The prejudice could eclipse opportunity. Also, seeking a better life than their native poverty—common to many of the Latin prospects—and not understanding English exposed them to exploitation. When the major league teams swooped into places like the Dominican Republic to harvest talent in the ’50s, “they never saw Latin American baseball as anything but a backwater and believed they were doing the poor people a favor by giving them an opportunity to play ball in the major leagues—an opportunity for which most North Americans would have given anything, and one that the Dominicans welcomed just as eagerly,” Alan Klein writes in Sugarball. Joe Cambria, the Washington Senators’ only official scout, who reportedly discovered 400 Cuban prospects, often signed them to blank contracts and filled in the salary amounts later. The prevailing belief among Latinos was that they were paid less than white American players of equal ability. “Baseball is a business, a 100 percent capitalist business, and if the opportunity is there for exploitation, there will be exploitation,” said Felipe Alou, who played 17 years in the majors and managed in the bigs another 14.
Just like African-American ballplayers in the post–Jackie Robinson era, dark-skinned Latin players had to work harder than their Caucasian counterparts to make teams and get the recognition they deserved. Roberto Clemente, who described his position in the United States as being a double minority, was discouraged that he got overlooked for his accomplishments, ranking only eighth in the MVP voting in 1960 after batting .314 for the season and helping his team win the World Series; he was overshadowed in the local papers by white teammates Dick Groat and Ralph Hoak. “Roberto was as valuable as either of them,” said Bill Mazeroski, the Pirate who hit the home run that won the Series.
For the dark-skinned Latino, the prejudice carried a double edge: He was derided as an “idiot nigger,” dismissed first for the color of his skin, then for his perceived stupidity if he didn’t speak English and had difficulty reading foreign social cues. “While Latins and American blacks confront racism together, Latins alone deal with the additional trauma of acculturation,” notes historian Samuel Regalado in Viva Baseball! Latin Major Leaguers and Their Special Hunger. In a variation on its exploitation, Major League Baseball seemed to regard the Latin players as nothing more than seasonal migrant workers. “The baseball establishment has always treated Latin Americans as strangers and has tried to keep them at arm’s length,” remarked Happy Chandler, who was the commissioner when Robinson debuted in 1947. That stance left the players resigned to a permanent status as outsiders. “One fact that Latins must never forget is that as ballplayers, we were, are, and always will be foreigners in America and cannot hope that we will ever be totally accepted,” Alou said. Tony Oliva, a dark-skinned Cuban who would win three American League batting titles with the Twins from 1964 to1976, remarked, “We are like some stray dog.”
Not surprisingly, Latin players were rarely able to cash in on endorsement deals. Baseball historian Jules Tygiel, author of Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, observed in 1996, “While it’s probably not what it was years ago, the American players, both black and white, get more endorsements and the fans relate to them more than the Hispanic players.” After he had established himself as one of the game’s superstars but only managed to land a radio spot plugging apple juice, Marichal said in 1964, “I think there is a prejudice against those of us from other countries. It isn’t a racial thing, so much. It is more that we are strange to you and even among those who are in the game, there is a feeling we are different. We do not get so many opportunities, I think, as we should.”
When he did get the opportunities, the spots were more demeaning than lucrative, such as one promoting apple juice for a San Francisco company that made him sound like a Ricky Ricardo knockoff. “Where I come from, I do not know about apple juice,” Marichal said on the radio. “No, it is strange to me. But here I learn to dreenk it and now I dreenk it every day. It makes me feel VERY good. My arm, it makes it stronger. Thees is what it do for me! I am glad to learn to dreenk apple juice.”
Such were the pejorative attitudes of America and the conditions of Major League Baseball when Marichal made his debut in July 1960. He was confronted by the range of stereotypes about Latin players—that they didn’t hustle, didn’t mind losing, quit when behind, feigned injuries, and, perhaps most damaging, were hot-blooded, quick-tempered types prone to violence. The latter was an assumption built upon unfortunate occurrences, beginning with Dolf Luque in 1922. “The first great Latin pitcher, Dolf Luque of the Cincinnati Reds, had authored the lasting stereotype when he charged from the mound in 1922 to hit Casey Stengel on the New York Giants bench in the old Crosley Field,” Peter C. Bjarkman writes in The Elysian Fields Quarterly. “It had taken a host of officers to subdue the enraged bat-wielding Luque once he charged back upon the diamond after an initial ejection from the field of play.” That led many Americans to conclude, That’s just the way they are.
Luque birthed a stereotype unfortunately reinforced by further incidents. The Giants’ Puerto Rican pitcher Ruben Gomez gained notoriety as the “beanball king” of the 1950s. In a July 1956 game, Milwaukee Braves slugger Joe Adcock approached the mound after Gomez hit him on the wrist with a pitch. Gomez fired the ball at Adcock, then raced off the field with the slugger in pursuit. Gomez returned to the Giants dugout brandishing a switchblade or an ice pick, depending on who tells the story. Two years later, after Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh ordered his pitcher to throw at Gomez, the rookie Orlando Cepeda, Gomez’s teammate and countryman, went after Murtaugh with a bat. In both situations, the players were stopped by teammates before they could strike their targets, but they inflicted a wound upon the image of the Latin ballplayer. “They call us hot-tempered and say that we don’t play under control—that we are too emotional,” Marichal later said. “But there are a lot of American players that do the same. It’s part of the game. It’s the excitement that makes you act like that.”*
* In 1955 Gomez also had a fistfight with Willie Mays when they played winter ball in Puerto Rico. Before a game in San Juan, Mays decked Gomez with a right.
