Johnny took boxing lessons and studied karate. He liked to think of himself as a tough guy. But off the field he wasn’t. Those closest to him, his wife and children, saw the tender side. “He wanted to be a tough guy, but I don’t think he could hurt anybody,” Jeri said.
Despite his injuries, Roseboro had his best season in 1964. His decision at the beginning of the year to swing for contact rather than power paid off with a .287 batting average, the high-water mark of his career. He had only three home runs but 24 doubles, another personal best. He also threw out 60 percent of runners trying to steal, tops in the league. The Dodgers, however, did not fare as well as a team. They lost more games than they won and finished in sixth place, 13 games back.
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The new law, which made discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin illegal, had widespread implications for players like John Roseboro and Juan Marichal. But it did not eliminate bigotry, and in some ways it inflamed racial tensions. Two weeks later, when a white New York police officer shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American boy in front of his friends on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the incident sparked six nights of rioting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Over the next six weeks, race riots followed in Philadelphia, Rochester, Chicago, and three New Jersey cities. One hundred years after the Civil War, the sequel seemed to be playing out in a wave of guerilla urban violence.
CHAPTER FIVE
Summer of Fury
The specter of violence overshadowed the first Dodgers-Giants matchup of 1965. Malcom X had been murdered in February. Two weeks later, police in Selma turned a march for voting rights into Bloody Sunday. Also in March, the United States had sent its first troops to fight in Vietnam after launching Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombing campaign of North Vietnam. And civil war had broken out in the Dominican Republic.
Violence always lurked when the Giants and Dodgers played, dating back to the first encounter in 1889 between the New York Giants and the then Brooklyn Bridegrooms in a best-of-11 championship series that initiated the nation’s oldest rivalry in professional sports, one soiled by beanballs, brawls, and bad blood. A winner-take-all intensity charged the ballpark every time the two teams squared off. Giants players felt the surge the moment they arrived in enemy territory two weeks into the 1965 season. “When you stepped off the plane in Los Angeles, you could hear the electricity,” San Francisco’s power-hitting first baseman Willie McCovey said. “Even the skycaps at the airports were all wrapped up in the rivalry. It carried over to the hotel and finally the ballpark. The tension was always there.”
The atmosphere and tradition pushed the players to compete at a higher level. “Those of us who have been around a while always play this series just a little harder, and it’s contagious among the young players who aren’t as familiar with the background,” explained the Dodgers’ hard-throwing pitcher Don Drysdale, who would figure into both ends of the anger in that first series of 1965.
Specific personalities had stoked the rivalry over the previous seven decades. Brooklyn owner and president Charles Ebbets resented that his star pitcher, Joe “Iron Man” McGinnity, had defected to the Giants in 1902 and wanted in every way to beat them. John McGraw, who became the Giants manager that year, targeted Ebbets with frequent insults at the park and in the press. Ebbets lobbied the league (unsuccessfully) to punish the insolent manager. The stakes escalated in 1914 when McGraw’s former teammate turned nemesis, Wilbert Robinson, became the Brooklyn skipper, a position he held for the next 17 years; the two rivals didn’t so much play games as wage battles. After the Giants won the World Series in 1933 and the Dodgers finished 26½ games back, McGraw’s successor, Bill Terry, responded to a reporter’s question about the Dodgers prospects in 1934, “Brooklyn? Is Brooklyn still in the league?” The Dodgers retaliated by defeating the Giants in the final two games of the season to spoil New York’s pennant chances while Brooklyn fans waved “We’re still in the league” banners at the Polo Grounds. Seventeen years after that, Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen provoked the same revenge when he announced midseason 1951, “The Giants is dead.” That resurrected New York with a winning spree (39 of 47 games) that eliminated the Dodgers’ 13½-game lead, the coup de grâce coming off Bobby Thomson’s bat in the last inning of the three-game playoff with the “shot heard ’round the world.”
