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  That’s when I heard what Felipe was doing behind the scenes. “Please get Pedro to a place where he can win,” he told ownership and the front office. “Pedro deserves to win. If we’re going to trade him, let’s trade him somewhere where he can get a chance to win.”

  Instead, the Expos traded me to the Boston Red Sox, who finished twenty games out of first place that year. As it turned out I was able to help Boston win a World Series title in 2004, while also capturing two more Cy Young Awards there.

  I had Felipe for only four years in Montreal. It was like getting a college degree. I’m so glad I was able to pass through the school of Felipe Alou. I’m so thankful I’ve had him in my life in every aspect.

  As I mentioned, I love Felipe Alou. I also owe him most of the success of my career and the wisdom I have about baseball. My only wish is that one day someone will have that kind of perspective, that kind of appreciation, that kind of respect for me that I have for Felipe Alou.

  Pedro Martínez

  Member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame

  Introduction

  My eyes are still strong for an eighty-two-year-old man. But I didn’t realize they were this strong, able to reach back seventy-plus years and grab hold of myself as a boy, pulling me from my youth and putting me on the field my godfather once owned. The field was then, as it is now, a hardscrabble scratch of land, only back then it was surrounded by fenced-off farm animals and succulent fruit trees my friends and I would filch from. These days the field is an overnight parking lot for trucks, which serves the better purpose of patting down the grass and making the land, when empty, suitable for playing baseball. And that’s what boys are doing today—playing baseball.

  I stand on the edge of the field, which is on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and watch them. I can tell they are poor, as I was when I was their age. But I cannot imagine my arms and legs were once the skinny stick figures that theirs are—hungry and undernourished. Yet I know I was just like them. I see myself in them, except when I peer into their eyes, eyes hungry with hope. For them this is a field of dreams. Will one of them be the next great Dominican baseball player? Will one of them be the next Pedro Martínez, or Albert Pujols, or Juan Marichal, or Sammy Sosa, or Adrián Beltré, or Robinson Canó, or David “Big Papi” Ortiz, or perhaps me? The list of players to dream about one day becoming is long. No country outside the United States produces more big-league players than the Dominican Republic—an island country that is about 5,300 square miles smaller than West Virginia.

  For me, though, there never was a list. When I was a boy there were no Dominican players in Major League Baseball. When I started playing on that field there wasn’t even a black player in the big leagues. I knew. I collected baseball cards with the pictures of players such as Joe DiMaggio, Gil Hodges, Phil Cavarretta, Carl Furillo, and Billy Cox, all of them white and from the United States. So when I was a boy I played the game simply because I loved it. To play it professionally wasn’t even a thought, much less a dream. It would be more than a decade before someone went from our small island to Major League Baseball. That would be me.

  I still can’t believe it. Me? It seems incredible, even now, that I played seventeen years in Major League Baseball and managed for fourteen more; that I was teammates with two of the greatest players ever—Willie Mays and Hank Aaron; that I became a close friend of Roberto Clemente; that I was roommates with Hall of Fame players such as Juan Marichal, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda, as well as with Joe Torre, one of the game’s outstanding players and a Hall of Fame manager.

  I watch the boys today, and I feel sad for them. I wish they could play the game for the pure joy of it, the way we did. I know every generation believes it had it better than the generations that follow it. And I guess it is good that Dominican boys today know there is at least a pathway to the big leagues. But boys who are not even in their teenage years should not feel the pressure—and, believe me, there is pressure in my country—of having to make it professionally.

  The only thing I envy about the boys who play on that field today is that they have real gloves, bats, and baseballs. We played with small, dry coconuts and thick sticks of wood that my father, with his carpentry skills, fashioned for us. Occasionally, there was a rubber ball. Sometimes someone would find—or more likely steal—a real baseball, which we would treat as if it were a gold nugget. Gloves? Our gloves were pieces of canvas ripped from the backs of trucks carrying goods and produce, and my mother would stitch them into a makeshift mitt. Mostly, we played bare-handed.

