They Call It The Miracle Of Macoris

SAN PEDRO DE MACORIS, Dominican Republic - The numbers are astounding. Nothing less than that.

During the 1991 baseball season, 12 players from this coastal city played in at least one major-league game. That means that one of every 10,000 residents becomes a major-leaguer.

If, for example, the Baltimore area produced talent at the same rate, it would have 200 natives wearing major-league uniforms right now.

San Pedro had the following:

The American League batting champion, Julio Franco.

Three All-Stars (Franco, George Bell, Juan Samuel).

Four shortstops who played at least 100 games (Tony Fernandez, Alfredo Griffin, Manuel Lee, Rafael Ramirez).

Four second basemen who played at least 100 games (Franco, Samuel, Mariano Duncan, Juan Bell).

Two cleanup hitters (George Bell, Pedro Guerrero) with a combined 156 runs batted in (not to mention 441 combined career home runs).

All from a city of 120,000.

A city not even listed in most Dominican travel guides. A city with seven sugar mills and one university. A city where unpaved roads and crumbling houses are common. A city where horses sit next to Toyotas during rush hour.

It is called the baseball miracle here. The miracle of Macoris.

The batter stands with his back to a disintegrating concrete wall, the remains of a house. He is 10 years old, wearing blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes. He wiggles the broomstick handle he is using as a bat.

A light rain falls. The pitcher stands in the middle of the narrow corridor of mud, trash and rocks that passes for a street: the Dominican field of dreams. He stops in the stretch, giving the batter his best Dr. Doom glare.

The pitch is delivered sidearm . A plastic juice bottle lid sails in on the batter, who swings and connects - broom meets Tupperware - and sends the lid past the pitcher, toward the half-dozen barehanded fielders. Everyone shrieks.

The question came sputtering out in broken Spanish: "Beisbol? Los ninos? Donde?" Where are the kids playing baseball?

The young Dominican leading this tour of the city, a friend of a friend, his English no less broken, swept his hand broadly out the passenger window of the car.

"A la derecha," he said - to the right - but his gesture crossed the boundary of language. Over that way, he was saying. Anywhere over that way, everywhere over that way, was beisbol .

And so it was: in the streets, alleys and luscious parks, along the Malecon promenade by the sea, on just about any open space, using juice lids and mounds of string as balls; license plates and milk cartons as bases; rough-edged wood carvings and broomsticks as bats.

Gloves made of cardboard.

Sometimes it was a game, maybe one neighborhood playing another.

Sometimes it was just a pitcher, batter and a couple of fielders, taking turns.

Sometimes it was crica, a variation of the English game of cricket.

Sometimes it was los hit, a wall game played with a rubber ball: the game on which, so the legend goes, Tony Fernandez was weaned.

Sometimes it was softball. Slow pitch. Fast pitch.

Always, at the essence, it was baseball. Pitching. Hitting. Catching. And suddenly the miracle made perfect sense.

"All day long, you see baseball," said Carlos Bernhardt, the Orioles' Dominican scout, who was born here and lives here.

It has been that way for years, decades. Baseball has been a Dominican passion for a century, but the epicenter of that passion has never been the capital of Santo Domingo or the farmlands near Haiti. It has always been San Pedro.

In 1990, there were 12 natives of San Pedro and 21 natives of Venezuela in the major leagues. When the national newspaper Listin Diario recently suggested a national team representing the past 40 years, eight of the 25 players were from San Pedro. Santo Domingo was next, with three.

Why?

"Sugar," Bernhardt said. "You start with sugar."

The game arrived on the island more than a century ago, when American businessmen and soldiers exported it to Cuba, and Cubans brought it here. Then cricket came to San Pedro with the West Indian laborers imported by the sugar mills to work in the cane fields.

Cricket and baseball were cheap games whose equipment could be modified, and although the scions of the rich composed the first generation of players, the games drifted down to the working classes, spilling into the streets in a dozen forms.

When the dictator General Rafael Trujillo organized the mills and banana factories into semi-amateur baseball leagues after World War II, San Pedro experienced a startling boom.

The city was (and is) surrounded by miles of cane fields, enough to keep seven mills operating. Each mill built little ballparks and set about constructing teams. It was the first organized system for developing talent, and also a way to make money. Since San Pedro had by far the most mills, the game became much more popular here.

Many of the best players were, and still are, in the cane fields, descendants of the original West Indian laborers. Thus do some Spanish-speaking Dominican stars from San Pedro have such Anglicized names as Bell and Griffin.

