Two days after exchanging vows, Juan and his new bride returned to Phoenix. Once the season started, they shared a house in San Francisco with Maria and Felipe Alou. In a magazine piece typical of the day, Sport reported an interview with Marichal: “‘I ask maself that springtime how I can repay the Skeeper,’ Juan was recalling not long ago. ‘Then I have it! I pitch him one hellofa sonofabuck opening day game!’” Though Juan did not speak with that caricatured simplicity, he did pitch one helluva Opening Day game on April 10, given that honor as the Giants’ top starter. He struck out Hank Aaron three times and shut out the Braves before 39,177 fans at Candlestick. He also singled, doubled, scored twice, and drove in two runs in the 6–0 victory.
Juan’s success continued throughout the 1962 season. Pitching in front of a team loaded with talent—Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda (all future Hall of Famers), Jim Davenport and Felipe Alou (All-Stars in 1962)—Juan won 18 games, exactly half of his starts, and pitched 18 complete games. Now 24 years old, he began to fulfill the potential he had flashed in his first three games of 1960.
His success won him a berth on the National League squad for the 1962 All-Star Games.* Marichal earned the win in the first game with two shutout innings.* Being in the clubhouse with established greats like Clemente, Aaron, and Stan Musial thrilled him. He had arrived among the ranks of the game’s elite players. “It made me so happy and proud to be one of the players selected to play in that All-Star Game,” Juan said.
* From 1959 through 1962, Major League Baseball hosted two All-Star Games each year. In 1962 they played the first on July 10 at D. C. Stadium, the second on July 30 at Wrigley Field.
* That made him the first Latin American pitcher to win an All-Star Game.
He was beginning to master the art of changing speeds and locations with his pitches. He had two different speeds for his fastball and two for his curve, which he mixed with his changeup, slider, and screwball. Sometimes he delivered the pitches overhand, sometimes sidearm. He did not rely on one pitch when in trouble but was willing to select from his vast assortment the right pitch for the situation in the location he thought best. He kept batters guessing and off-balance, never quite sure what to expect where. “That’s what it’s all about, going against the batter like a chess game,” Marichal said. “The secret of pitching is not so much the kind of pitch as it is moving the ball. You should know where you want to pitch as much as what you want to.”
Marichal was just as likely to deliver a pitch sidearm as he was overhand or three-quarters, but the pundits entertained themselves with descriptions of his high leg-kick motion. He thrust his left foot over his head, leaning back so that the knuckles of his hand holding the ball nearly scraped the dirt behind his right foot, and whirled to unleash his throw, looking like he might topple over with his follow-through. “When he winds up, it’s like a helicopter getting ready for takeoff,” Furman Bisher wrote in the Atlanta Journal. “When it is working right, the high kick, seen by the hitter, is something like a pinwheel viewed from the side,” coauthor Charles Einstein wrote in Marichal’s first autobiography. “First the leg comes over the top, then the glove, then the pitching hand, finally the ball.” Sandy Grady of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin wrote that Marichal “looks like a double-jointed drum majorette trying to pick up a dropped baton.” Roger Angell, the New Yorker’s designated baseball scribe, wrote that Marichal looked “like some enormous and dangerous farm implement.”
What mattered most was that the motion was effective and had made Juan a better pitcher, as Andy Gilbert had convinced him it would. “If his control wasn’t great, the leg kick would have been useless,” said Steve Stone, who would win the American League Cy Young Award in 1980. “It might have helped with his deception, but the overwhelming stuff and control were what set him apart.”
Juan was also becoming more comfortable in the clubhouse. The young man who had been nicknamed “Laughing Boy” back in Tacoma had a penchant for practical jokes. He hid teammates’ car keys or encouraged them to take a whiff of a new cologne that turned out to be a fluid with an awful stench. He playfully snapped a towel at teammates coming out of the shower. He also discovered that he could make the big man Willie McCovey jump like a startled cat with a well-placed firecracker under his chair.
