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  He was a long shot to make the big-league team at the start of the 1960 season, but an unfortunate incident in spring training ensured he would need more time in the Minor Leagues. Marichal was pitching batting practice without a screen, which was normal then, and he didn’t put on an athletic cup because he had developed a rash. Big mistake. The first batter hit Juan’s first pitch right back at him, a line drive that struck him square in the balls. I wince just recalling it. To this day Marichal says it’s the worst pain he ever felt. He spent three days in the hospital, mostly with an ice bag on his swollen right testicle. The day the hospital released him the Giants sent him to their Minor League camp in Sanford, Florida.

  It’s a shame, because I thought Juan was good enough to make the team out of spring training. I wanted him with us, breaking bats. Instead, he got hit in the balls. By the time he did get to us he was eating up the Minor Leagues. He finished the 1960 season with us by going 6-2 with a 2.66 ERA.

  During those early offseason years with the Giants, Marichal would come by our house in the Dominican and run with my brothers and me to stay in shape. He loved to run. We would fish and scuba dive together, too. One time when we were spearfishing out in that beautiful Caribbean Sea, Juan started hollering. He was in excruciating pain from a sudden leg cramp, probably from all that running, and was struggling to stay afloat. I swam over, grabbed him tightly, and dragged him back to the boat. He claims to this day that I saved his life.

  Marichal was famous for his pitching style—that big, dramatic leg kick. Early in his career a sportswriter asked him about it, noting how it was similar to Warren Spahn, who threw the same way from the left side. “Oh, yes,” Marichal said. “Warren Spahn throws just like me.”

  The way he said that—“Warren Spahn throws just like me”—provoked media criticism. Spahn was a legend who was winding down his Hall of Fame career. After that people started calling Marichal cocky. But I knew Juan and that was him—a very confident, in-your-face guy. Extremely competitive. He wasn’t trying to put anyone down, especially Warren Spahn. He would say things like that out of his incredible confidence.

  Sure enough, almost three years to the day after his one-hitter debut, Marichal and Spahn united for the most epic pitching battle I’ve ever seen and probably the greatest pitching duel the game has ever seen. Only Carl Hubbell, coincidentally thirty years to the day earlier, had a better individual pitching performance—throwing an eighteen-inning shutout for the New York Giants. But never before or since has there been a better duel than the one Marichal and Spahn put on display in a game between us and the Milwaukee Braves on July 2, 1963, at Candlestick Park. They both pitched a scoreless game into the sixteenth inning—Marichal high-kicking from the right side and Spahn high-kicking from the left side. Willie Mays finally ended it with a walk-off home run against Spahn to give us the 1–0 victory. Historians say Marichal threw 227 pitches to record his sixteen-inning shutout, while Spahn threw 201 pitches. Marichal yielded 8 hits and Spahn 9 (one of them to me, a two-out single in the bottom of the ninth).

  Our manager, Alvin Dark, tried to take Marichal out in the ninth inning. Juan flatly refused. Pointing to Spahn on the mound, Marichal told Dark, “You see that man? He’s forty-two years old. I’m twenty-five. There is no way I am coming out of this game as long as that old man is still pitching.” Although Spahn was forty-two, he also hit the hardest ball off Marichal that game—a seventh-inning double off the right-field wall. It was the only extra-base hit Marichal yielded. Spahn was an outstanding hitter for a pitcher, finishing his career with thirty-five home runs. Dark tried again in the twelfth inning to relieve Marichal, but Juan stubbornly refused to come out. The tension in our dugout was now almost equal to the tension in the game. After our last out in the bottom of the fourteenth inning, Juan thought he saw a relief pitcher coming from the bullpen, and he quickly grabbed his cap and glove and ran to the mound.

  After retiring the Braves in the top of the sixteenth inning, with the score still tied 0–0, Marichal lingered on the field near first base, waiting for Willie Mays to jog in from center field. He stopped Willie, threw his arm around his shoulder, and said, “Alvin Dark is mad at me. He’s not going to let me pitch any longer.”

  Mays reassuringly patted Marichal’s back and said, “Don’t worry. I’m going to win this game for you.”

