It would be impossible to get here, they said. Sammy Sosa’s sister, Sonia, and his stepbrother, Carlito Peralta, said there would be no way to reach the home of Sammy’s grandmother, the woman who named her grandson Samuel for a biblical figure and nicknamed him Mikey for a soap opera character.
The Sosas were counseling against a visit to Ingenio Consuelo out of concern for their visitors’ ability to negotiate muddy, rutted roads in a small car. After all, it had been raining so hard for several days that the players at the Sammy Sosa Baseball School couldn’t practice that morning near the school in the city of San Pedro de Macoris.
Rosa Julia Sosa, 80, lives 10 miles out of the city, in this town established in 1902 by one of the sugar mills for whom many poor Dominicans would work whatever– and now whenever–jobs were available. Julia Sosa’s late husband plowed for a sugar company. So did Sammy’s late father. His late stepfather drove a sugar company truck.
This was the road worth taking. A man standing by the side of the highway at the entrance to Ingenio Consuelo offered to show the way, in return for a ride to the water tower that gives Julia Sosa’s street, Calle Tanque, its utilitarian name.
The roads were a mess, but navigable. Within a few minutes of leaving the main road, the visitors completed a different sort of home run than those, now more than five dozen, that had led them here.
This was the trip back to the beginning, to the place where record-breaking Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was born 29 years ago. This is where to find the framework for the puzzle. It is a puzzle that will resolve into the picture of how a kid from here, a nowhere with a name, could have put his talents and personality together in a way that has led his name to be recognized everywhere in his native and adopted countries.
“The things God does are big,” Julia Sosa said, her faith as unadorned as her life.
There will be a Sammy Sosa celebration before the Cubs’ game Sunday at Wrigley Field. Every time he hits a home run, the neighbors come to Julia Sosa’s home, to be a little closer to events taking place in another universe.
In front of Julia Sosa’s house, two boys are playing street ball–beisbol de patio–with a stick and a cap from one of the five-gallon bottles most everybody buys for drinking water. Running water in these neighborhoods often means the rain rolling in from a dirt back yard. Water from the tap arrives irregularly and full of bacteria.
The kids use that situation to their advantage, for the 2-inch-diameter bottle cap, shaped like a tiny frisbee, can be thrown like a curveball or slider. There are always plenty of the caps around to help a Dominican kid learn to hit the breaking ball. They also hit kernels of corn, lobbed from close range, to gain hand-to-eye coordination. Real baseballs are expensive in a country where unemployment is 30 percent and per-capita annual income is $1,460. Goats graze in the outfield at the local baseball field.
Pasted to the wall of what passes for a patio in front of Julia Sosa’s house is a page of a newspaper with a story about Sammy, headlined, “Money isn’t everything.” The house, cinder blocks covered with mortar and a corrugated metal roof, is perhaps 25 feet wide and 20 feet long. Julia Sosa is inside, sitting in darkness under three bare light bulbs that do not burn because the area is living through another of its frequent power brownouts.
When her daughter, Mireya– known formally as Luz Grecia–was pregnant with Sammy, Julia Sosa often listened to a radio soap opera.
“There was a character named Mikey who was a very bright young man,” Julia Sosa said. “He would make houses and trains. So I gave Sammy the nickname, `Mikey.’ He was always Mikey, always smiling and laughing, the same way then he is now.”
This is the neighborhood in which Sammy Sosa lived until moving at age 6 to the city, San Pedro de Macoris. This is where he made baseballs from rolled-up socks and a glove from pieces of canvas tarpaulins that came off, in a manner of speaking, the backs of passing trucks. This is where Julia Sosa always has lived, except for the stretches of a month or two she spends with Sammy’s mother.
“My room there always is ready,” Julia Sosa said, “but old people should live in their own homes.”
Julia Sosa shares this two-bedroom house with her son, Angel Nelson Sosa, his wife and five children. There is no phone. The refrigerator door is propped against the front of the refrigerator, a problem not worth fixing because of the irregular electric service.
She is asked to pose for a picture in front of the newspaper clipping. Julia Sosa said she wanted to change her clothes first.
Her attitude is the central piece of the puzzle. It is the piece that everything else fits into, the piece that shows how a kid who grew up here could have the self-assurance and determination and affection that have made the home runs just one of the things that have impressed everyone about Julia Sosa’s grandson.
Sammy Sosa came from this, and he comes back to it, bringing joy to Mudvilles. The fountain at the center of the small commercial center he built two years ago in San Pedro is dedicated to shoeshine boys, and the coins anyone chooses to throw into it are given to them.