When the two teams played one out of every seven games against each other—22 times each summer—the spikes came up, the fastballs shrieked inside, and the benches often cleared. In 1951 Giants pitcher Sal Maglie, known as “the Barber” for the close shaves he regularly gave batters, knocked down the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson. Robinson bunted the Barber’s next pitch down the first baseline, and when Maglie bent over to field it, Robinson smashed into him with a vengeance that emptied the benches. Four years later, Maglie again brushed back Robinson who again bunted. This time, the Barber avoided fielding the ball even though Robinson slowed to give him the chance to reach it. Instead, Robinson knocked over Giants second baseman Davey Williams, who was covering first. Alvin Dark, then the Giants shortstop, bowled over Robinson at third base later in the game, jarring the ball loose from Robinson’s grip, and the two grappled. In 1953 Ruben Gomez, the Giants’ notorious “beanball king,” plunked the Dodgers’ Carl Furillo, who was contending for the batting title, in the wrist. Figuring Leo Durocher had ordered the pitch, Furillo charged the Giants manager. In the brawl that followed, someone stepped on Furillo’s hand, breaking a bone, and he had to sit out the next 10 days (though he did end up winning the batting title with his .344 average). Such was the intensity the rivalry inspired.
On April 29, 1965, a playoff atmosphere permeated the Los Angeles ballpark, with both teams poised to be top contenders for the National League pennant. The Dodgers had reinforced their already strong pitching corps—Johnny Roseboro said in spring training he thought this was the best Dodgers team he had ever played on—and the Giants relied on the strong bats of Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, and Jim Ray Hart. Drysdale took the mound at Chavez Ravine that Thursday night against Juan Marichal. Juan had won his last three starts after losing a 1–0 decision on Opening Day. He had already thrown two shutouts.
But that night required focus beyond the Dodger Blue. Five days earlier, the rumblings of revolution that Juan had heard two months previous in the Dominican Republic were realized. Rebels loyal to Juan Bosch—who had won the election in 1963 but been ousted shortly afterward in a coup—pushed aside the military-imposed junta and set up their own government. The next day, Marichal could barely breathe. As often happened with him, the stress manifested itself in a physical ailment. This time, it attacked him in the sinuses. But he started the game against the Mets. Dominican military forces loyal to the ousted junta staged a countercoup. The people of his country who tuned into the broadcast of the Giants-Mets game found solace in Marichal’s success that night—until static bewitched their radios. The Western Union operator at Candlestick Park knew that something had gone wrong in Marichal’s country when he lost contact with the two Santo Domingo radio stations seized by the rebels. Marichal continued to strike out Mets batters and blanked New York, but the news from his country shook him after the game.
He and Alma worried about their families. Juan could not call his mother and siblings to check on them. The farm had no telephone. Letters took a week each way. He went to the San Francisco consulate to read the Dominican papers, but they were three days behind. The best he could make out was that bands of soldiers and insurgents stalked the capital’s streets, looting and executing hundreds—so many that the Dominican Red Cross workers buried them where they fell—but he could not be sure that his and Alma’s families were safe. Even though his wife’s family did have a telephone, the fighting interrupted phone service and it sometimes took days to make contact. On April 28, the day before Juan was scheduled to start against the Dodgers, President Lyndo
n Johnson dispatched several thousand US Marines to the Dominican in Operation Power Pack.
The President explained to congressional leaders and later to the American people on television that he wanted to protect the 2,000 American citizens in the Dominican Republic and prevent the spread of communism in the Caribbean. No one wanted another Cuba, did they? The specious Red threat provided a good cover for the protection of $150 million of American investments. The deployment of US troops made the nightly news, which Juan watched with alarm. By the 29th he had still not heard from his family. Not knowing unnerved him. As much as he tried to concentrate on the batter in front of him, he could not suppress his worries.
The Giants took a 1–0 lead in the second inning when Drysdale walked McCovey and then gave up two singles. Marichal grounded out to end the threat. The next inning, Drysdale faced Willie Mays. Roseboro knew the Giants’ best hitter had an Achilles’ heel. “He hated to be hit by pitches,” Roseboro wrote. “He especially hated to bat against Drysdale because Don would drill him.” Johnny liked Willie—the two were friends off the field—but the only loyalty any player had in those Dodgers-Giants duels was to his own team, and his only aim was to beat the other. Even when Mays came to the plate sweet-talking him, Roseboro didn’t hesitate to call for an inside pitch.