  One out into the bottom of the sixteenth inning, Mays hit the first pitch he saw from Spahn straight into the wind. The ball cleared the left-field wall for a home run. It was the only hit Mays recorded that night.

  Author Jim Kaplan wrote a book about that game, appropriately titled The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century. In it Kaplan quotes another Braves starting pitcher, Bob Sadowski, saying that after the game, Spahn was the last player to the clubhouse because of doing interviews. “When Spahn arrived,” Sadowski said, “everyone stood, applauded, and lined up to shake his hand. If you didn’t have tears in your eyes, you weren’t nothing.”

  Seven future Hall of Famers played in that game—Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Hank Aaron, and Eddie Mathews. Incredible. As a postscript, sitting in the stands at Candlestick Park was a twenty-eight-year-old Braves fan named Bud Selig. The former baseball commissioner still talks about that game. We all do.

  The turning point for Marichal came after the 1961 season. Following that impressive start, when he went 6-2 with a 2.66 ERA in 1960, Marichal was so-so in 1961, going 13-10 with a 3.89 ERA, struggling against lefties. Afterward, he told me he was heading to the Dominican Republic to play in the Winter League and develop a pitch to get left-handed hitters out. And he did. Marichal basically invented his own screwball that he threw over the top. It looked like a curveball to left-handed hitters. He also developed pitches from other arm angles, sometimes even sidearm without that high leg kick. But it was inventing that screwball that helped elevate him to greatness.

  “Compadre, I got it,” he told me one day. “I got the pitch for lefties.” That’s when he became a complete pitcher, going 18-11 in 1962 before rattling off six seasons of 20 wins or better over the next seven years.

  We didn’t play in the Winter League in the 1960 offseason. Instead, the Giants were asked to play a series of exhibition games in Japan. We started the road trip playing two games against U.S. soldiers on a military base in Honolulu, Hawaii, before flying to Tokyo, where we were greeted by dignitaries and kimono-clad girls. It was exotic, intoxicating, magical. I was playing well, feeling confident, looking forward to carrying my success overseas and my newly established role as an everyday player into the 1961 season. I felt like one of the guys.

  We played a 7–7 tie exhibition game when Sheehan assembled us for news from back home. His stint as interim manager was over. The Giants had hired a permanent replacement—Alvin Dark. The news shocked me and maybe even shook me. Dark had never managed. At thirty-eight, Dark had just completed a season mostly playing in the infield for the Milwaukee Braves. We actually acquired him in a trade for Andre Rodgers. As a player, seven seasons of which were with the New York Giants (1950–56), Dark gained a reputation for being a hardworking, no-nonsense guy, with a desperate desire to win.

  That was all well and good. What shook me is knowing he was from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and how it was his name I heard constantly when I came to America in 1956 and spent a miserable month in that southern city, enduring all sorts of racism before being told I had to leave because people of my skin color weren’t allowed to play baseball alongside white men. Now I was hearing the name Alvin Dark again.

  I knew more changes were coming.

  And it had me worried.

  10

  Dark Days

  I have a mind that is difficult to turn off. I’ve been told I overanalyze things. I’m sure that worked to my advantage later in my career as a manager, but as a man, and as a player on that 1961 San Francisco Giants team, I couldn’t help but dwell on the f
act I left the club two seasons earlier and that for the upcoming season our manager was a man from Lake Charles, Louisiana—the city where I first encountered the repulsive reality of racism.

  I knew during spring training in 1961 that Matty was going to make the team and he was going to be a player. I also knew Jesús was coming and he too was going to be a player. With Willie Mays entrenched in center field, and rightfully so, and Harvey Kuenn in his prime, I knew there was going to be a logjam in the outfield and somebody was going to have to go. With my active mind working overtime, I reached the conclusion it would be me. When? I didn’t know. But I knew it would be me.

  My immediate concern was Alvin Dark, who wasted no time confirming my darkest thoughts, setting the tone almost from day one with the Latino players. As I recall there were eleven Latinos in spring training, five of whom made the team—Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, José Pagán, Matty, and me. José Cardenal was there that spring, too, on his way to becoming a big leaguer, mostly with the Chicago Cubs, where he became the all-time most favorite player of a young girl there who would grow up to become Michelle Obama. One day, early in camp, Dark gathered us Latinos in short center field. His message—more like an edict—was short, but definitely not sweet.

