True, his competitive spirit could sometimes get the better of him. Another time, teammates had to hold him back when he wanted to charge Cincinnati pitcher Joe Nuxhall after he threw at a Giants batter.
But Juan also believed that the warnings and fines weren’t always meted out fairly. Some umpires, he said, were prejudiced against Latin players. “They throw at Willie [Mays] all the time and then I let them know they have to stop it,” he said. “Who gets fined? Me—not the guy who tried to hit Willie.”
Marichal squared off against Sandy Koufax for the first time on May 11 in Los Angeles. In the past when the Giants had played the Dodgers, the San Francisco manager had always pitted his ace against Los Angeles’ premier pitcher. In 1963 Marichal won that distinction. Koufax beat him 8–0 with a no-hitter. Two weeks later, Marichal beat Koufax 7–1 in the rematch in San Francisco, giving up only four hits. Still, as good as Juan was in 1963, Sandy was better. Both won 25 games and pitched no-hitters. Marichal lost eight games; Koufax lost only five. Koufax was the only pitcher in the majors to give up fewer than two runs a game (1.88 ERA); he fanned a major league–high 306 and walked only 58. He led the major leagues with 11 shutouts. He also won both of his starts in the World Series to help the Dodgers take the championship. Koufax was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player and was also the unanimous choice for the Cy Young Award.*
* Just one award was given to the best pitcher in the major leagues.
After working 321 innings that summer, Juan was exhausted when he returned home to the Dominican Republic in October, less than a month after Bosch had been ousted in the coup. Marichal would have liked another off-season rest, but his status had grown so large coming off his incredible season that he couldn’t refuse to play winter ball at home. He agreed to pitch again for Escogido.
When Los Leones traveled to Caracas for an inter-Caribbean series, Marichal heard that there were plans to kidnap him. He took the threat seriously because Venezuela had its own political turmoil at the time—the rise of communism in Cuba had shaken the region—and thugs had recently kidnapped a high-profile soccer player. The Venezuelan government assigned a permanent police escort that stayed with Marichal even when he did his business in the bathroom. But when he pitched he stood alone on the mound and flinched every time the home crowd fans let off a firecracker—which sounded to him like a pistol shot. The trip stressed him, which made what followed even more difficult.
Juan won seven games and lost only three, helping Los Leones make the playoffs, but along the way he grew frustrated with the Escogido owner, Maximo Hernandez Ortega, for trying to maximize his profits by cutting player salaries and skimping on expenses. When Juan wanted to take a hot shower after winning his seventh game and the water came out cold, he lost his temper and vented his frustration to Ortega. The owner either suspended him or Marichal quit—accounts vary—but the result was the same: Marichal did not pitch for Escogido in the postseason.
That enraged Escogido fans. They accused Marichal of shirking his duty to his country. El Caribe, the biggest newspaper in Santo Domingo, called Juan a rat. People jeered at him on the street. They made intimidating comments to Alma in stores. They phoned the Marichals’ home with threats to torture the pitcher. When Marichal attended a playoff game, some angry fanatics threw bottles at him and several threatened to kill him. A group of policemen had to escort Juan and Alma out of the ballpark. On New Year’s Eve Juan had to protect himself with his fists when revelers-turned-rioters attacked him in a Santo Domingo nightclub. After fighting his way out of the club, he was jailed briefly on the charge of “street brawling,” though ultimately acquitted. “I became worse hated than Trujillo in his worst days,” Marichal said.
Frightened for his safety, he retreated to his family farm in Laguna Verde. Paranoid and nervous, unable to sleep, he jumped at any loud or sudden noise. He visited a doctor who suggested he would feel more serene in the United States. Back in San Francisco, Juan applied for residency papers so he could buy a house and not have to return to the Dominican Republic in the off-season. But the American press again misunderstood the cultural milieu that threatened Marichal. Prescott Sullivan, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, poked fun at him: “While Marichal might have chosen a more congenial form of exercise, it is gratifying to hear that he hasn’t been idle. Juan, with a few more brawls under his belt, should report to spring training camp in Phoenix, Arizona, in prime condition.”