On Opening Day of 1962, the Braves’ Joe Torre hit a ball back up the middle that struck Marichal on the right leg. It hurt so badly that Juan couldn’t put weight on it and had to alter his windup. But he stayed in the game to complete his shutout victory. Despite his willingness to play through pain—or maybe because of it—Marichal did not garner sympathy from Giants management, particularly Alvin Dark, for his ailments. When the team was in Pittsburgh, Juan’s face became inflamed, so he went to a doctor who told him he had tonsillitis. After Juan explained that he had already had his tonsils removed years ago, the doctor responded that he couldn’t treat him. Dark’s cure was to have Marichal pitch in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee despite Juan feeling miserable. Back in San Francisco, a doctor properly diagnosed him with mumps and prescribed complete rest.
In early September Juan jammed his right foot covering first base and broke a bone. He had to be carried off the field and taken to the hospital. His foot swelled up, but X-rays did not show the fracture. Juan knew something was wrong. His foot throbbed, and even as it healed there was a rise on the instep.* He could not play for more than three weeks. On the final Saturday of the season, with the Giants in a tight pennant race, Dark called upon Marichal to start. Juan felt the manager was making him pitch when he wasn’t healthy; Dark rationalized that the X-ray had shown no fracture. By the fifth inning it was clear the foot was not ready. Marichal had allowed four runs, and Dark pulled him. “He said very little, but the look in his eye told me that he thought I was trying to quit under pressure,” Juan wrote in A Pitcher’s Story. After the game the team’s Latin players clustered around Juan’s locker; they believed Dark could have caused Marichal permanent damage by making him pitch, and accused the manager with angry looks.
* An X-ray four years and 96 victories later would finally reveal the break in his foot.
“I found Alvin Dark to be a hard man to understand because of the way he would change,” Marichal wrote in A Pitcher’s Story. “At times he was good-natured and understanding.” Like when he let Juan leave spring training to marry Alma. “Then he would change.” And become cold and rigid with his players, like he was earlier that summer when he thought his starters had gone soft, so he closed the bullpen and forced them to go the distance, with Marichal the first involuntary volunteer.
Dark had trouble dealing with his Latin players. A college football All-American at LSU, former National League shortstop for 14 seasons, and Christian from the Bible Belt state of Alabama, Dark was perhaps representative of many Americans who simply did not understand the vast differences between American and Latin cultures. He barred the Latinos from speaking Spanish in the clubhouse and dugout. Though other managers had done the same with the intent to overcome cultural divisions, the move was deeply resented by players who felt the policy stripped them of an integral part of their identity and imposed a false means of communication with one another, making the three Alou brothers, for example, speak to one another in English. “If I am going to talk to Felipe Alou, whom I have known most of my life from the Dominican, we are going to speak Spanish,” Marichal wrote. “I think he [Dark] just felt we had too many Latins on the team and he felt left out when we were talking.” Dark also banished music, an edict seemingly directed at Orlando Cepeda, the man they called “Cha Cha.” Dark was prone to violent outbursts. After a loss that season in St. Louis when he didn’t think Cepeda was hustling, the manager kicked over the clubhouse buffet table, which insulted the Latinos, who believed it was a sin to waste food when so many people went hungry. Felipe Alou picked up some of the food Dark had thrown on the floor, glaring at the manager in the eyes, and ate it,
a gesture rife with symbolism.
The Giants lost the game in Houston that Marichal pitched on his bum foot but managed to defeat the Dodgers in a three-game playoff to capture the National League pennant. Juan pitched the deciding game, his foot still in pain, and gave up three runs in seven innings. The Giants rallied to win the game and the pennant even though they had trailed the Dodgers by four games with only seven left to play in the regular season. “It was God’s will,” Marichal said matter-of-factly.