  “I don’t want you guys speaking Spanish while in uniform,” he said. “Some of the guys don’t like it when you speak Spanish.”

  I didn’t doubt that. There was a pecking order in baseball as well as in society. First-class citizens were the whites, second-class citizens were the blacks, and the third-class citizens were the Latinos. So I’m sure there were complaints from players—both white and black. But I believe it was mostly Alvin Dark, a rigid former marine with all his insecurities as a new thirty-nine-year-old manager. I believe it made him uncomfortable not knowing what we were saying, and it was obvious he was trying to enforce his authority. It was a ridiculous decree, and it angered us—especially Cepeda.

  Cepeda pointed to Matty, who knew very little English. “How am I going to speak to him without speaking Spanish?” he demanded.

  As he was saying this, I was thinking to myself, How can I explain to my father that I can’t talk to my own brother in Spanish?

  Cepeda was belligerent in his defiance, and the rest of us followed his lead. We started speaking in Spanish to each other right in front of Dark, doing so louder and louder, emboldened by our collective voices. And what we were saying—in Spanish—is that we were going to continue talking to each other in Spanish. We walked away from him, exaggeratingly speaking in our native tongue with ever-increasing mocking volume. We were never told not to speak Spanish with each other again. But the damage was done, a fissure created.

  No slight went unnoticed, especially to Cepeda. He started noting that whenever Dark had a clubhouse meeting, he avoided the Latino players—unless he wanted to yell at us, which was often. Dark frequently questioned our desire, our effort, our mental capacity. After one game where I struck out three times, Dark said I didn’t hustle, to which Cepeda opined, “I guess after you strike out, he wants you to slide into the dugout to break up a double play.” Cepeda said this to me in Spanish, though his sarcasm could translate into any language.

  There were other signs of tension. As he did the spring before, Marichal was pitching batting practice early in camp. One day the first guy in the batting group I was in was Eddie Bressoud, who was about to lose his starting shortstop job to José Pagán. Marichal broke Bressoud’s bat with his first pitch. Walking away, Bressoud grumbled, “Those kids pitching in winter ball come in here and make us look bad. They should bring those kids in later.” “Those kids” could have been rephrased as “those Latinos.”

  Bressoud was a good guy, though. He was mostly frustrated that Marichal broke his bat and likely concerned that he was losing his starting job. Alvin Dark, however, was more difficult to figure out—more complex. He was a devout Southern Baptist who would take me and other Latinos and blacks to church. Sometimes he would start workouts later on Sundays, so we could go to church first. He was extremely religious, a believer, yet he fell like many of us do. During the 1962 season, while married, Dark started seeing an attractive redheaded woman named Jackie. We first saw them together on a road trip in Chicago, riding an elevator toward his hotel room late one night. Dark eventually divorced his first wife and married Jackie, which is something he chronicles in his autobiography, calling himself a hypocrite.

  Dark also had a bad temper, sometimes peppering his tantrums with profanity. His lack of knowledge with Latinos made his profanity dangerous. In America calling somebody a son of a bitch doesn’t carry the same heat that it does in Latin America. Don’t say anything about the mother to a Latino, because if you include the mother, you’re going to be in trouble. If you call a Spanish player a son of a bitch, all hell is going to break loose. I feared that was going to happen with Dark and one of our Latino players.

  One time Dark’s temper really cost him—badly. It came in a June 26, 1961, game against the Philadelphia Phillies at Connie Mack Stadium. We lost 1–0, leaving twelve runners on base—nine in the last three innings. Losing ate at Dark. He abhorred losing. In the clubhouse afterward he heard a couple of guys joking and laughing, and it enraged him. He picked up a steel metal stool and flung it across the room. As the stool was on the fly, I could see blood dripping from it and the tip of Dark’s little finger falling off. Dark grabbed his hand, and immediately there was blood all over his uniform.

  Our pitching coach, Larry Jansen, his eyes wide with horror, pointed at the finger lying on the clubhouse floor. “Cap, Cap, look . . . ,” Jansen said. Then he sat down, and I thought he was going to faint.

