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And now it's my pleasure to introduce Mark Kurlansky Mark Kurlansky began his career as a playwright and he has also held jobs as a commercial fisherman a paralegal and a pastry chef. Among other jobs. But in the 1970s he left the New York theatre scene for a much more stable career in journalism. For the next 15 years he worked as a foreign correspondent for The International Herald Tribune The Chicago Tribune The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer. And in addition his articles have appeared in numerous other publications. He has also written numerous books including fiction nonfiction and children's books to name a few he has written cod which won him the James Beard Award for fiction writing. The book Salt 968 and he edited this year's food of a younger land. Mr. Kalinski new book The Eastern Stars moves away from food history to delve into another of America's obsessions baseball San Pedro is a small city in the Dominican Republic that has produced so far more than 70 major league baseball players including Sammy Sosa Manny Alexander

and Tony Fernandez. In other words about one in six major league players hailing from the Dominican Republic come from the tiny impoverished San Pedro the Eastern Stars looks at the legacy of those players and the larger picture of Caribbean and American relations particularly the history of racism in baseball and across the nation. Thank you very much. Very nice to be here in the great theater. But nobody's eating popcorn. You know there's fresh popcorn. Just want to begin reading a small part here. This is a story about making it about the slight twists and turns that determine success and failure. How each changes lives. In about a weird world where the right or wrong

not from a coach on a farm team so called for there are obscure American locations can make the difference between earning a few million dollars a year or going back home and earning a few hundred dollars a year. And that is the difference that determines the lives of more than a dozen family members too. Life is a precarious thing often decided by the strength of an arm the fluidity of the swing of the sureness of a gloved hand. Even in San Pedro Not everyone has the talent to be a baseball player. What it most always comes down to in life is how well we play the cards that are dealt us. Like poker life is a game of skill that stems from luck. It does not come as a revelation to most of us that life is essentially unfair. That is why we so admire the ones who play it well. Throughout the Caribbean the poor live on dreams. Generation after generation goes by and the hard life gets no easier.

But there is always hope in Kingston Jamaica slum kids practice their singing and hope to be the next Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff. In some paper the mockery they practiced their swing and dream of Sammy Sosa. The this story the Eastern Stars. Had a long fermentation a lot of years that I've been I've been thinking about it. The title of the Eastern Stars is actually the name of the. Professional baseball team in the Dominican league from San Pedro left to study fighting. Eastern Stars is I think about the most poetic name I've ever heard of for a baseball team and I'd like this team much more than most people to send page or do and the reason I like it is because I'm a longstanding Red Sox

fan and I understand. This is a team that always starts up brilliantly and always falls apart in the homestretch and nobody knows why. One year they seem to absolutely unstoppable and they're a starter hit a bus coming into town. A few years ago I was going down there towards the end of the season and I called up Raider Griffin who is from San Pedro and is the manager of the Eastern Stars and I said how's the team doing I've kind of lost track. He very excitedly said we're in first place and we've only got 10 games to go. By the time I had gotten down there they'd already lost four in Iraq and two games later they were eliminated. And it's kind of interesting to me that nobody in San Pedro will say that the Eastern Stars are cursed.

This is a curious thing because probably more than any other people in the world the Dominican is believe in curses called the Fuku. And you know there's absolutely everything. Trujillo the dictator for 31 years had lots of cuckoos and he was supposed to be an expert at them. And you know the the curse of the Bambino the the the Cubs in the curse of the goat especially the curse of the goats I'm so much like a Dominican from who but the Dominican. Don't believe there are a few coups and baseball teams if your baseball team doesn't win it's because of bad managers and everybody's mad at poor Alfredo Griffin and I. Ever written about the Caribbean for a lot of years I used to cover it for the Chicago Tribune. My first book content of violence was about the Caribbean. My first book of fiction a collection of short stories called the white man in the tree was

about the Caribbean and it's a place I have a great affection for and a great respect and admiration for. The people because there are there are there are people who. Just seem to have a terrible history and they just seem to face defeat after defeat and they're somehow never defeated and they always walk away with their dignity intact and they always keep their sense of humor. And if you were to go to devastated Haiti today you would you would see what I mean. And I'm always struck by how. People go to the Caribbean all the time but they never see the Caribbean. And in the Dominican Republic that's really not their fault it's by design a lot of places in the Caribbean it's by design in the Dominican. They build airports next to the resort so that you can fly in and not have to see too much before you get into the resort. And then when you get into the resort all