With Drysdale he didn’t have to. The Big D thrived on throwing hard inside. He had been tutored in intimidation tactics by one of the best—Sal Maglie had ended his career with the Dodgers and found an eager pupil in the young Drysdale. Over the course of his 14-year career, the 6-foot-5 Drysdale set a record for hitting batters (154) that still stands. He knocked down countless more. Fines and suspensions from the league president didn’t deter him. “He liked to teach hitters respect by knocking them down,” Roseboro wrote. “He was the meanest, most intense competitor I ever saw.”
Sure enough, Drysdale delivered a fastball under Mays’s chin. “What’s wrong with that motherfucker?” Willie whined to Roseboro. “Why does he want to hurt me?”
Johnny laughed. “Willie, he don’t want to hurt you. He just wants your respect.”
Willie grounded out harmlessly to third base.
The majority of the 30,219 fans in Dodger Stadium loved seeing their pitcher smear the Giants’ star in the dirt. The animosity agitated them as much as it did the players. In one game Dodgers shortstop Maury Wills tried to turn a double play but beaned Giants runner Jim Ray Hart when Hart didn’t slide. Hart lay on the ground, the Giants stormed the field, and a Los Angeles woman in the left field seats clobbered a female Giants fan over the head with her shoe.
That dimension of the rivalry dated back to the beginning, too—to the late 19th century, when the fisticuffs between the two sides were as likely to involve fans as players. Ebbets Field, where Giants outfielders had to dodge rocks and other missiles thrown at them, became an equally dangerous place for Giants fans. In New York the Dodgers and Giants were the only two major league teams from the same town competing in the same league. One couldn’t be neutral; the rivalry demanded you choose a side. If you loved the Bums, you hated the Jints—and vice versa. The circumstances tampered with the character of otherwise good people. Legend has it that Monsignor Woods, a Catholic priest from Brooklyn respected for his charitable works, declared in 1923, “I hate the Giants!” Whether or not he actually said that, the legend speaks to the grip the rivalry had on those it possessed.
In 1938 a postal worker named Bob Joyce sought comfort at a Brooklyn saloon after his beloved Dodgers had lost to the Giants. He didn’t find it from the bartender, William Diamond, who needled Joyce. Frank Krug, a patron and Giants fan, spiced up the taunting with his own comments.
“Shut up, you bastards,” Joyce said. “Lay off the Dodgers.”
Not surprisingly, that only incited more teasing. The laughter chased Joyce out of the saloon. He soon returned with a revolver and shot the bartender in the stomach. When Krug tried to intervene, Joyce plugged him in the head. After police arrested him, Joyce pleaded a temporary insanity brought on by rage from hearing the ridicule directed at his Dodgers.
The rivalry also took shape from the character of the two boroughs where it originated. Glitz against grit: Broadway, Park Avenue, and the Upper East Side versus Flatbush, Bed-Stuy, and Prospect Park. Dodgers fans resented the urbane elitism of the Giants’ following; Giants fans disdained the blue-collar vulgarities of the Brooklyn faithful. The move to the West Coast changed the complexion but not the intensity of the rivalry, which accentuated the animosity intrinsic between the capitals of Northern and Southern California. “Los Angeles and San Francisco had long sustained a mutual disregard, hatred blended with a tinge of jealousy for what one town possessed that the other did not,” David Plaut writes in Chasing October. Columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle characterized the reciprocal hatred as one of congenital convenience, “a reflex built in at birth. It is firmly a part of the mystique of each city, and why not? It’s fun to have an object of automatic disdain so close at hand.”
Plaut details how the pundits from the two places reflected their constituents’ views with the mud they slung up and down the coast. The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray criticized the loose morality and weather to the north: “San Francisco isn’t a city—it’s a no-host cocktail party. It has a nice, even climate: it’s always winter.” His compatriot Melvin Durslag at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner poked fun at the town’s new team in its early years: “San Franciscans [who expect a pennant] are advised to stay away from coarse foods . . . avoid stimulants that irritate the stomach walls . . . if seized by a choking feeling, lay quietly and well-covered until the physician arrives.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Art Rosenbaum sniped back with “Smodgers,” referring to the LA smog, and the “city whose women would attend the opera in leopard shirts and toreador pants if indeed they attended the opera at all.” Caen threw in the remark, “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?”