“He has made investments in his province,” said Francisco Santana, the regional director of education. “Other players don’t come back and do what he is doing. He lifts our country, and particularly our province. We feel very well-represented by Sammy Sosa.”
Dignity and strength and love have nothing to do with surroundings.
Baseball hotbed, literally
Circuits in a visitor’s brain overload in San Pedro de Macoris, the city of 125,000 that has produced many of the Dominican Republic’s best ballplayers, from George Bell to Joaquin Andujar to Tony Fernandez to Sammy Sosa. The chaotic traffic of cars and trucks and jitney buses and motorcycle taxis, the kids running into the street to hawk oranges at passing cars, and the noise and heat combine into a swirl that becomes dizzying to someone trying to get a handle on the place.
On a tongue-dragging afternoon, as Sosa and Mark McGwire were together in St. Louis chasing Babe Ruth and Roger Maris, the San Pedro Cardinals were playing a team called the Strength of Youth in a local league game for 19- to 22-year-olds at Filiberto Pena Stadium. There is mud in front of the bump of a pitcher’s mound, and the right-field foul line disappears into tall grass, and taller grass and brush begin in the outfield some 30 feet before the 360 mark on the center-field fence.
All those seem mere inconveniences compared to the heat. It is 96 degrees, with humidity to match, and the sun scalds even covered shoulders and heads.
Alejandro Vasquez, 20, is watching the game from seats shaded by the overhanging roof behind home plate. Vasquez an outfielder, used to play on this field, and he said he once shagged balls for Sosa. He has just returned from the Gulf Coast Instructional League, where he batted .335 and was MVP of the Houston Astros’ team in Kissimmee, Fla.
“The last month, we didn’t take batting practice or infield practice, just played the games,” Vasquez said. “They said it was too hot.”
Similar conditions led Sosa to run on the beach at 6 a.m., before he would go to school or shine shoes for 15 cents or run errands for Bill Chase, the transplanted New Englander who owned three shoe factories in the tax-free industrial zone of San Pedro. Chase, who now lives in Coral Springs, Fla., befriended Sosa as a shoeshine boy and still serves as a financial adviser.
“As a kid, Sammy knew what he wanted,” Chase said. “He wouldn’t just lie back. He kept coming at you for whatever it may be. Sammy is a believer. He has a mind-over-matter personality.”
So do the young men playing at Filiberto Pena Stadium. Most are too old to attract the professional scouts, but on they go. No matter when he was playing as a San Pedro teenager, Sosa ran hard from the dugout to the outfield to start an inning, and he ran back when the inning was over. Most kids who grew up in the kind of U.S. suburbs that produced McGwire wouldn’t last 10 minutes playing ball in this heat that suffocates everything but dreams.
To reach the stadium, you walk down shadeless, squalid alleys that recall public television documentaries about abject poverty in the Third World.
It is a place where a kid hitting pitched bottlecaps fears breaking the bent stick he has grabbed from a nearby garage, because its owner values the stick as a possible broom handle.
This is a neighborhood called Barrio Mexico. On one of its streets, Calle Prolongacion Uruguay, is a house where Sammy Sosa and his family lived before he signed with the Texas Rangers. Manuel Urena, a some-time mechanic, lives there now, with his wife and two children. He pays $100 per month rent for about 100 square feet of space and a dirt back yard. It is within a few yards of an office building filled with functionaries of a government that functions mainly to protect the interests of the white minority that has most of the land and power on this island of 7.8 million mostly mixed-race inhabitants.
“I would like to live somewhere else, but this is all I can afford,” Urena said. “At least I live where Sammy did.”
In the back yard, embedded in the ground, is a truck tire Sosa is said to have swung at in the early morning every day. It is hard to be sure of such things, of where myth runs over reality, for an association with Sosa is the only thing of value many of the people in Barrio Mexico have. They eat Johnny Cakes, made of fried dough, and dumplings made of plain boiled dough and proudly point out that the young Sosa liked the same things.
A woman pulls the visitor aside. “Sammy used to come back here often,” Rosa Serrano said, “but he doesn’t anymore because everyone asks him for money.”
Sosa, in the first year of a four-year, $42 million contract, has given much to San Pedro. Ambulances. The baseball school, run by his older brother Luis. The shopping center near Barrio Mexico, with its discos and bar and the boutiques that set up his sisters, Raquel (beauty products) and Sonia (clothes), in business. Computers for Dominican schools.