The American press also misunderstood Marichal’s application for residency papers at the US consulate and reported that he was seeking citizenship. Those reports further enraged the Dominicans. “If you ask many fans what they think of their one-time idol, they hiss that Marichal is contemptible, ungrateful, a man who has thrown them down and a disgrace to the patriotic creed of a proud people—a trador [traitor],” Al Stump wrote in Sport magazine. Despite the derision directed his way, Juan remained proud to be a Dominican. He was simply concerned for his safety and that of the young family he had started with Alma.
During this time Marichal’s stress index multiplied while he negotiated his 1964 contract with the Giants. When holding out in 1963, he had asked for $30,000—a raise that would have doubled his salary from the previous season—but had settled for $24,000. After Marichal won 25 games, as many as Koufax, the team offered him a $6,000 raise. The increase still would have left Marichal underpaid—a condition common among Latin players—compared to Koufax (who earned $70,000 in 1964) and the other top pitchers (Don Drysdale, $70,000; Whitey Ford, $53,000; and Warren Spahn, $60,000). Marichal settled for $40,000 but thought his salary should be closer to that of his peers.
The Giants had traded Juan’s good friend Felipe Alou after the 1963 season, perhaps for his defiance of Dark over the buffet table turnover. Juan missed him but still felt close to the other Latin players on the Giants, like the other two Alou brothers (Matty and Jesus), Jose Pagan, and Cepeda, who was like a brother to Juan. Even when Latin players didn’t come from the same country, they felt a connection through their shared language and culture. “The Latin players had a special bond, a brotherhood,” Marichal wrote in My Journey. “We were from the same part of the world with the same kind of climate. We spoke the same language. We had darker skin and we had experienced discrimination in the United States because of that.” The fraternity extended to players on other teams. Marichal and his Latin teammates socialized with players like Roberto Clemente, Manny Sanguillen, Vic Davalillo, and Manny Mota when the Giants traveled and when opposing teams came to San Francisco. “We showed the visiting guys some hospitality because we knew it could be lonely on the road as a Latin person in another city,” Marichal wrote.
The San Francisco organization had been progressive in signing Latin and African-American players. With Cepeda at first, Pagan at short, Jesus Alou in right field, Mays in center, and McCovey on first, more than half of the Giants’ eight starting position players were minorities. Dark wrote their names onto the lineup card, but that didn’t mean he treated them well. Cepeda thought that the tension Dark provoked on the team, which divided it into cliques of whites, blacks, and Latinos, cost the Giants a pennant or two during his tenure. That season of ’64, Marichal had started strong, winning eight of his first nine starts, yet Dark, who never seemed to show much regard for his pitchers, told Juan to change the way he pitched to the Mets. Even though Marichal had never lost a game to the startup club, Dark thought the batters were getting used to him. “Pitch every hitter differently than you’ve been pitching him up till now,” Dark said. “I’ll call the pitches from the bench.” Juan beat them despite Dark’s intervention.
In July the Giants and Phillies were flip-flopping between first and second place in the National League when Dark lost his temper again, this time over a base-running gaffe involving Cepeda, Pagan, and Del Crandall, a white player, that almost resulted in a triple play. He told Stan Isaacs of Newsday, “We have trouble because we
have so many Spanish-speaking and Negro players on the team. They are just not able to perform up to the white ball player when it comes to mental alertness. . . . You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have the pride in their team that you can get from white players. And they just aren’t as sharp mentally. They aren’t able to adjust to situations because they don’t have that mental alertness. . . . One of the biggest things is that you can’t make them subordinate themselves to the best interest of the team. You don’t find pride in them that you get in the white player.”