  My eyes peer across the field, and the decades peel away. I see a coconut tree, smack in the middle of the field, where second base is. All those decades ago I took a machete to it. My boyhood friends helped me, but I was the ringleader and I knew I would get a whipping for it. My father, like most fathers on the island, would come home from a day of hard work and hang his leather belt on a nail. It symbolized his discipline, his authority. When you looked at that belt you thought twice about doing something wrong. But all I could think about was removing the obstruction of that coconut tree so we could play baseball. I had plenty of time to change my mind, too. After all, it took my friends and me a week of on-and-off whack! whack! whacking! that tree with a machete to weaken it enough to where a strong wind and our grunting pushes finally toppled it.

  When my father learned of what I did, he marched me to my godfather—a big, benevolent man with kind eyes—apologizing and assuring him I would get a whipping. “No, no,” he told my father. “They’re just boys. They just want to play baseball.”

  My godfather was my father’s best friend, and he also owned the local grocery store and often supplied my family with food on credit. And so, at his behest, I was spared a whipping, and the next day we were playing baseball again, only now on an unobstructed field—except for a cashew tree situated between left and center fields. Soon my eye was on it, my machete in hand. But I decided not to press my luck. We decided that balls—or maybe I should say small, dry coconuts or whatever other objects we used—hit to the cashew tree became ground-rule doubles.

  As my eyes peer into the past, I wonder what my father would have thought all those years ago if he could have seen into the future. Would he still have thought about giving me a whipping? But how could he have known? How could he have dreamed that I would become the first Dominican to play in a World Series game? How could he have foreseen that three of his four boys—Matty, Jesús, and I—would become Major Leaguers and that all three of us would historically share a big-league outfield together—something never done before or since? All three of us played in the World Series, the first time three brothers accomplished that feat. My son—my father’s grandson Moisés Alou—also played in the World Series.

  All totaled, my brothers and I played forty-seven years in the Major Leagues with a combined lifetime batting average of .291. We amassed 5,094 hits, more than any other brother combination in modern Major League history, even more than the DiMaggio brothers—Dom, Joe, and Vince. When my brother Matty won the 1966 National League (NL) batting title with a .342 average for the Pittsburgh Pirates and I finished second with a .327 average for the Atlanta Braves, we became the first—and only—brothers to finish one-two in a Major League batting race. And we weren’t just one-two in the National League, we were one-two in all of Major League Baseball.

  Baseball gave the three of us a better life, and it might have had a fourth Alou—my youngest brother, Juan—but history had other ideas.

  Baseball came for me when I was attending the university in Santo Domingo, studying to be a doctor. The Giants’ franchise, then in New York City, offered me 200 pesos to sign—the equivalent then of about $200. The thought of making a living playing baseball seemed ridiculous, but my family owed my godfather 200 pesos for groceries. I signed so my father could pay for the food he had gotten on credit. Two years later, in 1958, I became the first of what have now become hundreds of ballplayers to go from Dominican
soil to Major League Baseball.

  I want to be fair, however, to Ozzie Virgil Sr., who was the first player born in the Dominican to reach the Major Leagues. Few people outside of Ozzie’s family were aware of him, though, since he moved from the island when he was thirteen and spent the rest of his years growing up in the Bronx borough of New York City, even serving in the U.S. Marines. Ozzie made it to the New York Giants two years before I broke in with the franchise in the first year the team began playing in San Francisco.

  I believe our family’s athletic ability comes from our father and our spirit—our drive and determination—comes from our mother. My brother Matty, who died in 2011, claimed my father played baseball but quit when he was fifteen, after seeing a friend die when he was struck by a bat. I don’t know if that’s accurate. Both my father and my brother Matty have died, as has my mother. What I can say for certain is that my father never threw a ball to me. We never played catch. He was too busy working as a carpenter and blacksmith, trying to put food on the table for a wife and six children in the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot shack we lived in. My father never even came to the United States to see my brothers or me play. He left the island only once, in 1964, when I took him to Caracas for a series between the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Even then he stayed only a day, leaving for home because he was concerned that the few cows he had would suffer neglect in his absence.