One of the computers went to the private school, Colegio Excelsior, where Carlito Peralta, 21, is a student. Sosa pays the $26-per-month tuition his stepbrother otherwise would struggle to find. Sosa delivered the computer himself to the school.
“He is an idol for the whole town,” said the school’s director, Gabriel Frias.
Going to a school where Sosa donated a computer “makes me feel special,” said 16-year-old Marta Patricia Roche. The computer sits unassembled on a table in the room that serves as a library and an office. “My wife has been sick,” Frias said. “We haven’t had time to build a space for it.”
Not everything fits neatly into the puzzle.
Revered not worshipped
Less than a minute after listening on the car radio to McGwire hit his 61st home run, the visitors began to walk through Parque Duarte. There were newspaper vendors and shoeshine boys in the park, but all were too busy scraping up a few pesos to listen to the game on a radio. In the heart of purportedly baseball-mad San Pedro, the only people paying attention to the Labor Day game between the Cubs and the Cardinals were a dozen men crammed into a betting parlor. They were watching both the Cleveland-Toronto and Cubs-St. Louis games on televisions, but they did not react, or even groan, when Sosa took a called third strike in the third inning. That would have distracted them from laying bets on everything from pitch count to foul balls. Only the presence of visiting TV crews prompted many San Pedrans to what seem choreographed displays of enthusiasm.
“They know they have big-leaguers, and it’s a big deal,” said Oneri Fliuta, the Cubs’ Dominican Republic scout. “They want to be like the big-leaguers, but they don’t worship the ground the players walk on.”
In the park, 15-year old Angel Luis Mejia sat on a milk can and shined shoes for 33 cents apiece.
“I am proud of this job, because it allows me to pay for books and shoes for school,” Mejia said. “I don’t want to be a shoeshine boy. I want to achieve more.”
That is what Sammy Sosa thought when he shined shoes under the tree on the side of the park near the betting parlor. He also was thinking about making enough money to help his mother and stepfather, who were raising a family of eight. Sosa’s natural father, Inez Montero, died 23 years ago. His stepfather, Carlos Peralta, died seven years ago. Sammy took his mother’s family name.
“Clothes or luxuries we didn’t have,” Sonia Sosa said, “but there always was food on the table.”
There are ads for Hilfiger, Liz Claiborne, Jones NY, Limited America and Lord & Taylor on the window of the Sonia Boutique at the 30-30 Plaza, named for Sammy becoming the first Dominican ballplayer to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in a season.
“Sammy paid for everything here,” Sonia said. “He is always thinking of his family, especially his mother. Sammy is the person he is because of his mother.”
On Mother’s Day 1997, Mireya Sosa was in her son’s Chicago apartment. He gave her a hug and said, “Mommy, I bought you a house.”
“What house?” she said.
“The house. The other house.”
It was a two-family house that cost about $250,000, which is a fortune in San Pedro de Macoris. It was said to be easy to find, but that wasn’t the case, maybe because it is in the middle of a neighborhood where hovels and houses share the same street. For 67 cents, a motorcycle taxi driver showed the way to an address barely a half-mile from the slum conditions in which the Sosas lived barely a decade ago.
“Sammy always said, `Mommy, I’m going to get you out of here,’ ” his mother said of their life in Barrio Mexico.
Behind a high wall, which sometimes is guarded by a man with a gun, is an airy, eight-bedroom house in which Mireya Sosa lives with a dozen of her children and stepchildren and grandchildren. This is the third house Sammy has bought for her, each a little grander, none far from Barrio Mexico. Its back yard is bounded by the wall of the Sensacional water bottling company, and two tall electrical transmitters rise just behind that. Sammy’s winter house is 60 miles away in Santo Domingo.
“We are from here, and we like it here,” Sonia Sosa said of remaining in San Pedro. “We travel, but we like to be together here. Our mother raised us to be real united.”
On this early September afternoon, togetherness extended beyond family to TV crews, local and out-of-town journalists, friends and the rooster which kept wandering in and out of Mireya Sosa’s kitchen. She sat in the TV room, answering questions and watching her son play the Cardinals. Outside on a terrace, watching the TV through louvered windows like a knothole gang, were her oldest son, Luis, who first brought Sammy, then 14, to the Filiberto Pena Stadium; Luis’ two children; and a constantly growing group of friends. Chickens, cats and ducks crisscrossed the terrace and back yard.
