On the way to Tamboril, Dominican Republic, a famous cigar-making suburb east of Santiago, our rented Hyundai Grand i10 dropped into every dirt pothole with a disturbing thunk. Frankly, we’d been terrible at sightseeing. Our maps and apps consistently let us down, our walking routes took us past hospitals and funeral homes and we never once made it to the beach. We were about to give up and drive to the airport early when my niece Aurora, 25, looked out the rear window and asked, “Isn’t that a baseball field?”

And that was the way it went in the Dominican Republic: Baseball found us.

Four days earlier, the week before Christmas, we had traveled there not for the 82-degree temperatures, cathedrals built by popes and bishops, merengue music, paella Valenciana and street-side ice cream parlors that seem to appear exactly when you need them — although those were nice. We were there to stave off seasonal depression. “As soon as the chill rains come,” A. Bartlett Giamatti, baseball’s former commissioner, once wrote, “It stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone.” I located the world’s best winter baseball — the Liga de Beisbol Dominicano — and dragged Aurora and my brother, Mark, to this island of banana plants and death-defying motorcyclists.

Baseball players in the Dominican Republic are like musicians — or, more recently, sprinters — in nearby Jamaica: so much talent for such a tiny island. Juan Marichal, David Ortiz, Robinson Canó, Sammy Sosa and Albert Pujols are from here. As of opening day 2015, Dominicans made up 83 of baseball’s 868 players. “If you reverse time back 15 years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree without 50 cents to actually pay for a bus,” Pedro Martinez, the Hall of Fame pitcher, once told reporters.

Baseball arrived on the island by sea in the 1860s, via Cubans fleeing the Ten Years’ War, according to “The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic” by Rob L. Ruck. By the 1930s, it had grown into a big-money sport where owners mined the country for talented youths whose parents often worked at sugar refineries. In 1937 a team, run in part by the dictator Rafael Trujillo, hired Negro League stars from the United States, including Satchel Paige. Mr. Trujillo built the first modern stadium, complete with lights, in the mid-’50s. That was when star Dominican players first graduated to the majors, beginning with the utility infielder Ozzie Virgil.