Juan started 11 games for the Giants that summer of 1960. After winning his first three games, he went 3–2 with a 2.66 ERA during the remainder of the season. He continued to pitch with remarkable control in his inaugural year, walking only 28 batters in 81.1 innings. He did not prove to be the miracle the Giants needed—the team finished 16 games back, in fifth place—but his success endeared him to the Dominicans who listened to his games broadcast over the radio. He returned to the Dominican Republic that fall a hero. In a place where baseball was a source of national pride, he had served his countrymen well. He was a popular starter for the Escogido nueve that winter.
After his call-up, Juan had experienced back pain that flared so severely at times he had to sleep on the floor. Giants manager Tom Sheehan sent him to see specialists in several cities, but none was able to diagnosis the source of Marichal’s pain. It eventually subsided, though it marked the beginning of a variety of strange ailments that would trouble Marichal throughout his career—and not all of his managers would be as sympathetic as Sheehan.
Marichal began the 1961 campaign as a regular in the Giants starting rotation. He did not dominate that season as he had the first three games the previous summer. The 23-year-old pitcher still had plenty to learn about pitching to hitters like Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente. He finished a third of his 27 starts, going 13–10 with a 3.89 ERA. He missed seven starts because his back again troubled him. His season ended on September 9, when the Dodgers’ Duke Snider accidentally spiked him in the heel while Marichal was covering first base and nearly tore Juan’s Achilles tendon. His heel felt strong enough to pitch again, but Alvin Dark, who took over as the Giants manager that season, decided to sit him with San Francisco out of the pennant race once again. “This gave Dark an excuse not only to keep me out for the rest of the year but to insis
t that I do no pitching in the Dominican winter league,” Marichal wrote in his first memoir, A Pitcher’s Story. Though Marichal was not one to speak out against his managers, he insinuated his frustration with Dark’s mandate. Dark and Larry Jansen, the Giants pitching coach, thought pitching the previous winter had worn out Marichal and accounted for his modest performance in 1961. Marichal’s relationship with Dark would be turbulent over the next three years.
During the ’61 season Felipe Alou set up his brother Matty, Marichal, and Andre Rogers, a dark-skinned infielder from the Bahamas, in a boarding house next door to where Felipe stayed with his wife. They lived with Blanche Johnson and her husband. Blanche, a no-nonsense African-American woman, told the young men, who were to her the children she never had, “You want to make good in this country, you learn to speak English.” She made them practice their pronunciation in the mornings, and when she caught Juan and Matty speaking Spanish, she chased them with a dishtowel or mop. The two men grew fond of her and called her “Mama.” Juan worked diligently with the English-Spanish dictionary Mama gave him and improved his English slowly.
Juan lived clean. He recited a Psalm at night and in the morning. He did not go out drinking or carousing with teammates. Instead, he sought out Catholic churches on the road to attend Sunday Mass. He went to bed early the night before he pitched. In San Francisco he sometimes ate meals next door prepared by Felipe’s wife, Maria. They also found a restaurant on Fillmore Street that served a fish that they were able to order back home. Juan took comfort in the familiar food.
But he and his Dominican teammates had other preoccupations that season. Once outside of his home country, Juan had started hearing stories that challenged the national fable of Rafael Trujillo as the Dominican savior. Juan learned about Trujillo’s secret police force that imprisoned, tortured, and killed political opponents and critics, stories that the Trujillo-controlled newspapers in the Dominican Republic did not tell about El Jefe.* “This was all completely new to me,” Marichal wrote in My Journey. “We never talked about such things in the Dominican.” The US government had backed Trujillo because of his anticommunist stance,* but President Dwight Eisenhower became disillusioned with Trujillo after he tried to bump off his critic, Venezuelan president Romulo Betancourt.* Eisenhower resolved to replace Trujillo with a more suitable puppet. That’s where the CIA came in.
* Time magazine reported in 1965: “Thousands of political opponents died in his [Trujillo’s] secret police dungeons, mysterious ‘auto accidents’ and ‘suicides.’ There were electric chairs for slow electrocution, another many-armed electrical device attached by tiny screws inserted into the skull, a rubber collar that could be tightened to sever a man’s head, plus nail extractors, scissors for castration, leather-thronged whips and small rubber hammers. P.A. systems in the torture rooms carried every blood-curdling scream to other prisoners waiting their turn.”
* Cordell Hall, US Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, defended the United States’ support of the tyrant: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”
* The attempt on June 24, 1960, wounded but did not kill Betancourt.