meals and drinks are included no reason to ever leave the compound. So there are several large resorts near San Pedro and yet you almost never see a tourist in the town of San Pedro. So I've often thought as a writer how do I communicate this. It's kind of what. Writing is all about to me is you know things that I feel strongly about how do I communicate them and tell the story of them. And for a long time I thought that the way to do this with the Caribbean would be to take a town and tell its story. And at some point I'm not exactly sure when this was it dawned on me well how about a town that had 79 Major League Baseball players. This is completely out of all proportion with the size of San Pedro. It's only slightly less than Santa Domingo a house

with Senate a bigger house almost half of the Dominican population. You compare it to New York City that's more than 30 times the size and population of San Pedro and has you know slightly has produced slightly more players and. Some Pager has produced all of these major league here since 1963. Baseball started in and sent Pedro in the 1880s. Some Pedro was originally a fishing town. Which you know I have a thing for fishing towns but I didn't even realize that when I started not only is it a fishing town but it's a fishing town that has the same patron saint festival on the same date as Gloucester over here

because St. Peter was the patron saint of fisherman. But if Ben became a agricultural exporting a lot of banana has gone through several evolutions at around the 18 80s there was a sugar boom in the Dominican Republic and Cuba from the 1880s through the 1920s that was called the dance of the millions as in millions of dollars and cents. Pedro was the center of the Dominican sugar industry because it has a lot of fertile flat land and a good port which is what you need for sugar. And. If you wander around San Pedro today and it's a traffic cloud pretty dusty tumble down kind of town. You look around in the downtown area and you see that actually there's a

lot of elegance to these some of the older buildings these Bose art buildings. And you can see that at one time towards the end of the 19th century early 20th century this was this was actually a prosperous place before sugar declined when sugar was booming. The people who ran the sugar mills were all either Americans or Cubans and this was a time when Americans and Cubans were very obsessed with baseball. And you know Cuba is the second oldest baseball country of baseball in Cuba goes back to the 1860s and sugar mills that best operate maybe half the year and the rest of the year there's nothing to do. And they brought in sugar workers from the eastern Caribbean because they could not get the Dominican to work in the sugar mills and these eastern Caribbean What

was the British West Indies were cricket players. So where are these baseball crazed executives looking out at the fields at their idle work or swinging back and they thought why don't we teach from baseball. And so they play talking baseball they form baseball teams they were sugar mills in some Pedro. And each one had a team and they played each other and they played very competitive baseball and a very high level of baseball because even though baseball was changing all the time there were constantly new executives coming in from the U.S. or Cuba who knew that the new rules you know the number of balls change the number of strikes changed things were changing all the time. My favorite 19th century regulation was when it was ruled that fly balls could no longer be caught with your hat

on. I don't think gloves were as good and you know hats I guess work a lot better than they are now turned up but. Did you know at the time one of the tricks of being a serious baseball league was keeping up with all the rule changes and they could do that so they were playing really first class baseball. And this went on for decades and decades. Grand Trujillo came to power. Trujillo didn't really he didn't really care about baseball he was more into the rag but his brother who is into baseball and his psychopathic somnolence into baseball and he just pretty much wanted to control everything anyway so he one of the first things he did was he took over Santa Domingo and he renamed it Ciudad Trujillo and then he took the the two teams in Santa Domingo and combined them into

one team which then became the Trujillo team. And in 1936 the San Pedro team in the championship beat the Trujillo team. Probably a mistake. You know you don't want to go beating tricky Oh so your hero decided that couldn't happen again. And so he got a dentist actually went to the states with an attache case full of cash that you know your hero sort of helped himself to the national treasury and. Just start offering cash to the top Negro League players Satchel Paige came down and Josh Gibson and the San Pedro team did the same thing that he used to be able to fly Pan Am directly to San Pedro and it was a sea plane that just landed in the harbor there. And so this.