Luis Sosa, 36, was eating a plate of Bandera Dominicana–red beans, rice and meat, which gets its name “Dominican Flag” because it resembles the colors on the national flag–prepared by a cook. Mireya Sosa, 58, also has two other women to help her around the house.
Not long ago, she kept food on her own table by cooking for the employees of the local prison. She would make the food in her home and carry it to the prison in metal canteens.
“When you don’t have resources, maintaining a family is very hard,” Mireya Sosa said. “I was mother and father to them. They were always very obedient. I raised them to be real close, and if something happened to one, another would watch out for him.
“I always had hope and faith God was going to protect them. This is a dream come true.”
In the back yard is a shed that serves as a chapel. There Mireya Sosa lights candles to the Virgin of the Alta Gracia and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, asking only that they watch over her family.
A few feet away, Luis’ sons were hitting a plastic bleach bottle and a bottle cap. Luigi, 3, and Eric, 8, were making decent contact.
That doesn’t surprise Sammy Sosa’s brother-in-law, Ramon Espinoza, who has just returned to San Pedro after batting .379, with 202 hits, for the Mexico City Red Devils of the Mexican League.
“In Mexico, in the streets you see every kid kicking a soccer ball,” Espinoza said. “Here, it’s baseball.”
Sixty-two Dominicans comprised 7.4 percent of the major-league players on Opening Day rosters in 1998. The number increased to 76 when the rosters were expanded in early September. Included are such stars as Sosa, Fernandez, Jose Offerman, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou and Vladimir Guerrero. Dominicans are leading contenders for the National League MVP (Sosa and Alou) and American League Cy Young award (Martinez). Seven Dominicans have hit 30 or more home runs this season.
Baseball has been played on the island for nearly 100 years, and there have been Dominicans in Major League Baseball for more than 40. The number increased at nearly the same speed as the integration of the sport because many are black. Giants infielder Ozzie Virgil was the first, in 1956, followed soon by the outfielding Alou brothers (Felipe, Matty and Jesus), Hall-of-Fame pitcher Juan Marichal and center-fielder Cesar Geronimo, who played for the world champion Cincinnati Reds in 1975 and 1976.
“Sammy Sosa puts all those players in his pocket,” said Rafael Mercedes, who runs a youth league bearing his name in San Pedro.
Geronimo is 50. When he was growing up in El Seybo, only one scout worked the island, and he came from Puerto Rico. Now there are at least 100 scouts on the island, and 27 of the 30 major-league teams plus the Hiroshima Toyo Carp of the Japanese League had some sort of development program and baseball complex there this summer. Teams are attracted to the Dominican Republic for its low-cost labor–many players sign for between $3,500 and $5,000.
Geronimo is assistant general manager of the Toyo Carp program on 70 acres in an oasis of tranquil greenery just outside San Pedro. The 8-year-old complex includes four fields, indoor batting and pitching cages and dormitories for 40 players.
“The changes in Dominican baseball since I was a kid are from here to the moon,” Geronimo said.
The facilities at the Sammy Sosa Baseball School, opened last November, are the other side of the moon from the Carp complex. Its 15 residents live for four to six months in the second house Sosa had bought for his mother. They practice, when they can, at Filiberto Pena Stadium. Five have been signed by major-league teams.
“Sammy Sosa is our hope,” shortstop Jose Luis Aquino said. “He is giving us the chance to develop our baseball.”
Mercedes said 90 percent of the 250 players in his league, ages 6 to 16, come from the poorest classes, and only 1 percent of those who play baseball live well. Like many of those who run youth leagues on the island, he supports himself by taking a percentage of the signing bonus for any player developed in his league. Sosa was signed out of a similar league.
“I have the most rewarding job in the world,” said Fliuta, the scout. “There is nothing like the smiles on those kids’ faces when you give them a chance.”
The “best” ambassador
Even when she is in Chicago, Mireya Sosa goes to very few of her son’s games. It would put too much pressure on him, she believes, so she watches on television and reacts the way only a mother could when her son touches his heart and his lips and then sends that message of love with his fingers.
“I feel it! I feel it!” she says of the virtual kiss Sammy gives her.
Rosa Julia Sosa said she has never seen Sammy blow kisses, but she is pleased to be told that her grandson does it. She knows that is what people see when the puzzle is put together to reveal a man whom Mercedes called “the best ambassador for our country.”
“I feel very proud of what he has done,” Julia Sosa said, and a smile lit her copper-colored face. A few minutes later, the electricity came back on in her house.