  Dark lost the tip of that finger permanently, although our team trainer, Frank Bowman, preserved it with alcohol in a pickle jar.

  We played the Phillies two days later in a rain-delayed affair, with the lead ebbing back and forth and the clock ticking toward 1 a.m., which was important because the city of Philadelphia had an ordinance stating that no inning could start after that time. In the fifteenth inning we scored three runs to take a 7–4 lead.

  Mike McCormick was on the mound in relief of Jack Sanford, who had been a little wild, giving two runs back to the Phillies while leaving a runner on third. McCormick was one out away from nailing the game down when our catcher, Hobie Landrith, overthrew McCormick in tossing the ball back to the pitcher’s mound. The ball skittered into center field, and the runner on third scampered home to tie the game at 7–7.

  McCormick got the last out, but now it was past 1 a.m., meaning the game would end in a tie. It was the longest march back to the clubhouse. The hallway at Connie Mack Stadium was so narrow you had to walk in single file. We were like a line of condemned prisoners.

  In the clubhouse Dark took some stomping steps, and I thought he was going to explode again or maybe call a team meeting. But he said and did nothing.

  I heard Dark got better control of his temper in his later years, especially when he was managing the freewheeling Oakland A’s to a World Series title in 1974. But with us it never seemed to get better, only worse. And it could be petty, almost personal. Dark forbade Cepeda from playing his Latin jazz music in the clubhouse, which was one thing. But then he tried to prevent Cepeda from taking his record player with him on road trips—which, for the sake of getting a good night’s sleep, I would not have minded one bit. It wasn’t right, though. Dark sent the clubhouse man, Eddie Logan, to Cepeda and told him not to bring his record player with him on a road trip we were about to embark on. Cepeda forcefully told Logan to tell Dark that if his record player couldn’t go, he wasn’t going either. That was the end of it. The record player, and Cepeda, went on the road trip—and I lost several more good nights of sleep.

  Cepeda claims that Dark’s bigotry fostered division in the clubhouse and cost the Giants a couple of pennants. I don’t know about that. There is no doubt Dark mismanaged his power and that he struggled with managing people, but he did excel in managing—in
the strategic part of the game. I know he made me a better ballplayer. I always say I graduated into a big leaguer under him.

  It wasn’t only Cepeda who noticed all the racial slights or became angry over them. He was just more inclined to want to turn those slights into a confrontation—physical, if necessary. Once when we were in Pittsburgh on a road trip, Cepeda and I went to a restaurant next door to our hotel. It was a Saturday night after a day game, and we were dressed in new suits we had purchased from a Jewish tailor in Philadelphia whom many players patronized. Walking into the restaurant we asked for a table for two.

  “We don’t serve Negroes here,” the headwaiter at the door said.

  “That’s okay,” Cepeda replied, “because we don’t eat them.”

  When Cepeda and I started talking to each other in Spanish, the man, thinking he had mistaken our intentions, added, “You looking for a job? We have nothing for you. If you’re looking to wash dishes, you might try the restaurant down the street.” Cepeda was hot, and he wanted to retaliate and fight. Instead, we went back to the hotel and ordered room service.

  Sometimes—oftentimes, really—the racism was that overt. Other times it was subtle. And then there were the times when it appeared to be there, but really wasn’t. I felt that way many years later with Al Campanis. In 1987, on the fortieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, Campanis was a guest on the ABC News program Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. Koppel asked Campanis why there had been so few black managers and no black general managers. Regrettably, but not reprehensibly, Campanis replied that blacks “may not have the necessities” to be a field manager or general manager.

  I say “not reprehensibly” because I knew Al Campanis, and I knew he was not a racist. And if anything, I had every reason not to like him. Campanis, who played alongside Jackie Robinson with the Montreal Royals, was once a superscout and topflight manager in Latin America. Known as a keen evaluator of talent, he discovered and signed Roberto Clemente as well as Sandy Koufax and Tommy Davis. After I hit .380 in the Florida State League in 1956, Campanis was asked that offseason when he was in the Dominican Republic for the Winter League why he didn’t sign me to the Brooklyn Dodgers.