The Fight of Their Lives Read online

  Marichal did not grasp Pompez’s meaning. He thought the old man was telling him “fairy stories” about this new land. In the Dominican Republic people were not divided into black and white categories; the stratification was more nuanced, with lighter shading more highly esteemed than darker. Ultimately, wealth determined one’s place in the social hierarchy. “Although whiteness may be considered desirable [in Latin America], an individual’s status is more clearly demarcated by class position,” sociologist Harry Kitano explains. Though Juan was aware that discrimination existed, his experience growing up in the Dominican Republic did not prepare him for the way skin color could rule one’s social life and crush one’s career in the United States. He was shocked and discouraged that the team spontaneously segregated into groups of whites, blacks, and Latinos. “That really shocked me,” Marichal said. “I felt like I was on another planet. I’d never experienced that.”

  Assigned to the Giants’ Class D club in Michigan City, Indiana, Juan rode a Greyhound north with his new white teammates, though he sat in the back with three other Latinos and four blacks. The first time they stopped to eat, Marichal and the other dark-skinned players had to wait on the bus while the white players walked into the restaurant. Someone went in to order their food and then brought it outside, where they ate on the bus. The indignity startled and disturbed Juan. It was a long trip.

  Even north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where Jim Crow laws weren’t enforced, restaurants refused Juan and his Latin teammates service, and people sneered at them. In Michigan City the dark-skinned Latinos and African Americans could not stay in the same hotel with their teammates; they had to find boarding houses run by black families. That kind of humiliation defined the dark-skinned Latin ballplayer’s experience in North America. On his first day in the United States, the Puerto Rican Orlando Cepeda was abandoned at the train station in Kokomo, Indiana. He started walking to where he thought the team might be staying. A policeman picked him up and dropped him off on a street corner in the town’s colored neighborhood. Felix Delgado, also from Puerto Rico, was barred from using the stadium restroom, forced to urinate in a can on the team bus. Fellow Puerto Rican Felix Mantilla received death threats when he played for a Jacksonville, Florida, team in the Sally League. When the Giants assigned two dark-skinned players, Marichal’s countryman and childhood friend Felipe Alou along with Ralph Terry from Harlem, to their Lake Charles, Louisiana, team in 1956, Louisiana governor Earl Long invoked a state mandate that barred competition between black and white players to run the two out of the league.

  Vic Power (né Victor Pellot Pove), a dark-skinned infielder from Puerto Rico, had married a light-skinned Hispanic woman, but when he drove her around Kansas City—where he played for the Athletics in 1955—police regularly stopped him to question him about the white woman in the passenger seat. Another time, after Power bought a Coke at a gas station in Florida, the attendant boarded the team bus and demanded that Power return the bottle. Power complied with some choice words. A patrol car soon pulled over the bus, and the officer arrested Power for profanity. Power’s teammates posted bail of $500 but warned him not to go back for the trial. “What kind of country is this?” Power asked. America’s team gave him his answer. Power batted .330 and drove in 109 runs for the New York Yankees’ AAA team in 1952, but the parent club did not promote him. The next year, Power won the American Association batting title with his .349 average but still didn’t get called up. Knowing that Power’s stylish play and his relationship with a white woman (whom he would soon marry) might ruffle the team’s staid fan base, Yankees general manager George Weiss said Power wasn’t the “right kind” of black man to integrate the Yankees. The team’s traveling secretary Bill McCorry was more blunt: “No nigger will have a berth on any train I’m running.” Yankee president Dan Topping tried to justify the team’s decision by labeling Power a “poor fielder.” Once Power finally did get a crack at the big leagues after the Yankees traded him to the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954, the infielder went on to win seven Gold Gloves, and he could have won more had the award been introduced prior to 1958. Baseball culture reflected American society’s prejudice.

  Minnie Miñoso had modeled a means of survival when he became the first dark-skinned Latino in the major leagues in 1949. “They used to call me terrible things,” Miñoso said. “I had to listen and laugh, even though I was crying inside. But never did I let them see it bothered me.” Marichal adopted the same attitude. “I took it because I wanted to be a baseball player,” he said. “I promised my mother that I was going to be a baseball player. I didn’t want to go back home and hear her say, ‘You failed. Your dream didn’t come true.’” So, like Jackie Robinson and Minnie Miñoso before him, Marichal learned to turn the other cheek and draw upon his competitive nature to survive as a ballplayer in a hostile environment.

