The influence of Dominican baseball players in America is well known. Albert Pujols is considered the greatest player of his time, and more than 10 percent of major league rosters are filled with players from the Dominican Republic.
However, 75 years ago this spring, a group of American players went to the island to play in a season that nearly destroyed the game in the Dominican Republic — a war fought with bats and balls, not guns.
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was in a war for the hearts and minds of his people in 1937, and that battle was fought on the baseball field.
The recruits were the biggest stars of the Negro Leagues — including Hall of Famer Josh Gibson.
Trujillo took over the operation of two teams in the Dominican League and merged them into one super team, intending to crush his political opponents who owned other teams in the league.
But his opponents countered by coming to America and recruiting Negro League baseball stars like Chet Brewer and Showboat Thomas to come play for their teams, hoping to embarrass Trujillo by winning the league championship.
Trujillo struck back by sending agents to New Orleans — where the legendary Pittsburgh Crawfords, owned by racketeer Gus Greenlee, were in spring training — with a bag of money to convince the Crawfords’ biggest stars — Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige among them — to play for his Dominican team.
In the book “The Tropic of Baseball,” Bell said, “He got himself a ball club. Nobody could touch us.”
Except Trujillo himself. There were armed soldiers constantly around the players, and when Trujillo’s team played in the deciding championship game that year — under armed guard — Paige believed their lives were at stake. In a 1953 article in Collier’s magazine, Paige said that he believed if they lost the game, “there was nothing to do but consider myself and my boys passed over Jordan.”
Paige pitched his team to the win and the championship, and he, Gibson and others left the country quickly.
The game wasn’t the same after that in the Dominican. It took years to recover from the 1937 baseball war.
In his book “Sugarball,” Alan Klein was told by a Dominican writer, “We wound up killing professional baseball here. Although we continued to play amateur ball, we spent many years without professional ball after 1937. All our money was gone. We were exhausted financially and in enthusiasm also.”
The game did recover, and 75 years later the shoe is on the other foot. Now it’s America that is importing Dominican baseball talent at a high price.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
