Scouring the Fields of Dreams for Dominicans : From This Poor Sandlot, They Seek a Chance to Show Off Their Talent in Dodger Stadium

The next batter steps carefully around the piles of manure and up to the piece of cardboard that is home plate.

He waves his chipped aluminum bat. His bright face hardens. The pitcher, standing in a clearing amid infield weeds, prepares to wind up.

Wait! Time out!

Two naked children run through the infield, their dust-covered buns eventually disappearing into a bush behind first base.

The batter returns to the cardboard. The pitcher squints to see the catcher, who is standing 10 yards behind the plate to prevent a foul ball from rolling into the jungle.

Wait! Time out!

A horse, fleeing the shouts of an old woman in a rag dress, prances through left-center field before slipping behind a cluster of shacks.

The batter steps back up. The several dozen villagers clustered behind him grow silent. The ball is finally pitched.

Clang! It sails high toward left field. Over the left fielder. Over a pig rooting behind the left fielder. Past the old woman who is still chasing the horse.

With a majestic “boom,” the ball bounces off the roof of an outhouse.

As quickly as the occupant might have jumped off his seat, the Dodgers have discovered another prospect.

“Just think,” says Dodger scout Pablo Peguero as he circles the name Francisco Rojas on his clipboard. “Five years from now, maybe we can all say that we saw this guy way back when .”

Against the stark backdrop of this poor island country, the Dodgers’ imagination runs thick and sweet as sugar cane juice.

For more than a decade in the Dominican Republic, swaggering administrator Ralph Avila and his scouts have shaken banyan trees, dug through ghettos and, yes, even rattled the outhouses in search of people who eventually could play baseball 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

This search is conducted in the town of Guerra from a cluster of buildings that the resident hopefuls look upon as heaven. Campo Las Palmas, a tropical Dodgertown, is considered the finest baseball academy in Latin America, even though it sits just off an unpaved country road.

And all for what? The answer can be found in the roots of this summer’s highly regarded Dodger team.

Of the nine players who could be in the Dodgers’ opening-day lineup April 9 in Atlanta, six became Dodgers because of the club’s player-development program in the Dominican.

Pitcher Ramon Martinez and shortstop Jose Offerman are graduates of Campo Las Palmas. First baseman Eddie Murray, second baseman Juan Samuel, possible third baseman Mike Sharperson and outfielder Kal Daniels all came to the team in trades that involved Dodger-developed Dominicans.

Murray was acquired from Baltimore for shortstop Juan Bell, among others. Samuel was traded from the New York Mets in a deal that involved Alejandro Pena.

Sharperson was traded by Toronto for pitcher Juan Guzman, and Daniels was traded by Cincinnati in a deal that involved infielder Mariano Duncan.

Not bad for a country not quite the size of West Virginia.

“We could not have built this team without our efforts in the Dominican Republic,” said Fred Claire, Dodger vice president. “We take a great deal of pride in what we are doing down there--and for obvious reasons.”

And so instead of looking toward Darryl Strawberry and Brett Butler when considering the Dodgers’ foundation, perhaps it would be better to look at Peguero, who brought his old Dodger duffel bag and a sense of adventure to the recent tryout camp here.

The “field” was a patch of grass behind several shacks that rested uneasily on a narrow, unpaved road. Manure and trash were everywhere.

There were no backstop, no bases and the smell of sewage was as unmistakable as the candidates’ desperation.

Of the 12 young men in their late teens who had been invited to this session by the Dodgers--their tryout camps are private to keep the number of respondents below 200--none wore complete baseball attire.

Some wore baseball pants with T-shirts. Others wore baseball shirts with sweat pants. Some wore tennis shoes, and others wore spikes that were obviously too big or small.

“We look at everybody, and we will keep looking at everybody, because you just never know,” said Peguero, a former catcher in the Dodger organization. “The talent in this country could be anywhere.”

And everywhere. Roughly 7% of today’s major leaguers are from the Dominican Republic. Half of all Latin American major leaguers hail from here.

“In the United States, calling baseball the national pastime has become a cliche, but in the Dominican, it is a reality,” said Milton Jamail, a professor in Latin America Studies at the University of Texas who is writing a book about Latin American baseball. “They all love the game, and, because of the poor economy, they have very few options for work. So baseball is it.”