When Dark’s comments ran in Newsday at the end of July, the Giants’ black and Latin players met in Willie Mays’s hotel room in Pittsburgh ready to mutiny. Mays talked them out of it. He figured Dark would be fired at the end of the season. Forcing the issue would make a martyr out of him for the bigots. Mays also reasoned that a managerial change at that point in the season could cost the team the pennant. He succeeded in quieting the rebellion. Dark, of course, claimed he had been misquoted. Perhaps more disturbing was the support he received. Giants owner Horace Stoneham defended him in public. So did commissioner Ford Frick. A Sports Illustrated editorial asserted, “He [Dark] has treated them [Negroes and Latin Americans] as individuals, not stereotypes. He has knit together a club that was chaotically divided, partly by racial and nationalist hostility, at the time he took control.” That was certainly not the prevailing opinion on the team or among close observers, but the situation exposed the widespread tolerance for slandering minorities at the time.
To Stoneham’s credit, he did fire Dark after the 1964 season, though it may have been as much for the team’s collapse as for the manager’s ugly opinions. After his public outburst, the Giants never regained first place and finished fourth. Marichal had another strong season—despite missing eight starts because of back spasms—going 21–8 with a 2.48 ERA and leading the majors with 22 complete games. After the winter of Dominican discontent the previous year, he had planned to stay in San Francisco with Alma and their two daughters at the house they had bought. But if he wanted to see his mother—who was afraid of flying and never traveled to the United States—and visit other family members, Juan knew he needed to go home. He also believed that there might be help for his back troubles in the Dominican Republic.
He made his annual pilgrimage to the Rio Sanate, said to have healing powers. Along the way he stopped at the Basílica Catedral Nuestra Señora de la Altagracia, where he prayed before the portrait of Our Lady of Altagracia, protector of the island and the Dominican faithful. At the river he swam in the cool water. He knew the stories of others who claimed the waters had cured their ailments, and Juan desired the same for his troubled back.
Once home in the Dominican, he felt pressured to pitch again for Escogido. His acceptance seemed to heal some of the bitter sentiment directed his way a year earlier. Record crowds packed the stadiums for his pair of starts in late December, including one against the rival Los Tigres del Licey. “His appearance, like that of a typical national hero, attracted widespread attention,” a newspaper reported.
But the political climate remained tense. The ruling triumvirate still struggled for support, and unrest grumbled from within the military and among loyalists for Juan Bosch, the scholar who had won the presidential election only to be thrown out of office by the military coup. Before Marichal left for the 1965 season, he heard the more ominous resonance of revolution in Santo Domingo’s streets.
CHAPTER FOUR
Filling Campy’s Shoes
Roseboro did well during the Dodgers 1958 spring training following Roy Campanella’s career-ending injury, but he did not think he was in Vero Beach competing for the starting catcher position. Johnny had conceded that role to 10-year veteran Rube Walker. Dodgers manager Walt Alston eased the pressure by starting Walker on Opening Day. For the first month Alston alternated his catchers, but by mid-May Roseboro had won the job. Not through any sensational play but more due to the attrition of Walker’s skills. Roseboro struggled to receive pitchers like Sandy Koufax, Johnny Podres, and Clem Labine, who threw a lot of low breaking balls. “Campy was an expert at blocking those wicked pitches in the dirt,” a profile in the team guide observed. “But Roseboro reached for them like a lady warding off a mouse.”
In their first season on the West Coast, the Dodgers did not adjust well to Los Angeles, finishing in seventh place (of eight teams), 21 games back. Pitching was problematic: Newcombe didn’t last the season, and Koufax, Podres, and Don Drysdale all lost more games than they won. Los Angeles also had the lowest team batting average in the league, with Duke Snider the only Dodger hitting above .300. Many of the team’s critics singled out the “catching problem.” Roseboro caught 104 games, made eight errors, and batted .271 with a third of his hits for extra bases. It wasn’t a poor debut season—he was even named to the National League All-Star team, though he didn’t play—but it did not approach the standard by which he was inevitably measured. “You don’t win a pennant when Roy Campanella sits in a wheelchair and Johnny Roseboro does the catching for you,” Jimmy Cannon sniped in the New York Journal-American.
Johnny and Jeri bought a small house in Compton, just south of the Watts neighborhood. On his minimum Major League Baseball player salary of $7,500, they could afford only one car, an old Plymouth convertible, so Johnny commuted by streetcar to the Coliseum. He took a salesman job at a downtown clothing store to make some extra cash and indulge a haberdashery habit he had developed while in Montreal. Johnny prided himself on looking fine. Even though Jeri was the more sociable one, dancing at parties hosted by other players and their wives, Johnny was certain to look good when he did go out.