The Giants had lost two of the first three World Series games to the Yankees when Marichal started Game Four in New York. Through four innings he had given up only two hits, struck out four (including Mickey Mantle twice), and not allowed a run. He felt strong, confident, detecting no serious trouble from his previously injured foot. He batted in the top of the fifth with runners on first and third, no outs. Juan got the bunt sign, but the first two pitches from Whitey Ford were balls. He had the fake bunt sign for the next three pitches, which ran the count to 3–2. Then Dark surprised Marichal by calling for a two-strike suicide squeeze, which Juan considered “a stupid play” in the situation. Juan knew he had to make contact, even when Ford’s pitch veered inside and low. The ball struck the index finger of his right hand, his pitching hand, which immediately started to swell. The umpire called him out for fouling off a third-strike bunt. Juan protested that the ball had hit his finger first but lost the argument. He threw his helmet in frustration. The Yankee Stadium crowd booed, not understanding his anger. His finger throbbed with a blood blister that would eventually push off the nail. His World Series debut ended abruptly.
The Giants held on to win, and the Yankees took the fifth game before the Series returned to San Francisco, where it rained for four days. A reporter asked Dark about Juan’s finger. “Marichal won’t pitch again,” Dark said. “I don’t care how long it rains. Marichal won’t pitch.”
One writer commented, “I’ve never in my life heard a manager throw one of his players to the wolves the way Dark did with that crack.”
Dark’s crack stung Juan. It “left the impression with them [the reporters]—and me—that he thought I did not wish to pitch, and that with an attitude like that he didn’t want me pitching,” Marichal wrote in A Pitcher’s Story. “It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that he indicated this line of thinking about me.” Juan had not expected to start again because the rain gave the team’s two top starters, Billy Pierce and Jack Sanford, the rest they needed, but he would have pitched in relief if his finger allowed him to. Marichal chafed at the challenge to his competitive spirit—which simmered intensely—and the seeming condescension to the stereotype that Latins quit when behind.
The Yankees ended up winning in seven games. Juan figured that he would have another chance to play in the World Series with the great team that the Giants had. But that would not happen, making Dark’s call for the suicide squeeze that ended with Marichal’s bruised finger an even bigger disappointment, though Juan would not realize that until years later.
When Juan returned to the Dominican Republic, he found conditions still unsteady, the country under civilian junta rule with elections scheduled toward the end of the year. In November Juan, Felipe Alou, and Cardinals second baseman Julian Javier joined their country’s team in a seven-game series against a Cuban All-Star squad in Santo Domingo. Ford Frick, Major League Baseball commissioner, had instituted a ban on players participating in such contests unless they had his permission, which he did not grant for the seven-game interisland series. Frick’s stance smacked of the colonialist attitudes practiced by other US businesses involved in the islands. But Marichal didn’t believe he needed the foreign commissioner’s permission to represent his country. Besides, the Dominican’s top players faced danger beyond that of disciplinary action from the league or even that of disappointing the ruling junta. “If we didn’t play, there would have been a revolt right there on the spot, and we would have been the prime targets,” Felipe Alou said.
Frick fined each of the players $250 and threatened by telegram to bar them from spring training if they didn’t pay. Alou responded with an article in Sport magazine calling for a Major League Baseball representative for Latin players who could interpret the cultural and political nuances that the commissioner so obviously misunderstood. Frick did not take him up on the suggestion but instead locked him out of spring training until he paid his fine. Alou and Marichal—who had also stated he would not pay the fine on principle—now felt they had no option other than to comply if they wanted to play the ’63 season in the United States.*
* Frick’s successor, William Eckert, did appoint Bobby Maduro, former owner of the Havana Sugar Kings, as an ambassador for Latin players, but Maduro did little to improve conditions. By the 1970s the position was abolished.
Juan reported to spring training shortly after Juan Bosch Ganio, a leftist scholar and author of short realistic fiction, assumed the Dominican office of the president he had won in the December election. But Bosch’s insistence on the separation of church and state alienated the powerful Roman Catholic Church, and his policy on land reform threatened the elite class. He also aggravated the US government by awarding public contracts to Europeans. His tenure would not last through the Giants’ baseball season; the right wing backed a military coup that deposed Bosch in September.