Today the game is firmly a domain of the underclass, particularly the new and enormous neighborhoods of urban poor created in the past 20 years by a nationwide migration to cities and a collapse of the country's currency.

"They all want to be the next Julio Franco," Bernhardt said. "All the kids grow up with this in their heads."

The situation is at once desperate and joyful. The game is the light of thousands of otherwise dark lives, but that is so in large part because the people - particularly the young - have no alternatives.

More kids go to school in San Pedro than in the rural areas, but many still see their education as a dead end because their families are too poor to send anyone to college, meaning they'd end up as laborers anyway. Some quit school and go to work to help their families eat. Some do nothing but play baseball.

"These people don't have TV or computers or anything," Bernhardt said. "All they have is their work and their baseball. It is the one thing they can afford."

The field is ringed by palm trees, laid out in front of a boy scout clubhouse with the roof gone and two sides blackened by fire.

The pitcher grips a ball with the cover ripped off, his bony fingers digging into the string. The batter raises a chipped Louisville Slugger. A dozen fielders stand beyond the pitcher, holding beat-up gloves.

A group of old men sit on the clubhouse stoop, watching. The edge of the Caribbean is behind the trees and down a hill.

Three hours to the last pitch. Three hours to sundown.

The road appears to be no more than a muddy alley, but it takes another turn and becomes a long, winding path between tumbledown houses. Telephone wires dangle near the ground. A mother sits on her porch holding a naked baby. Kids play ball against a wall. Somewhere, someone is blasting salsa on a boombox.

"Aqui ," says the tour guide, "la casa de Tony Fernandez." The house where Tony Fernandez, the All-Star shortstop, was born and raised.

It sits a long home run away from the city's main stadium, home of the local pro team, Estrellas Orientales. It is a small, square building with four rooms and a crumbling porch. Four doors down, lying on his bed in a similar house, is Manny Alexander, the Baltimore Orioles' fine shortstop prospect - yes, another shortstop.

San Pedro is known as "the city of shortstops," and it's a cliche for a reason: Nine of the locals who played in the majors last year began as shortstops. No one really knows why, except that years of fielding balls in cramped streets and alleys certainly helps develop your wrists and quickness.

Like Fernandez, Griffin, Rico Carty, Joaquin Andujar and most of the other big San Pedro names that came before him did, Alexander is playing for Estrellas this winter, commuting maybe 50 feet from his front door to the ballpark.

"It is impossible," he said, "not to find a game around here. I can find 10 now."

There is one going on over at the stadium this morning, a collection of kids going at it with the seriousness of major-leaguers, dressed in the traditional San Pedro gear: caps, shirts and pants from three different teams. Expos here, Lodi there.

"The stadium gets used 18 hours a day," said Greg Biagini, Oriole first-base coach who managed Estrellas for two seasons. "There's always some game going on, teams from some league or neighborhood or something. That doesn't happen at any of the other pro ballparks in the Dominican. Just in San Pedro."

The field shows the wear, with rocks and bumps across the infield.

"And you wonder so many infielders come out of San Pedro," Biagini says. "If you can pick it on that field, you can pick it anywhere."

Is there another place in the world where the game is more omnipresent? "Probably not," said Milton Jamail, a University of Texas professor of Latin American studies, who has written a book about Caribbean baseball.

The Houston Astros' young Dominican signees are spending the afternoon working out at a manicured field owned by the Sante Fe mill. The Chicago White Sox's camp, which includes fields for baseball and softball, is across the street from an enormous cemetery. The San Francisco Giants' field is a postcard, surrounded by trees, in the shadows of a cement factory.

When the sun sets, 3-inch moths gather beneath the dim lights of the half-dozen mill fields. Always, in the shadows, you hear the sound of balls hitting bats and gloves: the next generation, on the way up. Always.

A rusted Ferris wheel sits in far right field, behind the kid holding a catcher's mitt almost his size. The field is mud, across the street from the Estrellas stadium. There are no bases. The pitcher holds a dark red ball. The batter waggles an aluminum bat. It starts to rain. Harder. Harder still. The pitcher winds . . .

--------------- ALL-TIME LINEUP ---------------

San Pedro de Macoris' all-time lineup:

Tony Fernandez, ss Julio Franco, dh Cesar Cedeno, cf Pedro Guerrero, 1b George Bell, lf Rico Carty, c Juan Samuel, 2b Rafael Ramirez, 3b Carmen Castillo, rf Joaquin Andujar, p

(Note: Cedeno was raised in San Pedro before moving to Santo Domingo.)