The United States had actively protected its economic interests—primarily sugar, fruit, and coffee—on the island of Hispaniola throughout the 20th century. With US troops already occupying Haiti and the Dominican government floundering financially, President Woodrow Wilson sent in US Marines on May 16, 1916. They stayed eight years, establishing an administration that some Dominicans refused to serve in and guerillas resisted. By the time the marines left in 1924, Rafael Trujillo had risen to head the Guardia Nacional that the Americans had created. Within six years El Jefe seized control of the country. Thus began the Era of Trujillo, when the dictator constructed hospitals, housing, schools, airports, and roads; steered the country out of debt; expanded the middle class; and amassed one of the largest personal fortunes in the world (estimated at $800 million)* through nearly absolute control of the country’s resources. Now in 1961 the CIA—which over the next several years would rub out Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Republic of the Congo; Abd al-Karim Qasim, prime minister of Iraq; and Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam—set its sights on the Dominican Republic’s undesirable dictator.
* Dominican-born author Junot Díaz sarcastically credits Trujillo with “the creation of the first modern kleptocracy.”
On May 30 the Giants played a doubleheader at Candlestick against the Cincinnati Reds. Marichal lost the second game after giving up five runs in four innings and being lifted for a pinch hitter. Afterward he heard the news: Trujillo had been assassinated. Late that evening, a group of men had ambushed El Jefe’s chauffeured Chevrolet on the dark road to San Cristobal, where Trujillo kept his young mistress, and shot him dead in a gunfight with their M1 carbines supplied by the CIA. The United States had failed spectacularly six weeks earlier in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but it had succeeded in its mission to take out Fidel Castro’s neighbor.
The scramble for power in the aftermath of Trujillo’s assassination plunged the country into a summer of uncertainty. Ramfis Trujillo, who had been living in Paris, returned to take charge and began executing rivals. Two of his uncles also returned from exile to challenge him. In November US President John Kennedy expressed his preference for the law professor Joaquín Balaguer to rule by sending naval ships loaded with 1,800 US Marines to cruise the Dominican coast. Ramfis fled and Balaguer, the figurehead president under El Jefe, assumed power. Throughout that summer of 1961, Juan tried to keep up with the situation by reading his country’s newspapers at the Dominican consulate in San Francisco. Constantly worried about his family’s safety, he still pitched every four days. Though not wanting to make excuses, his concerns kept him from performing at his best. “When you’re doing a job like that, you want your mind to be clear, but sometimes it’s impossible,” he said.
Juan had another preoccupation that summer: Alma Rosa Carvajal. She lived next door to the Alous in Santo Domingo. Juan had met her two years earlier, when Alma was just 15, and been stirred by her beauty. Her father, Jose, a pensioned army officer, had been close to Trujillo. Jose had been shot in the leg while fighting in Trujillo’s service and was good friends with El Jefe’s cousin, Lieutenant General Jose Garcia Trujillo, the secretary of armed forces from 1955 to 1960. El General, as they called him, was a passionate baseball fan who followed the major leagues and Cuban beisbol. When Juan was back in town, El General used to invite him over to talk baseball. “I was nervous, a young kid talking to a general while he would sit back and drink vodka,” Marichal remembered. But El General came to like Juan and so did Alma’s parents, whom he called Papa Jose and Doña Polonia.
One day after Juan had come home following the 1961 season, he visited Alma and found her holding a baby. She told him that the baby was hers and that she was married. Juan felt immediately jealous. “No, you’re not.”
“What difference does it make to you?” she challenged him.
That’s when he knew how much he loved her.
Not long afterward, El General spied the couple kissing in a car parked outside Alma’s house. He summoned Juan and Alma to face her parents. Juan burned with embarrassment. Needlessly, it turned out. Papa Jose and Doña Polonia gave the couple their blessing to marry. “Now you can kiss her,” El General said, smiling.
Juan left for spring training with plans to marry his sweetheart in October after the 1962 season ended. But the political situation worsened. A general strike forced Balaguer to share power with a Council of State that included two of Trujillo’s assassins. Two weeks and two days later, air force general Pedro Rodriguez Echavarria toppled the Council in a coup d’état. But Rodriguez lacked sufficient support, including that of the United States, to stay in power, and the Council of State resumed functioning until a national election could be held. The turmoil rocked Alma’s family because of its connecti
on to Trujillo. Extremists threatened to bomb their house. Alma was afraid to go out into the street. Juan feared for her safety from afar in Arizona.
Finally, he could no longer bear his worry. He asked Alvin Dark for permission to leave spring training, so that he could return to marry Alma and bring her to safety in the United States. Dark asked why she couldn’t come to the States to marry him. Marichal explained that she was still a minor, only 17. Dark consented, for which Marichal remained forever grateful, even in their strained days ahead. On March 5 Juan left spring training, and two days later a Catholic priest at the Church of San Juan Bosco in Santo Domingo pronounced Juan and Alma husband and wife. Under the headline Lovesick Marichal Leaves . . . to Marry, the San Francisco Examiner reported that it was “the first time anyone could recall a player leaving in the middle of camp and traveling 4,000 miles to get married.” The American press underestimated the emotional severity of the political situation for Marichal and his country.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 5