There were those who thought the move across the country or expansion in 1962, which reduced the times the teams faced each other every summer to 18, might dull the intensity of the rivalry, but it remained robust in California. Alvin Dark, who had played for the Giants in New York and managed them in San Francisco, said, “I don’t care where you play these games, the Dodger-Giant rivalry is always intense.” The move simply built upon what was already there. “You can talk all you want about Brooklyn and New York, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Dallas and Fort Worth,” said Joe Cronin, who was born in the City by the Bay. “But there are no two cities in America where the people want to beat each other’s brains out more than in San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
A scorer’s decision exposed the mutual enmity in 1959. Giants pitcher Sam Jones, perhaps better known for chewing a toothpick on the mound than he was for his sweeping curveball, worked a no-hitter into the eighth inning at the Los Angeles Coliseum (where the Dodgers played their first two seasons in California) when his shortstop bobbled a ground ball and didn’t attempt a throw to first. Error, Jones thought. Obvious error, many witnesses concluded. But the official scorer, Charlie Park of the Los Angeles Mirror-News, ruled base hit. The San Francisco newsmen in the press box lambasted him, but Park resisted their appeals. The San Francisco Chronicle observed that there are “dark and secret things unrelated to reality and governed by no law of man or nature that happen all the time in the Los Angeles Coliseum . . . Whatever the explanation, the facts are intolerable to San Franciscans who regard baseball as a sane pastime, bound by logical rules, fairly imposed. They don’t like to have indignities inflicted on Sam Jones’ no-hitter.”*
* Jones did notch a no-hitter in his career: Four years earlier, pitching for the Chicago Cubs, he no-hit the Pittsburgh Pirates on May 12, 1955. But he had another no-hitter in 1959 taken away. He had no-hit the Cardinals on September 26 through seven innings when rain stopped the game. His effort was initially recorded as a
no-hitter only to be rescinded by Major League Baseball in 1991 when it decided games had to go nine innings for pitchers to be credited with a no-hitter. Perhaps not coincidentally, Toothpick Sam’s second nickname was “Sad Sam.”
Even the groundskeepers became complicit in the indignities. Dark employed them to thwart Maury Wills’s speed in 1962, the year Wills set the Major League Baseball mark for most stolen bases in a season (104). The Giants manager instructed Candlestick Park groundskeeper Matty Schwab to douse the base paths, ostensibly to keep the loose dirt from swirling, but obviously to slow down Wills and the rest of the speedy “Swift Set.” Murray complained that if Schwab had sprayed any more water “the Red Cross would have declared second base a disaster area.” Of note, the Giants players voted Schwab a full $7,290 World Series share that season for his contribution to their success.
In the fourth inning of the game on April 29, 1965, the Dodgers’ Tommy Davis pleased the locals with a triple that drove in a run to tie the score. Two innings later, Wills singled, moved to second on a bunt, stole third, and scored on another Tommy Davis hit (this a single to center field), and the Dodgers led 2–1. Perhaps Marichal’s concentration had slipped. Herman Franks lifted his pitcher for a pinch hitter in the seventh (ending Juan’s streak of nine complete games going back to 1964) and replaced him with Bobby Bolin. Juan remained on the bench, intent upon the outcome of the game he had started against the hated Dodgers. When Drysdale knocked down Mays with another inside pitch in the top of the eighth, Marichal seethed.
Juan had been around long enough to have internalized the enmity. Each player felt a personal stake in what Time characterized as “baseball’s bitterest rivalry.” They didn’t forget the hard slides, the inside pitches, the angry words of those games. “The grudges got carried not only from game to game but from year to year,” Wills wrote in his autobiography, On the Run. “It was like a war all the time.”
The Fight of Their Lives Page 9