  In his debut for the Michigan City White Caps on May 5, 1958, Marichal had to deal with climate shock. Temperatures dropped below 40 degrees. He didn’t do poorly for a young man used to the Caribbean sun, giving up eight hits and three earned runs while striking out six batters in seven and a third innings of a 10–6 loss, but he was more convincing five days later with a seven-hit, eleven-strikeout shutout over Dubuque. From late May through early August, Marichal was the hottest pitcher in professional baseball, posting a 17–2 record and a 1.43 ERA. During one stretch the sidearmer pitched nearly 40 consecutive innings without allowing an earned run. By the end of the season, he had tallied a league-record 24 complete games in 28 starts (demonstrating the durability that would mark his career), won 21 games, and recorded a 1.87 ERA. Employing the impeccable control that Viruta had emphasized, he averaged better than a strikeout an inning (246 in 245) and walked only 50 batters. His performance earned him the Midwest League’s Most Valuable Player honors.

  Unfortunately, the only time Marichal felt comfortable that summer was on the mound, particularly with two strikes on a batter. He did not know enough English to ask for a glass of water. In restaurants he glanced at other customers’ plates for a dish that looked good and ordered by pointing to it. The inability to communicate made him feel disorientated and isolated in America. So did having to live in a boarding house in the colored neighborhood. He had brought with him a record player and some old 78s, which he listened to with the handful of other Latin White Caps such as Rene Marte, his battery mate, but after a while the merengue music made him too homesick. He gave away the records. At times the pain of being away from his family and his country became so strong that he considered giving up and going home. But he wanted his mother to hear his name on the radio, and he figured he could make more money for his family by staying with baseball. At the time, he was sending home a third of his $300 monthly wages to Doña Natividad. He prayed for the strength to persevere.

  Juan survived his first summer away from home and returned to play winter ball for Los Leones del Escogido, the team that Ramfis Trujillo favored, and went 8–3. The following spring, the Giants promoted him to their Class A team in Springfield, Massachusetts, which also meant a pay raise to $450 a month. With only eight teams in the National League at the time, the competition was strong at the Class A level. Marichal rose to the challenge under the tutelage of Springfield manager Andy Gilbert, who had collected one hit in the major leagues in a very brief career as a Red Sox center fielder. It also helped to have Manny Mota and Matty Alou on the team. The three Dominicans shared an apartment in Springfield.

  Even in the Northeast, Juan had to endure the ignorance underlying the prejudice in America and its national pastime. When Dewey Griggs, the Milwaukee Braves scout who had signed Hank Aaron, watched Marichal pitch in Springfield that summer, he was impressed by the young pitcher’s performance, noting he “should go all the way.” He also wrote on his scouting report that Marichal was “colored,” and “Cuban or Puerto Rican.” Juan ran to the mound to start each inning and battled batters, yet Griggs recorded as a weakness “possibly to
o easy going,” a perception perhaps derived from the stereotype of laid-back Latinos.

  Gilbert employed economics to motivate his players. He fined batters for not moving along runners and pitchers for giving up hits on 0–2 counts. Marichal paid his share. To avoid being charged one dollar, he began a habit he carried into the majors of running to and from the mound. More significantly, Gilbert taught Juan the slider and changeup, which he added to his arsenal. He also worked on the 21-year-old’s confidence. “I learned to have courage and not to fear any hitter,” Juan said. “He always told me I could get anybody out.”

  Marichal turned in another MVP performance, finishing 23 of the 32 games he started, winning more games (18) than any other Eastern League pitcher, striking out four times as many batters as he walked (208 to 47) in 271 innings, and posting a 2.39 ERA. He won an additional two playoff games, as he had the year before. “He [Gilbert] taught me more about pitching than I had dreamed it was possible to learn,” Juan said.