Pan Am flight landed with all of these baseball stars and the army was there and arrested the players and took them to see a doctor hero and forced them to play for Trujillo's team Satchel Page in his memoirs wrote about pitching for the Trujillo team and how scared he was that you know I mean you just couldn't afford to lose a game with your heroes military stand they were standing there on the field while he was pitching. And they talked about how in the the last two very close game in the end he won and beat San Pedro for the championship. And how relieved he was to just go directly to the airport and get out of there. But in spite of the quality players in San Pedro they never play for the in the major leagues because they weren't white enough. You know there was that color line until 1947.

And only 15 percent of the Dominican Republic is white and most of them are from an aristocracy that doesn't produce professional athletes. So they were just excluded from Major League Baseball until 1947 and then it opened up and mostly stars foreign players go it was Cubans. In 1963 Kennedy declared an embargo on Cuba and at that time there had been in Major League history 90 majorly Cuban players and 12 major league Dominican players. That all changed with the embargo and the scouts a lot of the scouts were Cuban and they knew where to go to replace the

Cubans because the Cubans used to play with the Dominican so they started scouting the Dominican Republic and at first they did sort of obvious places like the Dominican team that played in the Pan Am Games and the military teams because Trujillo built up the military teams and that's how they found one Mary Scholl who's still the only Dominican Hall of Famer. But they were scouting the Dominican for very long before they ran across this funny little sugar town where they played a lot of very serious baseball. And actually right around the time of the Cuban embargo San Pedro players started being signed for the Major League in 1963 and then in the 1970s it was the Curt Flood case where Curt Flood was traded and he didn't want to trade.

And it was a famous court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court and the end result was they created the system of the draft and free agents. And you started off being drafted and then after you build your contract it used to be after you filled your contract you had no choice the contract would automatically be renewed and basically they could do whatever they wanted with you now. You could become a free agent and go where ever you could make a deal. But the problem was that the draft was very constricting and still is. Each team is only allowed a certain number of players they can draft if you draft a player that doesn't go with the team you've just lost that slot your draft picks are in reverse order of your standings the season before you know as to who gets the first choice and who gets second choice but free agents. Anybody can bid on any free agent and you can sign as many free agents as you have money to pay for.

Foreigners are all free agents except Brad Ricans and Canadians and so there started to be this hunger for foreign players. It's a way to get more top players on the new team than the draft could provide. And as soon as they start looking for foreign players the place to look was the Dominican Republic and so on. Pedro is one of the great places to look in the Dominican Republic and. You know then there was the expansion where we went from 16 teams to 30 teams and you know there's now a little more than seven hundred fifty major league slots that have to be filled. And if you just if you just look at the teams you know you will see that you know if there were lots of people that had what they're looking for in baseball that all these teams would be would be

equal. If you look at the difference often the difference between the big money teams in the small mining teams that you know why why doesn't everybody have a closer like powerful bomber Mariano Rivera. Because there aren't many people who can pitch like that. There are many you know lights out starting pitchers many people who can consistently bat over three hundred a season. And so they're you know they're looking for these people these rare talents. And one of the places they look is in San Pedro. And it has changed the town. If you think if you know that the average the average kid in San Pedro. What are his possibilities he can he can work in the sugar mills which is horrible work and make literally a few hundred dollars a year and make not much more than that working in the duty free

zones or in tourism doesn't pay very much and there's terrible inflation in the Dominican Republic and it doesn't these jobs don't keep up with that they can not get together enough money for a motor scooter you can use it as a taxi and pick up a little money that way. Not a lot of great possibilities. And your family is hungry they're struggling to get have enough to eat. If anyone is sick they can't afford to go to a doctor there is no money to pay for medicine and the average salary in the major league is 3 million dollars a year. I can assure you that you'd be working on your swing too. And they you know they are and you know it's not only you know for your own advancement it's to save your family. I mean I've known people in San Pedro who went into baseball literally directly to get money for medicine for a sick family member or a sick parent.