Several times a week, the Dodgers try to take advantage of this fervor with tryout camps. The most talented players are invited to Campo Las Palmas. The recent Haina experience was typical.

Avila likes to talk about the time he was scouting in Monte Cristi, a town near the Haitian border. Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican.

The town was so remote that Avila had to stop his car at the end of a road and proceed by horse. The tryout site was so overgrown that his son Albert asked, “Where’s the field?”

“You’re standing on the pitcher’s mound,” Avila replied.

Then there was the camp in another remote village where Peguero was impressed with all but one attribute of a prospect.

“He did everything right except run fast, which didn’t figure because the guy was obviously a great athlete,” Peguero said. “Then I realized, he was wearing work boots.”

Although Martinez and Offerman were discovered at tryout camps, sometimes players are found in more unusual ways.

Avila was once invited to a farmers’ league game at an old lettuce patch with a plowed-up infield.

“I was getting ready to leave in the second inning because my family was begging me to go to the beach, but then I see this 15-year-old kid run out of a jungle in right field and make a hell of a catch,” Avila recalled. “I stayed for seven innings.”

And discovered outfielder Jose Gonzalez.

Avila’s crew doesn’t offer contracts at first sight. Instead, the mostly poor youngsters are given something nearly as thrilling--a chance to live and work at the Dodgers’ sparkling baseball academy.

Cut into 31 acres of sugar cane near Santo Domingo, Campo Las Palmas has been the Dodgers’ most curious jewel since it opened in February of 1987.

The road outside is lined with rickety shacks and women carrying fruit on their heads, but the atmosphere behind the two locked gates is definitely Dodger: the Walter O’Malley headquarters, the Tom Lasorda dining room, the Roy Campanella clubhouse, the Al Campanis classroom and Manny Mota Field.

The complex houses and feeds 60 prospects on spotless, manicured grounds. In their 11-hour days, prospects learn about both baseball and American life while sheltered from the problems and distractions outside the gates.

Of all the facilities owned by the Dodgers, this is the only one at which callers can hear roosters crowing in the background. Yet in some ways, there is no facility that makes them prouder.

“When it comes to Latin American players, you have to understand the depth of what you are dealing with and realize what transition has to take place for them to come to the major leagues,” Claire said. “With our academy, we feel we are gaining that understanding.”

They also have gained what is probably the smoothest-running operation in the country. This is not just a camp, it’s a small city.

Thanks to foresight by Avila, who built the property for only $397,000, Campo Las Palmas has its own water supply, electricity and fuel. All are valuable commodities in a country that operates like a touchy old car.

The camp also produces much of its food. Trees that line the fields supply thousands of pounds of bananas each year, and camp-raised pigs supply the pork.

The food is cooked in a full kitchen and served in two dining rooms. The players sleep in two dormitories outfitted with wooden bunk beds.

The camp has its own bus, its own satellite dish and its own machine shop. It is so self-sufficient that when a general strike essentially shut down the country for three days this winter, all young Dodgers living on the island were sheltered here.

“The facility is head and shoulders above anything in the Dominican and superior to anything like it in Latin America,” Jamail said. “Other teams sit around real envious and say, ‘Oh, the Dodgers have this camp because they have more money than anyone else.’ But what the Dodgers have done there, you can’t do with just money.”

The camp even has its own Latin American dictator, Avila, 61, who can best be described as a bronzed Tom Lasorda.

The Cuban-born former scout is more than just the camp’s administrator, he is its conscience. He alternately treats the players to hugs and screams, encouraging them to shoot for the big leagues but reminding them to never forget their manners on the way.

A short man with a round belly and big voice, Avila is equally adept at teaching a catcher how to block a ball and showing a pitcher how to use a flush toilet. Since 1968, he has taught young Latin Dodgers not just how to be Dodgers, but how to be men.

“You couldn’t have invented someone better for the job,” Claire said.

Avila said recently after lecturing his campers about life while they sat in one of the dugouts: “Sometimes, it is trying. Sometimes, you have to teach these kids everything. How to eat. How to dress. They come here and many of them are nothing.”

It isn’t as if Avila has plenty of time, either. Prospects selected from tryout camps are brought to Campo Las Palmas for a further look. But because of government regulations, if they are not signed to a contract within 30 days, they must leave.

If they are signed, they begin working their way through the Dodger minor league system.

