final series but lost.
    In 1959, the Estrellas Orientales got a new home, a stadium on the edge of town by the rural road that led to the sugar fields. It was named for Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s murderous, baseball-loving son. There was originally some question of the paternity of Ramfis, whose real name was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Martínez. Ramfis’s mother, María Martínez, had had him while she was married to a Cuban who insisted that he was not the father of the baby. María left him and became Trujillo’s third wife. From an early age a family resemblance became apparent, as young Ramfis—Trujillo gave him the nickname from a character in the Verdi