It's it's the it's the only chance you have. And you see kids starting to work on their swing when they're about three years old. Had. It's amazing how well a three year which can swing a bat or a stick or sugar cane or whatever there is and it has over the years gotten more and more organized. That is Major League Baseball has. Had more and more success with players from their Major League Baseball is a tremendously efficient and sophisticated corporation and very well organized. And they're now they're all the teams are there. They all have they have academies for training. Players once they're signed they go to these academies they get a little schooling they learn some

English they learn about American food. The first word of English that everybody learns is I've got it which you know is a good thing to learn if you're playing outfield in an English speaking country and. They have these kids they sign at 16 and a half by law. They used to be able to sign at any age and then you know a lot of parents are complaining that their kids were disappearing because the the teams were all competitive so you find this good 12 year old prospect and you sequester him away in this house with the field in the back and you trade him and there are actually cases where parents didn't know what had happened to their kid and it you know it's shared out that the San Francisco Giants had them down the street in the house. So they made a law that they had to be 16 and a half. So what happens is that twice a year. There is a signing of everyone who's made sixteen and a

half by that. So they're all bidding at the same time so it's made the bidding more competitive so the prices have gone up and you hear you hear it often said that you know they're getting these Dominican players because it's cheap labor. Well signing bonuses have gone from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars as a you know sort of a normal signing bonus now in 2008. A pitcher 16 year old pitcher was signed by the Oakland A's for four and a half million dollars. Yeah. You know when even a left hander and you know he and his family are set for life no matter what he does might not work out that well for Oakland we'll see. The problem with all of this is that what

you're doing is getting 16 year olds to drop out of school to play baseball which would be great if they were all going to become major league players and millions of dollars. Actually even doing that it's kind of sad that they don't get an education but it's worse than that because only 3 percent of them will make the major league and a lot of times their families aren't that crazy about Julio Franco's mother didn't want him to play baseball. Philippe aloo wanted to be a doctor and he was lured out of medical school by $200 from the Dodgers. I mean the difference in our economy and theirs is just unbelievable. So you know if a few hundred dollars is a lot of money in San Pedro what is three million dollars. I mean it's just unimaginable wealth. The players.

First go off to these academies and some of them are released in the academies and the rest of them go to the US and they play Rick. Rookie ball a ball Double-A ball Triple-A ball and if you make it to the majors when you're released they're absolutely horrible about it they just tell you to go into this office and somebody says to you we're releasing you. And they absolutely refused to give you any reason why. So this this greatest crisis in your life that you will think of over and over again for the rest of your life you have no idea what you did wrong or how you failed. And then they give you a ticket back to the Dominican Republic because the players come to the U.S. on a temporary seasonal work visa like a migrant farm worker. Harvest is over good bye. Some don't go back and stay illegally in the US which is also a very hard life. Fernanda taties a

place for the mats and is from San Pedro told me that he met his father for the first time when he was brought to a farm team in Texas. His father came to see him play as father had been involved player who was released in the U.S. And so he never went back he tried to send money but you know they never saw him because you can't go back and forth you either go back or you stay in the US. So it you know it turns out to be pretty tough for everybody but a local but a. Lucky few talented lucky few. And. When you go back to San Pedro the opportunities you have I have everything to do with how far you got because there are jobs working in these academies coaching working and training programs playing Dominican ball playing for the Eastern Stars major leaguers play and these teams and you're paid according to how far you've got.

So if you were released in Double-A you're worth more than somebody who was released and rookie league. And if you make it into the majors you're in the club even if you only play in one major league game. And there are some who only played in one major league game but there are still four major leaguers. You know if you only have one at bat in your career and you get a hit you have a lifetime batting average of a thousand. But if you strike out it's a lifetime average of zero. And. This is kind of their their world it's a town full of baseball players. Baseball players are kind of easy to spot because they've been American fad and Americans tend to be very lean and undernourished which is one of the things I spend a lot of time with Scouts and you know how do you look at. A 14 15 year old kid and decide what kind of ballplayer

he's going to grow into. The first thing you have to do is look at their body and imagine what to look like if they get well fed and get good trainers. I was watching this kid pitch with a Scout named Eddie to Ledo oldtime Scout used to scout for the Mets. I was side and Jose Reyes and a lot of top players not scouts or Tampa Bay. Then he turned to me and he said look at this kid. He can tie his shoes without bending his knees. So what you know but he was trying to say that you know he had long arms and was flexible. They learned to look for all sorts of things there's a lot of different skills of some of the things that makes baseball unique is the variety of skills that you need to be a good player and how many of them does this kid have. They're all looking for what's called the five tool player that has the five basic skills but they're all also