Marichal held out for a higher contract until March 13, longer than any other Giant had until that point, finally signing for $24,000, and proved himself worth every penny. In the 1963 season Juan went from good to brilliant. He won 25 games, or 76 percent of his 33 decisions. He allowed only 2.41 earned runs per nine innings. He struck out 248 batters while walking only 61 in 321.1 innings, the best ratio in the majors. Certainly Marichal’s numbers—like those of every pitcher—benefited from the expansion of the strike zone from the “top of the knees to the armpits” to the “bottom of the knees to top of the shoulder,” a change that curbed home run output and stifled batting averages league-wide by 16 points. Regardless of the size of the strike zone, he pitched two of the most memorable games of his career that summer.
On June 15, before the Giants played the Houston Colt .45s at Candlestick Park, Juan told leftfielder Willie McCovey that he should play deeper than he normally did. Marichal planned to alter his windup because Houston had hit him pretty hard the last several times he faced them. McCovey thought Marichal was nuts to tinker with what had worked—Juan had won his last five starts—but did as he was told. It paid off in the seventh inning when Houston’s cleanup hitter, Carl Warwick, lifted a long drive that McCovey managed to haul in at his limit beneath the left field screen. The catch kept Houston from recording its first hit. The game remained a scoreless tie and tense affair until the Giants scored a solitary run in the bottom of the eighth. Marichal had worked eight innings with no margin for error. Only four batters managed to hit balls out of the infield, and all were caught. Marichal walked two and struck out five but needed only 89 pitches to become the first Latino to pitch a no-hitter.
Juan saved his best game for 17 days later. In perhaps the greatest pitching duel ever, Marichal battled the Milwaukee Braves’ future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn through 15 scoreless innings on July 2 at Candlestick. Dark had wanted to take Marichal out in the 9th, 12th, and 13th innings, but he insisted on staying. Marichal, then 25, pointed to the 42-year-old Spahn in the Braves dugout and told his manager, “I am not going to come out of this game as long as that old man is still pitching.” Marichal was painting a masterpiece, despite throwing more than two games’ worth of pitches, and he wanted to finish the job. His teammates left him alone on the bench, and he ran to and from the mound each inning. By the 16th Marichal and Spahn had been pitching four hours without either allowing a run. After Marichal set down the Braves, he told Willie Mays, “This is going to be the last inning for me.” Mays responded, “Don’t worry. I’m going to win this game for you.” Sure enough, Mays knocked Spa
hn’s first pitch in the bottom half of the 16th out of the park.
Marichal had pitched 16 innings, thrown 227 pitches, and shut out the Braves on eight hits. In these days of careful pitch counts and relief specialists, it is unlikely that anyone will ever better his remarkable performance. Sportswriter Jim Kaplan authored an entire book about the game, aptly entitling it The Greatest Game Ever Pitched. That’s how good Juan was in 1963.
Juan seized whatever advantage he could over batters. He used the cold weather in Candlestick, when contact with the bat on the ball stung the hands, to gain an edge. “I liked it when a pitch hurt the batter’s hands at the start of the game,” he wrote in My Journey. “I tried to get their hands to sting right from the beginning. Then they wouldn’t want to go back and hit.”
He also knew the value of an inside pitch and did not hesitate to use it. “He could burn the letters off the chest of your uniform with ‘message pitches’ that didn’t require translations,” wrote Bob Stevens, the San Francisco Chronicle’s beat writer for the Giants.
The message sometimes sent was Don’t mess with my teammates. In Marichal’s next start after his 16-inning duel with Spahn, the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson hit the Giants’ rookie Jim Ray Hart with a pitch that sent Hart to the hospital with a broken shoulder blade. “He [Gibson] played fiercely,” Marichal wrote in My Journey. “They called Gibson ‘The Head Hunter’ and he loved to be called that. He loved that name. He wasn’t trying to hurt the batters, but he wanted to make them nervous. It was okay with him if they thought of him like that. That was to his advantage.” That was the way it was done then, and Marichal understood it. So when Gibson took his turn at the plate, Marichal delivered a message close to Gibson’s head. Plate umpire Al Barlick stepped in front of the plate and waved his finger to impose the requisite $50 fine for a deliberate beaning attempt. “He’ll get it again!” Juan shouted. Dark and catcher Ed Bailey had to restrain Marichal to keep him from being ejected.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 6