  On the day my father died at age eighty-nine, August 3, 1994, I was the first and only Dominican-born manager in Major League Baseball. My team, the Montreal Expos, also had the best record in baseball. By then my father, who was nicknamed Abundio on the day he was born, had lived up to that moniker. Abundio comes from the word “abundance,” and what an abundant baseball progeny he left behind. It’s been written that you would need a scorecard to keep track of my family’s baseball tree. In addition to my brothers and me, there is my son Moisés Alou and my nephew Mel Rojas, both of whom had successful big-league careers. Mel’s son Mel Rojas Jr. is currently working his way up the Minor Leagues. Two of my father’s other grandsons—Francisco and José Rojas—played Minor League Baseball. My father’s sister’s grandson was José Sosa, who pitched two seasons in the Major Leagues. I have a son, Felipe José Rojas, who also played Minor League Baseball and is now in charge of the Baltimore Orioles’ baseball academy in the Dominican; another son, Luis Rojas, is a manager in the New York Mets’ Minor League system; and another son, José Alou, was a Minor League player and is now a San Francisco Giants scout.

  I have to laugh, too, because of how my friend and Hall of Fame pitcher Juan Marichal likes to say that my sister Maria Magdalena was as good a baseball player as any of us. Marichal got that information about my sister from very reliable sources—her brothers. She was good. We were all good. And we were all young once. Now I’m young only when I close my eyes and allow memories to fill my head. Or when I open them and look across that field and see my youth, and a story that was just beginning.

  1

  1935–1956

  1

  A Name

  My last name is not Alou.

  Baseball has given me so much, but this is the one thing it took away from me—my last name.

  My father’s name was José Rojas, and from his loins came five Major League Baseball players. I was the first and the first to go from the Dominican Republic’s verdant land to Major League Baseball in the United States. Latin players were rare then, back in 1956, and the Latin tradition of placing the mother’s maiden name after the family name wasn’t well known. Somebody must have seen my paperwork when I arrived in Louisiana for my first baseball stop, saw that my name is Felipe Rojas Alou, and thus issued me my first jersey, which read “F. ALOU.” At the time I didn’t know enough English to explain the correction, so the name Alou stuck.

  This never bothered my father, who had bestowed the name of his father on me. What did bother my father, and especially my mother, Virginia, is that I never became a doctor. It’s what they wanted for me and also what I wanted for myself. It was what I was studying to become at the University of Santo Domingo when a scout for Major League Baseball’s New York Giants noticed my athletic skills.

  That I was even starting my education at a university was an accomplishment for the Rojas family. Like most Dominicans, especially Dominicans of that era who lived under the oppressive regime of the dictator, Rafael Trujillo, we were poor. I know it’s a cliché for people to say they grew up not knowing they were poor. But believe me, we knew. Our home was the size of an average bedroom in the United States—fifteen by fifteen feet—some of it with an uneven cement floor, and the rest, particularly our kitchen floor, was dirt. My father built the home in 1934, the year before I was born in that house. It was painted blue with faint red trim, situated along the southern coast of the Dominican Republic in what is known as Kilometer 12, or Highway Sánchez. As the firstborn in my family, and as more siblings came into the world, six of us total, I grew up sleeping in a small bed with my brother Matty and sister Maria. We tore the sheets by pulling them at night and sewed them back together the next morning. What was worse is that it wasn’t uncommon for one or both of them to wet the bed. So later, as more children came—Jesús, Juan, and Virginia—I slept on a thin mat on the cement part of the floor, no pillow, and was glad to do so.