looking for kids with character and brains and solid family and things that will help them to make it when they're alone in America because America is a very different society than the Dominican Republic and these are kids who you know a lot of cases have never even been to Santa Domingo. You know they've never been out of San Pedro and suddenly they're in this strange country where people speak a different language and eat weird food that you've never seen before and they're completely lost a lot of them you know learn the name of one food that they discover they like. Pedro Gonzalez who played for the Yankees in the here in the 60s told me that he spent about two or three years eating nothing but ham and eggs because that's what he learned to say. You know I was one player who just would go into restaurants he liked chicken and he just go into restaurants and go. Until some magick and. Jose can know they have Father Robinson Cano who was a pitcher

and he loved these. Double cheese whoppers and he can never remember if you caught them at McDonald's or Burger King and he was always going to the wrong one and asking for it and getting dirty looks. Julio Franco was sent to a farm team in Montana where there was snow on the mountains and he didn't bring a coat because he had never worn a coat. And there were lots of problems with racism because American racism is so completely different from Dominican racism. They were just they were just lost and you know the players who made it were lost and a lot of players didn't make it to have the talent but it was just such a traumatizing experience so now they they try to teach them a little bit about America in the in the training academies and of course there's TV because when all this started in the Dominican

Republic there was no TV in the Dominican Republic so they didn't. Not only didn't they see well I don't know is it true that you see American culture on American TV. I don't think so I mean but you see some strange thing that's supposed to be American culture. But I mean they didn't even see Major League Baseball games. Now one of the things that's great about being in San Pedro is that you can see major league team usually a choice in Major League games every night and from different places so you know I've. I've seen more. I live in New York and I think I've seen more Red Sox games in San Pedro than I've ever seen in New York. It's a it's a town that's been rebuilt time baseball. And you see it in in the way people stand around the way kids stand around kids

kids when they're talking are forever going to batting stance is and there are games everywhere in the town and you go and look at these games and there's all kinds of people there people with great stories. You find some major leaguers you find some x major leaguers helping out some kids. Sometimes it's major leaguers playing and you know some. Great pitcher from your childhood tossing a ball. It's it's another kind of another kind of society of baseball world. I'm going to stop there and I'd love to take some questions from any of the. The problem fundamentally is that the Dominican government doesn't regulate the stratagem in a kinda government doesn't regulate much of anything

and that you can buy anything over-the-counter in a pharmacy and pager or anywhere else. And clued ing all kinds of steroids steroids that are used in agriculture animal grade steroids I don't know what the medical repercussions are of taking steroids that were designed for cattle but I'm guessing not good. And it's kind of gotten this reputation not so much from kids taking steroids in the Dominican as from major leaguers going there to get steroids like Alex Rodriguez said. Finally we see that that's where he got his steroids. And you know it was apparently only said in the major league that players not just Dominican players or players in general used to like to play winter league Dominican ball

because they could get steroids it up while they were down there. Of course kids also were taking a lot of steroids as you can imagine with the pressure they're under to try to do well and if the difference in getting signed or not getting signed is some drug they're not going to hesitate to do it. But. Major League Baseball a few years ago started testing kids when they signed them and if you test positive you don't get signed. And that's knocked it down I don't remember what it originally was but it was quite high. The positive testing but now it's down below 3 percent. And you know I would say I was thinking because I you know optimism is like a disease with me. See the optimistic scenario in everything and I was thinking that you know there and in the major league that you know now that they're they're testing for steroids and you get suspended and all these bad things happen to you and I was going to be the end of steroids.

Well I guess it is but you see you have this guy from the Red you're talking about that they're now finding other sort of substances that that aren't on the list. You know all of this has to do with their being too too much money in baseball. But. It. It somewhat gets overblown this idea of you know Dominik kids and steroids. You know Mark McGuire isn't Dominican and Barry Bonds his Dominican. If I were the guy from MLB staying put I would say to you is that I'm not 100 percent buying this but it does have some truth to it. You know baseball has become a very important part of the Dominican economy contributes probably is much possibly more than tourism. So it's not true that they're not getting anything out of it and it's providing better

jobs than most of the things in the in the economy. So it's not you know it's not totally a negative thing. It's not you know people like to because of the history of San Pedro they like to compare it to sugar. You can't really you know the jobs and sugar are miserable and nobody you know ever got out of poverty. And it's it's not like that I mean even if you have a job coaching in an academy or working in a training program you have a better job than historically people ever had in San Pedro. So it does have some positive. But I know what you're saying and yeah I mean it would be. It would be nice if Major League Baseball I mean it seems like major league baseball has endless money so why shouldn't they do great things. You know I mean they could they could build things there or they could they could have education programs for everybody.

