Sosa an Island Hero On--and Off--Field

On what was to be the final day of a major league baseball season that flooded this poor coastal town with hope and love--as Sammy Sosa neared writing the final chapter in a summer saga that had overwhelmed all else in the Chicago Cub slugger’s hometown--televisions were dark on Sunday, radios were silent, and hope was running thin.

Five days after Hurricane Georges ripped this nation to shreds--killing five people and leveling 34,000 homes in San Pedro alone, and leaving the entire town without water or power as the storm raged toward U.S. shores--the American home-run battle that had become life itself here gave way to a battle for mere survival.

The hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who had thronged San Pedro’s betting parlors, living rooms and roadside stands throughout the summer--hypnotized by each Sosa at-bat--instead mobbed bottling plants in a desperate Sunday search for water.

“A hurricane swept this town before Georges. It was Sammy Sosa,” Municipal President Mario Jimenez said inside the battered headquarters of a city that has produced more than a dozen major league stars through the years. “But now, people only talk about Georges and their misfortune.”

And yet, even amid the destruction and misery of a storm that killed at least 200 Dominicans nationwide, the crowd grew steadily through the afternoon inside the tiny Juancito Sport betting parlor. There, a gas generator and a last-minute satellite link flickered to life--just in time for Sosa’s second at-bat in the Cubs’ crucial regular-season ender.

“Sammy! It’s Sammy! Let’s go, by God!” Juan Richardson shouted, and suddenly all fell silent. “Diablo!” he muttered, when Sosa then struck out. The Cubs later lost and will take on the San Francisco Giants in a one-game playoff for the wild-card slot.

“For us, at a time like this,” Richardson later explained, pointing toward the set, “this is a voice that fills the spirit and the heart.”

It didn’t even seem to matter when Richardson, a local factory worker who was listening to Mark McGwire’s St. Louis Cardinals finale on a battery-powered Walkman, announced: “My God! McGwire just hit No. 70. What an animal!”

“Really, the home runs don’t matter to us,” Richardson said later. “We still feel good, because what Sammy has done is a great achievement for all of us.”

In an already impoverished city where Georges turned wooden houses to tinder, blew down every traffic signal, shredded tin roofs, blasted walls, shattered windows, uprooted trees and left behind a twisted wasteland, most are counting on Sosa’s legendary philanthropy and largess.

“We’re going to celebrate when he comes. He’s going to bring us a lot of things,” said Rafael Hernandez, 36, whose wife and five children were among the 97 families who have turned the inside of the San Pedro Apostle Church into a barrio since they fled Georges’ terror on Tuesday.

The church, where children now sleep in pews, mothers cook over open fires on a mosaic floor and the confessional is used as a clothesline, is among the makeshift shelters created within hours of the storm in a nation ill prepared for its destruction. Together, San Pedro’s churches, schools, hospital and other buildings now house 135,000 homeless--more than a third of the city’s population, Municipal President Jimenez said.

And San Pedro is just one glimpse of the devastation throughout this Caribbean island nation. Although the official death toll stood at 201 on Sunday, it is expected to rise in the days ahead. Hundreds more are missing and believed dead--many from a dam that reportedly was opened to prevent it from bursting at the height of the storm.

Georges also destroyed much of the crucial Dominican sugar crop and left 500,000 homeless nationwide. Most of the country is without electricity or drinking water. “We have no light. We have no water. We have no food in the market and none in the fields,” Jimenez said. “And we’ve gotten nothing from the government. The only thing we have is our own bodies.”

But San Pedro and the nation also have Sosa, who spends his winters in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, and visits his hometown several times each year. With a five-year contract worth $42.5 million, Sosa already gives $500,000 a year to Dominican charities, and he has donated 250 computers to the nation’s schools.

On Saturday, Sosa went to the Dominican Consulate in Houston and loaded trucks with goods donated for the hurricane relief effort in his homeland. And rumors were spreading Sunday of more aid he plans to send.

“It’s not official, but we’ve heard Sammy Sosa is raising millions of pesos for hurricane relief here, from his own resources and from other major league players,” said Leonides Henriques, part owner of an FM radio station that rents space in the shopping center Sosa built here--a structure remarkably untouched by the storm.

“We’ve even heard McGwire is going to donate millions of pesos to the relief effort. We don’t know if it’s true, but with the leadership Sammy has, we’re sure he can coordinate some assistance--not just for San Pedro but for the whole country.”

Pappy de la Rosa agreed. He shines shoes in San Pedro’s central Plaza Duarte, the same square where Sosa grew up shining shoes and washing cars for $1 a day. Now 38, De la Rosa grew up alongside Sosa at the same shoeshine boxes where De la Rosa remains. And he still calls Sosa “my good friend.”

Working on a Sunday amid the square’s decapitated palms, De la Rosa nodded when asked about his--and his city’s--future.

“Sammy will come and do something for us,” he said. “Sammy is our only hope now.”