  An early event that drove home not only how poor we were but also the ways of the world arrived when I was about nine years old and my father got a little bit ahead with money. Back then U.S. dollars were the island’s main currency, and my dad had been paid $11 for some work—a $10 bill and a $1 bill. My parents kept the money in their bedroom, hidden behind a picture of the Virgin Mary. To this day it’s not uncommon in the Dominican Republic to see people traveling with a horse and buggy, selling fruits and vegetables. One day a woman passed by, and my father bought some tomatoes and green vegetables, using the $1 bill. Or so he thought. He actually gave the woman the $10 bill. Everything seemed normal. She even gave him change as if he had handed her a $1 bill. A little later my father searched for the $10 bill and couldn’t find it. Panic set in. My mother called him careless, and an angry argument ensued. Soon they were both crying. We never saw the woman in the cart again. That’s when I learned about life.

  And then there was learning about death. I soon discovered that death, even the death of children, is a part of life. My father was a carpenter and blacksmith. As a carpenter he often built caskets. People would bring him wood to make a casket for a loved one. That was sobering enough to witness, but to see the tiny caskets he made, the size of my siblings and me, was heartrending. So many children died during that time because their parents didn’t have enough money for medical care or the means of transportation to get them to a hospital. Or they got to the hospital too late. Even today there is a children’s hospital in Santo Domingo where you see poor women outside, trying to get in to save their children’s lives.

  We were not immune from these types of tragedies. All of my siblings and I came into this world in that small fifteen-by-fifteen-foot house that had no electricity, running water, or any type of plumbing, and all with the same midwife—a big, stout lady, full of confidence, who wore a long, flowing dress. Her name was Bartolina, and from her hands came three Major League Baseball players, an engineer, and a veterinarian. It got so that whenever I saw Bartolina, I knew I was getting another sibling.

  One day, though, about two weeks after Bartolina delivered a girl into our family, born between Matty and Jesús when I was around eight years old, I awoke to the sound of my mother sobbing. We knew the baby had suddenly started losing weight. Now she was dead in her crib. I can still see her sweet, serene face and recall how beautiful she was. I can also still see my mother’s face, stricken with grief, looking at that precious baby with such profound sadness, weeping, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  As a boy it triggered within me a desire to be a doctor, particularly one who would help people who didn’t have enough money. None of the families w
here I lived could afford medical treatment, and if by chance you could, such treatment was usually too far away and the wait too long to do any good. Instead, we relied on island remedies and superstition. One time Matty fell out of a tree and broke his arm. A man came and massaged it and—supposedly—healed him. My mother knew all the herbs, teas, and various natural remedies to apply to an ailment. And if one of us kids was running a fever, we had a tin basin my mother would fill with cold water and put us in.

  In spite of those hardships my upbringing was idyllic in many ways. There were a lot of relatives. My father had two sons before marrying my mother—Francisco, the oldest, and Joaquin Rojas. As for my mother, the family history is that my father helped my grandfather Alou build a well, and through that a friendship developed between my father and mother. When my father went to ask for her hand in marriage, the fear was that my grandfather would say no because my father was a Dominican and my grandfather was a Spaniard who had emigrated from the island of Majorca. At the same time the thought that my grandfather would say no because my father was black and my mother was white was not even a consideration. Interracial marriages were, and still are, common in the Dominican Republic. Years later, people made a fuss about Derek Jeter being an interracial player in the Major Leagues when he broke in as a rookie with the New York Yankees in 1996. But I was an interracial player in the Major Leagues in 1958.

  My mother had seven siblings. I was the first grandchild and thus the first nephew born into her family when I entered the world at eleven pounds on May 12, 1935. I’m told all the Alou brothers and sisters used to fight over who would hold me. On my father’s side of the family, I never knew my grandfather, but I do remember my grandmother. She was quite a lady. She smoked a pipe, and I vividly recall how she would take that pipe and a fishing pole and disappear for hours, almost always returning with some grouper for us to eat.