  Gilbert’s most significant influence transformed Juan’s delivery into what became his signature windup. Toward the end of the season, the manager asked Juan why he threw sidearm. Marichal told him about Bombo Ramos. “You’re too young to throw sidearm like that,” Gilbert said. At first Juan was reluctant to change because he had been successful throwing sidearm, but Gilbert convinced him that throwing overhand would make him a “much, much better pitcher against left-handed batters.” When Marichal first tried the new overhand delivery, his pitches came in high. “Kick higher with your leg,” Gilbert instructed. “That will bring the ball down, because the body force will be coming down as you release it.” Juan practiced the new motion dutifully, though he was not ready to use it in a game that season. “I had to make the change through repetition,” he explained in his memoir Juan Marichal: My Journey from the Dominican Republic to Cooperstown. “But I fell in love with the style and saw that I could throw more pitches and thought I would be more effective.”

  He went home after the season and worked on the windup with the Escogido team. It did prove effective. Marichal won four, lost two, and earned the nickname El Rey de Ponche, “the King of the Strikeout.” Back at spring training in 1960 with the Giants in Phoenix, the team had him throwing batting practice every day to hone his new overhand style. In the days before protective screens for BP pitchers, one of the hitters drilled a ball back up the middle that struck Juan in the right testicle.* He crumpled in pain. He spent the next three days in the hospital with a bag of ice tucked between his thighs. After nearly a week the Giants sent him back to the minor league camp in Sanford, Florida, but he could not pitch for a month.

  * That day, because of a rash on his groin, he was not wearing a protective cup. He also was not expecting to pitch batting practice, but when summoned to do so, he was too timid to request time to strap on his cup.

  The Giants eventually assigned Marichal to their AAA Tacoma team in the Pacific Coast League, where he was paid $700 a month. At first Tacoma manager John Davis complained that Marichal was inadvertently tipping off pitches, but the director of player development, Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell, told Davis, “Leave him alone until he gets to the big leagues.”

  Meanwhile, the racist attitudes Marichal had encountered in Sanford, Michigan City, and elsewhere softened on the Pacific Coast. “It was so different,” he writes in My Journey. “Those people in Tacoma cared about you as a human being.”

  The Tacoma press nicknamed him “Laughing Boy” because it seemed he was always smiling, never complaining. Despite jumping two levels, from Single- to Triple-A ball, Marichal continued his winning ways in the Pacific Coast League. On July 10, 1960, Marichal beat the Sacramento Bees, a victory that improved his record to 11–5 with a 3.11 ERA. He had completed 11 of his 18 starts, struck out 121 batters while walking only 34 in 139 innings, and earned a spot in the AAA All-Star Game. He was excited to appear in the game and to receive the expensive watch given to each player. But around midnight in Sacramento, the Giants called. In his first major move as the Giants manager, Tom Sheehan, who had replaced Bill Rigney, summoned Marichal to join the team’s starting rotation. Though disappointed that he wouldn’t get his watch, Juan was delighted to be promoted to the big leagues. The next day, the team’s trainer drove him from Sacramento to San Francisco.

  In two and a half seasons of minor league ball, Marichal had struck out 575 batters and garnered a winning percentage of .658 (with a 50–26 record) and an ERA of 2.35. More significantly, he had demonstrated the control that would make him legendary. Over 655 innings he had walked only 131 batters, an average of 1.80 bases on balls per nine-inning game. It remains rare to find major league pitchers with that kind of control, let alone a young minor league pitcher.

  Felipe Alou, Marichal’s childhood friend, and Orlando Cepeda, who in 1958 became the first Latin American player to win Rookie of the Year honors, welcomed Marichal in español when he entered the Giants clubhouse for the first time. They shook his hand and brought him over to meet Willie Mays, whom Marichal had first seen play three years earlier on the day he had signed his professional contract. “I thought I was in heaven because I dreamed for so many years to be in the major leagues, and I was shaking the hand of the best player in the game,” Marichal recalled. “I thought it was God in front of me.” He wrote home to his mother about all of the players he had met, mentioning each by name. “I felt so beautiful and happy because I proved to her that I was going to be a baseball player,” he said. Now all he had to do was prove himself fit to fulfill the dream.

