Where Stars are Born

Sosa's season affirmed for all that the Dominican Republic is the real cradle of the game

By Michael Farber

In this summer of statistics, when a nation counted down with more urgency than Casey Kasem, you are asked once again to do the math. From Sammy Sosa's hometown of San Pedro de Macorís (pop. 125,000), there are currently 13 major league baseball players. If, say, New York City produced as many big leaguers per capita, the 30 dugouts would be crammed with 763 men with George Costanza accents. If they played in Peoria the way they do in San Pedro de Macorís, there would be 12 focus-group Americans in the bigs.

In the greatest baseball city on earth they play in the alleys, in the streets, in the sprawling sugarcane fields that line the city's outskirts—with bats made of branches from guava trees, crude gloves crafted from milk cartons, and stuffed socks that stand in for real balls. The fields are often rocky, which has tested not only the occasional protective cup but also the reflexes of the glovemen who have forged San Pedro de Macorís's reputation as a redoubt of shortstops. In the 1980s the city delivered, among others, Tony Fernandez, Julio Franco, Mariano Duncan and Rafael Ramirez to the majors. Frequently overlooked, however, are the boppers, men like Rico Carty, George Bell and Pedro Guerrero, all of them Macorisanos. Whereas Sosa spent the summer rewriting the record books, some of us are going to have to spend the winter rewriting the game's mythology.

This was Sosa's glorious role in the home run race: He changed everything. It was supposed to be the summer Ken Griffey Jr. played long-ball cat and mouse with Mark McGwire. Instead, Sosa went on his 20-homer binge in June and established himself as Big Mac's most formidable challenger. He was the perfect mystery guest, whose humility and joyful, carefree approach to the game leavened the most self-conscious record chase in history. Content to joyride in McGwire's wake, Sosa squeezed every last drop of pleasure from the race and even helped McGwire realize that Chasing Roger should be a kick, not a solemn duty. It was all great fun.

The Summer of 62 will ultimately be recalled as a time when baseball regained its health. Fans should also remember it as the year of the Dominican Republic, the nation where baseball never took ill. If not for Roger Clemens's remarkable late-season run, Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, of Santo Domingo, would most likely have become the first player to win consecutive Cy Young awards in different leagues. Moises Alou, who also grew up in Santo Domingo, went from Florida to Houston, where he led the Astros to the National League Central title and emerged, along with Sosa, as a leading MVP candidate. And 22-year-old Montreal Expos outfielder Vladimir Guerrero, from Nizao Bani, quietly morphed into Griffey Jr., putting up numbers that might have challenged for a Triple Crown in another year. Not one of these men, incidentally, is a shortstop.

But it was Sosa who finally made the game a block party that everyone could enjoy. Although baseball has been international for decades and roughly one fifth of today's major leaguers are from Latin America, the Cubs outfielder is the sport's first true crossover Latin hero, outstripping even his own idol, Roberto Clemente. When Sosa leaped out of the batter's box, skipping two strides as he watched his swats soar toward the bleachers, we skipped along with him. If he didn't shatter any windows along Chicago's Waveland Avenue, he did open plenty of others across the country, letting in some much-needed fresh air. He challenged the assumption that North America could never truly embrace Latin players, that they were too "flamboyant" or, in the case of Clemente, too "moody" for gringo tastes. McGwire might have been the first to get to 62, but Sosa's home run quest was richer. It flattered America's vision of itself as a land of acceptance, as a meritocracy in which color and language and origins don't matter.

In the Summer of 62, National League fences were not the only things Sosa broke down.

Issue date: October 7, 1998