They don't they. The Tampa. Bay. Rays. I was going to say Devil Rays they're not devil anymore since they started winning but they started winning Dominican would say because they got rid of the devil. They don't have the big money of the Yankees or the Red Sox. And so what do they do in this competitive bidding they tell players that if you sign with Tampa Bay and you get released we will pay for your education through college. This is a very appealing thing to a Dominican Dominican and Caribbeans in general care a lot about education. It's something that they've been denied that they really want it. You know this was. One of the initial sources of Fidel Castro's popularity in Cuba was that he offered poor people education. It's

why Maurice Bishop was popular in Grenada. It's a huge issue in the Caribbean. And. You know parents don't know what to do with these kids. You know you got this 16 year old kid and he's dropping out of school to go after Major League Baseball. And I mean what are you going to say to him you know who who Franco's mother didn't want Julio to go into baseball he wanted him to have an education ignoring the fact that he was a terrible student and flunked out of almost everything. And if he had if he had done that he never would have got on to have a fabulous major league 20 year career and win every. Geriatric record in baseball the oldest man to do everything. So. You know it's kind of hard to say to these kids no you can't go after this major league career and you can't say to them yeah you can go after but finish

your education first because if you wait till you're 19 or 20 you're not going to be that valuable to the major league because it takes it past four or five years. To get into the majors if you manage to get in at all. So if you started 20 you're 25 and half are your best years are gone before you get in. Nobody's going to give a good signing bonus to a 20 year old. So it's a problem and they try to give them some education in the academies but it's not a lot of education because they're trying to do a lot of different things including teach them baseball and feed them a lot of food. Five meals a day. It's really amazing to see these kids eat. So. Yeah I agree with you. You know some more should be done. Baseball is a you know. It's a greedy corporation like other greedy corporations it's a it spends more than most greedy

corporations out its workers with. Well you're asking me to speculate here but I'll say you know typically First of all I would assume that he is salted away what in the Dominican Republic would be a huge fortune. So he's not going to live badly. He's going to be in demand everywhere because he's a famous Major League Baseball player. He can do what he wants he can make any kind of business contacts he wants if he wants to go into business. He can you know. It can make a deal with Major League Baseball and buy buy a plot of land and rent it to them for a lot of money. He can he don't go worry about Artie's he's going to be in good shape. It's now that you have to feel sorry for it after when he quits he'll be much better off actually. Yeah I mean some do go back and some don't. It's kind of hard. It's kind of hard to go back if you're a really successful major leaguer. Imagine being in an Popper's

town and you Vera and millions of dollars and everybody knows almost to the dime how much you care. And I was talking with Julio Franco about this. You know I mean he can't walk outside his house without getting hit up just you know can you buy us a bottle of milk. You know small stuff but you know it's kind of hard to live like that so they tend to be kind of removed. You know they kind of live in enclaves and separate. Some of them do things programs you know depending on what they were into Tony Fernandez is worried about orphans and so he built an orphanage and has programs for orphans and Soriano who still playing has a baseball program for kids that he finances. You know there's there are some different things and then you know

some of them just you know have businesses. George Bell has a construction company you know that provides jobs. Afraid of Griffin has a. Discotheque on the waterfront and that provides jobs I mean the Dominican Republic is a country where you know there's not enough economic activity so anything that you do and you know frankly a lot of this stuff isn't done to help the people of San Pedro it's just stuff they're doing for themselves but it helps I mean I was talking to the mayor of San Pedro about this. Because I was thinking exactly what you're thinking. Couldn't they do more. And he said well but there's you know a lot of major league players in invest in send Pedro I mean Sammy Sosa built his house for his mother and you know walking on to a car built a big house. He says you know anybody spends money that's an investment.

