Dominican baseball

The Times "Bats" blog has a great Q&A with Mark Kurlansky, author of books on salt, cod, and oysters, who has now turned his journalistic attention to the baseball pipeline that has long been San Pedro, Dominican Republic. And sugar.

Mark Kurlansky: Sugar is why baseball developed in San Pedro. Having fertile flat land and a well-located and well-sheltered port, San Pedro became the sugar center of the Dominican Republic during the sugar boom in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Between 1876 and 1916, eight sugar mills were established in San Pedro. They were all owned or operated by Americans and Cubans at a time when baseball was a near obsession in both Cuba and the United States. The mills found it difficult to find Dominican workers because most agrarian Dominicans would rather work a small but fertile plot by themselves than endure the abuse of a salaried job for the sugar companies.

So the mills brought in sugar workers from the British West Indies, islands where the sugar industry had never recovered from the abolition of slavery. Many of them were cricket players and had a great deal of time to play, since sugar mills have little work for about half of the year. So the Cuban and American executives formed their idle bat swinging workers into baseball teams.

Each of the eight mills had a team, so there was an eight-team sugar league that competed fiercely and developed a very high standard of baseball. Many of the town’s players who went on to the major leagues got their start in this sugar league. Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money. Why would anyone stuck working in a sugar mill not want to take a shot at being a professional baseball player instead?

Q.

Outlining the history of the Dominican Republic and San Pedro, you write, “It seemed that baseball was the one thing a small Latin American nation could gain from a U.S. invasion.” Explain.

A.

Dominicans, Nicaraguans and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.

Q.

How did the dictator Rafael Trujillo influence the development of baseball in the Dominican Republic? Was Trujillo a baseball fan?

A.

Trujillo was more of a merengue guy, not particularly interested in baseball, but his unstable brother and psychotic son were. And after he renamed the capitol after himself and combined the two Santo Domingo teams into one bearing his name, the Trujillo team had to win.

After San Pedro beat them for the championship in 1936, winning became an obsession. He opened up the treasury of stolen wealth and hired top Negro League stars, even kidnapped some from San Pedro. Trujillo won the 1937 championship but both teams had spent so much effort and money in the fight that it was the end of professional Dominican baseball until the 1950s.