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Dominican Baseball Hits a 'Jonrón'

If you're a baseball fan, you well know how much "America's pastime" owes these days to the Dominican Republic – starting with greats like Pedro Martínez, Matty Alou, David Ortiz, Juan Marichal, Manny Ramírez, and of course the great Sammy Sosa (right).

These are just a small handful of the 400 peloteros the country has sent to the U.S. major leagues, and the reason is that beisbol is as popular here as in any country in the world, with a long pedigree stretching back more than a century, introduced in the 1880s by immigrants from Cuba (where the game had already been played for decades).

Today, hundreds of thousands of young Dominican boys grow up playing the sport – often starting out with nothing more than broom handles – and dreaming of the majors (as depicted in the 2008 movie Sugar); indeed, MLB scouts are thick on the ground at certain times of the year.

Moreover, coming down here is a great way to catch some absolutely smokin' baseball action once the season is over in the U.S. and Canada -- in the Caribbean it runs October through February. In the DR, you can catch more than 60 games played among the six teams belonging to LIDOM, the national league, which marks its 60th anniversary this year. The country's capital, Santo Domingo, has two teams (the Leones del Escogido and the Tigres del Licey – the lions and the tigers), while second city Santiago has its Águilas Cibaeñas and La Romana its Toros del Este (the most recent national champ).

What you could call baseball’s local heartland lies along the southeastern coast, including the towns of San Pedro de Macorís (left) and San Francisco de Macorís, home to the Estrellas Orientales and the Gigantes del Cibao, respectively. In particular, San Pedro, about an hour’s drive east of Santo Domingo and just down the road from La Romana, is a charming sugar-industry town that produced Sammy Sosa and is dubbed the “cradle of shortstops”; you’ll definitely want to catch a winter league game at its Estadio Tetelo Vargas.