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It's Not All Sun and Games

By Jorge Aranguré Jr. & Luke Cyphers
ESPN The Magazine

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The next Dominican export rises from a former sugarcane field, slender and tall, with legs as sturdy as steel bridge cables. Under a cloudless sky, he stands on bare yellow earth, dark skin clad in a green Oakland A's jersey, like a misplaced mahogany tree in the desert. It is 3 p.m. on a mid-January Tuesday in San Pedro de Macorís, but more than a hundred spectators pack the concrete bleachers, and dozens more, many of them boys, line the backstop, some with their noses poking through the cha ...

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