They're not you know you think about these millionaires going back to this poor town and they're you know they're not. They're not turning it around. They're doing some are doing a little some are doing very little but certainly the town is better off that some of their money is ending up there. However it is ending up racism in the Dominican Republic is centered around the fact that it shares an island with some very dark people you know and that Haitians have invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic twice. And there is this almost psychosis about Haitians. And so if you are Haitian or if you can look like you're Haitian and you get a lot of discrimination

and that is the main thrust of Dominican racism. The other the other aspect of Dominican racism is that when and when Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic they consciously tried to make the Dominican population blacker. They brought in freed blacks from the U.S. just to make the population blacker. And as a reaction. The Dominican have always been obsessed with trying to make it wider so that you know Trujillo when nobody was taking in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany Trujillo took in a bunch because they were white people. It wasn't because he cared about you. And that's sort of the way you see Dominican racism operates. They get to the United States and Americans don't really care about light skinned or dark skin you know. And here everybody is black.

Barack Obama for example would not be considered black in the Dominican Republic. And some of these people who have never been black in their own country have witnessed bigotry against blacks but have not been the recipient of it. I don't understand why they are when they get to the U.S. and in the old days and during the Civil Rights Movement when they were still Jim Crow in the south and a lot of farm teams are in rural southern towns they thought that this didn't involve them. And. White bigots went to great lengths to inform them otherwise. And there were also kind of resented by the African-American players for trying to make that distinction so they had they had a lot of problems with this racist difference and difference in racism in the Dominican Republic there was a there was a politician I knew him quite well named was

a pen your Gomez. Who is one of the more capable politicians that American republic ever produced. And he was never going to get elected president because his skin was just too black. And in one election he almost made he looked like he was going to make it and the incumbent Obamacare a very strange man who I also know quite well. Put the word out that not only was Penn your Gomez high Haitian but that he had conspired with the Haitian government to have Haiti take over the Dominican Republic and Penn you're gone has lost the election. So it's it's not but it's not the Dominican. Don't know anything about racism but they just don't know anything about American racism. I don't know about that. I don't know about the puberty in the basement. He got me on that why would baseball be. I've heard of. I'm not sure what the relationship is between baseball and puberty although I'm sure

there is one my coach when I was a kid always have that watch that. Yeah. You know there's this big conflict now because. African-Americans in the African-American presence in Major League Baseball has dramatically declined it is now under 10 percent. And one of the reasons for that is that inner city blacks don't want to go out for baseball. They want to go out for football and basketball and the reason is what you just mentioned because in football and basketball yes you go in plain clothes and in college and then you get the big contract and the big money. Baseball doesn't work like that here or in the Dominican Republic. In baseball. Even in the US you you go into the minor leagues you're paid very poorly and you spend years in the minor leagues before you

come out. You know. If you can do it in three and a half years that's phenomenal for five years this is typical. It takes slightly longer to develop Dominican because you're starting with somebody who's under nourished and all sorts of social issues. But you know this is a reality if baseball and you know there are there are some educated baseball players and some baseball players come out of college but not not to the extent that football and basketball players do. And also not all colleges. Actually try to educate their their athletes. Some do. I'm actually a graduate of Butler University which actually does educate its basketball players that in spite of that they seem to win. Yeah

you know this is a problem it's a problem in all sports but it's particularly a problem in baseball because of the length of time it takes to develop a player. And you know by the time they're in their mid 30s they're they're in decline. I mean how old is David Ortiz. I Should we don't know how old David is it is beginning to look like he may be older than he said. But but you know when you're in your mid 30s you're you're you're reaching the end so you want to get there before you're in your mid 20s. You know actually 10 years is considered a good baseball career in the middle if you can be in the majors for 10 years. It's you know there's. There's this need to get the Myan which are you know I agree with you isn't you know it's a it's and it's not it's not good. I don't know how you I think that if you made an

education requirement for baseball players that this would not fly with anyone including fans. So I'm not sure what the solution here is. Oh I've already had a ton of books I have a book that's done that's coming out next fall called Edible stories it's a collection of short stories that are all interconnected and they all have to do with people's relationships with different foods there's 16 stories the Italian terrorist who drinks too much it spreads so in the moment of the psychopathic fare of crim brulé and well. Never think about crime or lay you know crime. So that's that's my doc's book. Thank you all very much I'm glad to say.