Campanella came to Dodgertown in the spring of 1959 as a special coach with a specific project: John Roseboro. Campy, in his wheelchair and a shiny Dodgers windbreaker, talked Rosey through his throws to second, quickening his release. They spent hours on the nuances of stopping low breaking balls. “When Campy got through working on Roseboro, John was digging in the dirt in the manner of a dog burying a bone,” Bob Laughlin noted in the Dodgers’ team guide. “These coaches threw pitches in the dirt to me until I had to learn how to catch them or become the biggest bruise in Florida,” Johnny said. The tutoring sessions continued in the Dodgertown lobby after practice with the veteran instructing the younger man how to handle pitchers.
The lessons stuck. Roseboro called pitches confidently, and pitchers began to trust him. That season, he allowed only 17 steals and threw out 24 aspiring sack thieves, his 59 percent spoiler rate the best in the league. On August 31, 1959, he caught an 18-strikeout performance by Koufax. Johnny’s 19 putouts (the catcher gets credit on a strikeout) set a major league record for most in a nine-inning game. His 848 putouts during the season exceeded Campanella’s big league mark of 807 established six years earlier. With their catching problem seemingly solved, the Dodgers finished in a tie on top. Roseboro hit a two-run homer in the eighth inning of the final game to provide insurance and set up a best-of-three playoff with the Milwaukee Braves. He had fewer than 100 hits that season, batting only .232, but he delivered his biggest hit in the first playoff game, a sixth-inning, 375-foot home run that won the game for the Dodgers. “Roseboro finally looked like a fair facsimile of his famous predecessor in the gloom at Milwaukee yesterday,” the UPI wire story ran. The home run won over Cannon. “The game belonged to Johnny Roseboro,” the Journal-American critic wrote. “Not even Roy Campanella could do any better.”
The Dodgers won the playoff to face the Chicago White Sox in the World Series. These were the “Go-Go Sox” that had raced to the Series on the speedy feet of Luis Aparicio, Nellie Fox, Jim Landis, and Jim Rivera. The press forecast that the Sox would steal the Series off the arm of the Dodgers’ green catcher. Alston boosted Rosey’s confidence when he told reporters, “They don’t know how well Roseboro throws. They can go, but he’ll cut them down.”
Roseboro made Alston sound like a prophet. He threw
out every Chicago runner that tried to steal in the first two games. With the Series tied at one game apiece, Landis finally swiped a base in Game Three, but Johnny caught Aparicio, Fox, and Rivera to erase multiple threats. “Johnny’s arm was a major factor in winning that pivotal third game which saw Chicago make 12 hits, have four walks and one hit batsman yet lost 3–1,” Bob Laughlin wrote. The Dodgers won the Series in Los Angeles, a gift to the city the team’s second year in its new home. Roseboro had only two hits but was considered one of the stars for his superb defensive play, a theme that would define his big league career.
Johnny spent his World Series money on a new Thunderbird for Jeri and an Austin-Healey for himself, an extravagance that he couldn’t quite afford, but it would be years before he came to terms with his fiscal irresponsibility. Johnny and Jeri also had their first child, Shelley, in June. Johnny considered her a bigger thrill than winning the pennant and the World Series. He spent hours playing with her and talking to her. He loved to watch her fall asleep on his chest.
Having started a family, the couple moved out of Compton to south LA in 1960. Roseboro’s batting fell off that summer, dropping to .213, the lowest of his career for a full season, and the Dodgers finished fourth, but Johnny’s defensive play continued to improve. In 1961 he won his first Gold Glove. He also raised his average to .251 and made the All-Star team.* The Dodgers finished four games back in second place. Jeri and Johnny had another daughter, Staci, born in February 1961. Johnny thought Jeri was a good mother, but he felt a strain in their marriage. She loved being a baseball player’s wife, going to the games and mixing with the other wives. A natural introvert, he did not talk about what bothered him, and the resentments smoldered.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 7