“The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris” by Mark Kurlansky, $25.95
In many ways, San Pedro de Macoris is like any other medium-sized Latin American city. Its narrow, pot-holed streets are choked with traffic, much of its populace wages a daily battle with crushing poverty, and its tired, time-worn architecture hints at a once-grand past.
But what truly sets San Pedro apart are the shortstops.
Founded around its sugar mills, San Pedro, a teeming Dominican Republic city, has thrived in recent years because of its ballplayers.
No city its size has turned out more Major League Baseball players than San Pedro de Macoris. Since 1962, when Amado Samuel made his debut for the Milwaukee Braves — at shortstop, naturally — becoming the first native son to play in the majors, San Pedro has sent more players to the big leagues than 28 states and the District of Columbia.
How and why so much talent sprung up in such a place is a remarkable story that Mark Kurlansky misses in “The Eastern Stars.” A former Caribbean-based correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Kurlansky repeatedly runs aground in his foray into sportswriting.
He gets so many of the simple facts wrong so often that, after a while, it becomes impossible to trust his grasp of the larger narrative. Big-league all-stars Roberto Alomar, Juan Gonzalez and Ivan Rodriguez are Puerto Rican, not Dominican. Neither is Ozzie Guillen: He’s from Venezuela.
What’s missing from “Eastern Stars” is the human element. In “Away Games: The Life and Times of a Latin Ball Player,” Marcos Breton explains that Dominican players are not just good, they’re desperate to escape the poverty of the cane fields and succeed in the major leagues.
It’s that drive that best explains how baseball changed the city. And by not making that connection, Kurlansky’s book fails to explain the magic of San Pedro de Macoris.
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