Chapter One

MIGUEL TEJADA

As he would be for most of his early life, Miguel Odalis Tejada was malnourished on the day of his birth -- May 25, 1976. His mother couldn't afford to see a doctor while she carried Miguel in her womb, nor could she afford to stop working until just before Miguel was born.

"My father didn't want any more kids, but my mother did," Miguel says today. "I was a surprise. And when I was born I was ugly, ugly, ugly." He scrunches up his face as he says this, imitating the frowning baby his family says he was -- a scowling infant with unattractive blotches on his dark skin. "My father said they thought I was going to die, that I looked like I was sick."

Miguel was the eighth child born to a family living in a shantytown outside the city of Bani, which sits forty miles southwest of Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. His parents, Daniel and Mora Tejada, already had two sons together -- Juansito and Denio. In addition, Mora had four girls with another man, while Daniel had another son.

By the time Miguel was born, most of the older children were already working.

Miguel would work as well, first earning money at the same age American kids are usually starting kindergarten.

In Miguel's family, the boys shined shoes or helped their father work piecemeal construction jobs, moving earth, stacking concrete blocks, or mixing mortar that would stick to their fingers and legs long after they had given up trying to wash it off. The girls in Miguel's family cleaned and cooked for others as their mother did.

As a toddler, little Miguel was like other dark-skinned babies at the bottom of the Dominican's socioeconomic scale. He would ramble around a dirt road in front of his family's dwelling completely naked, unprotected from the filth of farm animals roaming freely amid raw sewage. Today, it is still very common to see impoverished babies completely nude in the barrios and shanties of the Dominican.

To the unaccustomed, the scene is at first reminiscent of something out of a National Geographic special -- like a scene out of an African village.

The difference between the Dominican and Africa is that in the barrios of Miguel's youth, squalor commingled with television antennas and constant reminders of the United States. All around, Miguel's neighbors stored their water in empty Clorox bottles while wearing clothes donated by U.S. Catholic charities -- making it very common to see rail-thin, barefoot Dominican kids wearing faded T-shirts from some Elks Lodge in Ohio or a bowling shirt from a company team in Pennsylvania. Seemingly everyone wore a frayed baseball cap or owned a beat-up Zenith television set or dreamed of owning a fancy American car.

Miguel's brothers were like any other Dominican boys. They played baseball day and night. Miguel's older brother Juansito, hobbled since childhood by a poorly healed broken right leg, played with verve and skill -- deftly fielding balls fashioned from balled-up rags and running aggressively on calloused feet hardened by countless hours of playing on jagged rocks and pebbles. Miguel's other brother Denio was also very good.

His father, Daniel, had been a ballplayer as well, but in his day the game was just a diversion for the impoverished, nothing more. In fact, the Tejada boys had no real thoughts of being major leaguers. They were so poor and their lives so remote, it would have been ludicrous to dream of such a thing. Boys like them had become big leaguers with some regularity since the very first Dominican -- Ozzie Virgil -- suited up for the New York Giants in 1956. But after an initial burst in the late 1950s that produced future Hall of Famer Juan Marichal and the three Alou brothers -- Felipe, Matty, and Jesus, all of the San Francisco Giants -- the presence of Dominicans in major league baseball could hardly be described as a force. Not until the mid-to-late 1980s would Dominicans explode on the major league scene, fueled by the realization of baseball men that, with the proper work, large numbers of players could be produced for very little money. That explosion would come too late for Juansito and Denio Tejada. Instead, their lives would be marked by two disasters, the first of which came on a Friday, August 31, in 1979.

Hurricane David was the most powerful weather system to strike the Dominican in the twentieth century, leveling city and countryside and 90 percent of the nation's crops and pounding the island with thirty-foot waves that kept coming for five days, spurred on by a tropical storm that moved in after the eye of David careened northward toward the Florida Keys.

Satellite photos taken at the time show the Caribbean as a black background with the outline of neighboring Cuba spared by a confluence of killer clouds swallowing up the Dominican. To look at the photos, it's as if the entire island had been erased.

When the rain and 150-mph winds finally stopped, David had caused $1 billion in damage while killing thousands and leaving one hundred thousand Dominicans homeless -- including the Tejadas.

To this day, Miguel doesn't remember much of the storm or its aftermath, but his family does -- they lost everything. Which is to say, they lost what little they had. All their clothing, their beat-up stove, an antiquated radio, their food, and what few family mementos they had.

All that survives are memories of displacement and a desperate trek into Bani, searching for survival. Like most refugees, the Tejadas were not accepted with open arms and joined a substantial homeless population still in shock from the ferocity of David and the devastation it had wrought. It would be roughly two weeks before they found a spot in a refugee camp where more than two hundred people lived on top of each other.

Necessity drove Miguel to build a little box and hustle shoeshines from men working or gathering in Bani's main plaza, a tree-lined square like thousands of others in Latin America. Miguel would hoard whatever coins he could get and share them with his brothers, who would use the money to buy bread or fruit. During this time, Miguel's mother was often away in Santo Domingo, cleaning houses and working in a bakery. On the weekends, Miguel would eagerly await her arrival and the anticipated dispersal of crumbling pieces of week-old breads and pastries. He had begun going to school by this point, but his attendance was sporadic, In a sense, these years were like a blur of hunger, a time without roots or a sense of stability that made an indelible mark and colored his every move years later.

For five years, Miguel lived this way. When he was eight, his family relocated to a slum in Bani dubbed Los Barrancones. In the Spanish language, the word barrancon means an obstacle of great danger, and is often used to describe a ravine or a gorge. In some dictionaries, the word is illustrated with a saying: salir del barranco, to get out with great difficulty.

With this identity firmly in place, Miguel turned to baseball. He had nothing else; playing the game was the first thing that made him feel whole, made him feel free, made him feel strong.

So he began thinking as the other boys did, of baseball as his one outlet of aggression, his only means of entertainment and form of expression. Kids like Miguel had little chance at an education, but most could run. And when they ran they could begin to dream, to escape, to test themselves, their strength, their intelligence; and their instincts every time they swung a stick or tree branch fashioned in the shape of a bat.

After being taught the game by his brothers, Miguel spent almost all his time running the dirt streets of Los Barrancones, to a dilapidated sandlot where burros were known to feed on the dried grass of right field.

Miguel was short and squat, thin through his shoulders but powerfu