“The hardest part is sending a kid back outside the gates,” Avila said. “I always tell him that he still has a chance if he keeps working hard. It’s baloney, but I cannot bear to tell him anything else.”

On his way out, the departing player may pass others who have come on foot, horseback or motor scooter to those front gates. They gather every morning underneath the two large plastic baseballs, begging the security guard for admission so they can try out.

Each week, Avila allows several such raggedy candidates inside for a quick look. He has never signed such a player, but he keeps inviting them in anyway.

“I figure, what will it hurt?” he says. “If just one is talented, then it will be all worth it.”

Sometimes it is even harder for the players who stay inside, even if they do make more money in a month, about $800, than the average Dominican makes in a year.

“The player here has to realize there is more to life than all the gold chains he can buy,” Avila said. “He has to realize that to make it in the United States, it will take more than money.”

Much more:

--Avila teaches them how to eat: “All they want is rice and beans. They won’t eat fruit and drink milk at the same meal. They don’t know the first thing about nutrition.”

--Avila teaches them hygiene: “We give them shoes to wear in the shower, but they won’t wear them in the shower. They will wear them everywhere else.”

--Avila sends many to the dentist for the first time: “Mariano Duncan once had 21 cavities, I swear.”

Perhaps there is nothing so frustrating as the English lessons, given daily by a local high school teacher in a steamy classroom built specifically for that purpose.

During one recent class, players whispered, giggled, doodled in their books and generally behaved the way many teen-agers do when confronted with something they don’t understand.

But the problem is more serious than just not understanding English.

“Once I yelled at the instructor, ‘Damn! How come there is no improvement in these kids?’ ” Avila recalled. “He said, ‘Because some of them can’t even read or write in Spanish !’ ”

Avila still cannot forget what happened many years ago after offering a contract to pitcher Alejandro Pena, a poor youngster he had discovered playing third base at a tryout camp.

Said Avila softly: “I had to put my hand over his hand and sign his name on the contract for him.”

Because the language difference is the biggest reason many Latin major leaguers are labeled “moody” or “misunderstood,” Avila holds the lessons sacred.

Once there was a top prospect who was hassling the English teacher. Avila confronted him afterward and ordered him to run laps around one of the fields.

“A little while later, one of my coaches came inside and said this player had just collapsed after 39 laps,” Avila said. “I told the coach, ‘Good. Let the s.o.b. die.’ ”

Good thing Jose Offerman didn’t.

“I don’t care who the player is,” Avila said. “They leave here knowing right from wrong.”

But in return for his tough standards--players need permission slips to leave camp--Avila does more than just educate. He protects.

“Lot of times, these kids’ parents or friends will try to come in here and pressure them for money,” Avila said. “This is one reason I live across the street. One way or another, our staff checks out everyone who comes in.”

Avila also does not allow the players to visit the nearby village center in Guerra, because he understands machismo.

“The locals think all of our guys are coming to steal their girls,” he said.

Said Claire: “The bottom line for Ralph is he cares. Those boys are like his sons.”

And when somebody like Martinez makes it? Well, in a frame on Avila’s wall is the original lineup card from Martinez’s 18-strikeout performance against Atlanta last year. And in Avila’s memory is the phone call from Martinez shortly after that game.

“To see one bit of success from all this, that is to see the reason we keep going,” Avila said.

And, heck, Avila thinks he has other versions of Martinez. They just haven’t grown up yet.

Eddie Silfa and Joe Garcia wonder if they fall into that category. The pitching prospects have been living at Campo Las Palmas for less than a year, yet recently they spoke about the Dodgers as if they would be in the organization the rest of their lives.

“If I’m not here, I’m shucking sugar cane,” said Silfa, who was not complaining about holes in his socks or a Dodger uniform that appeared too tight. “This is the chance of my life. I must make the best of it.”

Garcia had a the same wide-eyed attitude, perhaps because he came from a shack near the Haitian border where he had no plumbing or electricity.

“This is a much, much better place than where I was living,” Garcia said. “I can only do one thing and that is work hard. I do not want to leave. I go home, I must help with the cows.”

The thin teen-ager spoke softly and slowly, as if in the middle of a dream. Avila stood nearby and smiled. Even if they can do nothing else for young Garcia’s career, the Dodgers can share that dream.