  Alou, Cepeda, and Marichal were part of the new wave of dark-skinned Latin Americans playing baseball in the United States. As a boy who idolized Tetelo Vargas, the Dominican Republic’s best ballplayer of the 1930s, Marichal had not thought it possible for someone like himself to play in the major leagues because Vargas —nicknamed “the Dominican Deer” for his fantastic speed (legend had it he once beat Jesse Owens in a sprint) and a great hitter with a golden arm who starred for teams in the Dominican, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Canada, and the Negro Leagues—was unable to crack the color barrier in the United States. The major leagues’ unwritten segregation policy blocked others, like the truly multitooled Cuban Martin Dihigo, who threw no-hitters in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela and won three home run titles playing for the Homestead Grays in the United States, and his countryman Jose Mendez, who pitched the Kansas City Monarchs to three straight World’s Colored Championships (1923–25). “We can’t help thinking what a sensation Mendez would be if it was not for his color,” Cincinnati baseball writer W. A. Phelon observed in 1908. “But, alas, that is a handicap he can’t outgrow.”

  Not long after Phelon’s observation about Mendez’s “handicap,” the Cincinnati ball club tested the limits of the color spectrum with two Cuban players, outfielders Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida. Their signing in April 1911 was met with the headline Baseball to Lower Color Line? Reds Signing Two Cuban Players Is Step toward Letting in the Negro. In response to complaints about the two men’s darker complexions, the Reds management issued a press release that described Marsans and Almeida as “two of the purest bars of Castilian soap ever floated to these shores.” Fellow Cuban Dolf Luque, who broke in with the Boston Braves in 1914 and led the National League with victories (27), winning percentage (.771), ERA (1.93), and shutouts (six) for the Reds in 1923, was called a “Cuban nigger.”

  In 1947 Jackie Robinson not only integrated major league baseball for African Americans but opened the door for dark-skinned Latinos. Saturnino Orestes Armas “Minnie” Miñoso Arrieta was the first black Latin player to follow in Robinson’s footsteps when the Cuban leftfielder debuted for the Indians in 1949. His early success (by 1951 he was an All-Star) inspired teams to scout for prospects in Latin America and laid the pipeline to the major leagues. Prior to 1950 only 54 Latin players had graced the major leagues’ fields, dating back to the Cuban Esteban Bellan w
ith the Troy Haymakers in 1871; in the ’50s 69 Latinos joined the ranks. Orlando Cepeda, the Puerto Rican who joined the Giants in 1958, said Miñoso was “to Latin ballplayers what Jackie is to black ballplayers. Minnie is the one who made it possible for all us Latins.”

  Juan Marichal took note, especially when Ozzie Virgil debuted with the Giants in 1956, becoming the first Dominican to make a big league team. Until Virgil’s breakthrough, Juan had dreamed of pitching for his national team, the highest honor he thought he could achieve. Now, he was about to realize the new, bigger dream. He finally had his chance.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Own Little Bailiwick

  Coming up Interstate 71, about an hour and a half from Columbus, Ohio, you see a sign off exit 186 that welcomes visitors to “the world headquarters of nice people.” That sign wasn’t there when John Roseboro Jr. grew up in Ashland, in the 1930s and ’40s, but the nice people were. His family was one of only a handful of colored families in the city of 11,141 residents, yet Ashland was relatively free of the racial prejudice that haunted other areas of the country. “The Klan had been in Ashland, but since there weren’t any blacks, they had to pick on the Catholics and Jews,” said Joe Mason, a longtime resident who grew up with Roseboro. “The Klan had disappeared in that area by the 1930s.” Niceness didn’t necessarily translate into cultural sensitivity.

  The other kids liked Johnny, though he was afraid they wouldn’t. He wet the bed until the third grade and slouched in shame at school, afraid he smelled bad. He did the things the other boys did: took swimming lessons at the Y, learned to tie knots in the Boy Scouts, built tree forts in the woods near his house, rode his bike around town, and played pickup ball. He made several friends but remained shy and happy by himself. Though he felt accepted by them—“It didn’t seem to matter that my friends were white and I was black,” he wrote in his autobiography, Glory Days with the Dodgers—there were painful reminders that his skin color marked him as different. Like the time his Boy Scout troop pedaled their bikes to a camp miles outside of town and the camp director turned away Roseboro. Johnny had to pedal back by himself. When his scoutmaster found out, he pulled the entire troop out of the camp, but the situation made young John acutely aware of his otherness.