The Fight of Their Lives

by John Rosengren

  After the Dodgers’ flight took off for New York and a four-game series with the Mets, Johnny played in the regular poker game with his teammates. The cut on his head continued to seep blood. When talk turned to the fight, he said, “I don’t believe in turning the other cheek.”

  The media wanted more when the plane landed at LaGuardia at 4:30 a.m. A reporter asked Roseboro if he planned to finish the fight with Marichal when the Giants and Dodgers played for the last time that season on September 6 and 7. “No,” Johnny said softly. “But it’s not easy to forget when somebody splits your head open.”

  He finally got to bed at the hotel around 7 a.m. but woke with a monster headache. The reporters crowded into his room on the 15th floor of the Roosevelt Hotel. He talked to them seated on the edge of his bed still in his blue pajamas. He occasionally pressed his hand to the bandaged patch on his head. He told them his version of events, said that his throw had not touched Marichal, that Marichal had clubbed him when he took a step toward him. “As far as I’m concerned the incident is forgotten,” he said. “I’m not thinking about getting him or looking for him or anything like that.”

  Everyone wanted to talk about it, and suddenly Gabby had a lot to say. Later that day Roseboro appeared on Les Crane’s television show, the square white bandage on his scalp in stark contrast to his black hair, and repeated his diplomatic message with a caveat: “In my opinion it’s all over. If anything has to come of it from me, then they can forget it because there will never be another incident between Marichal and I unless”—here he tilted his head to look at the host—“he makes a mistake and starts something and of course I’ll be there when it happens. But as far as being vindictive or anything like that, it’s just almost forgotten.”

  Almost? “My wife didn’t like my head being bashed open too well.” He smiled. “But she’ll get over it.”

  Meanwhile, National League president Warren Giles was also at the Roosevelt Hotel conducting his investigation into the incident, talking to the managers of each team and the umpires by telephone. When a Los Angeles reporter asked Roseboro what he thought Marichal’s punishment should be, Johnny confided in him, “He and I in a room together for about ten minutes.”

  Roseboro wanted to play in that night’s game but didn’t. His headache drove him to the hospital for X-rays, which revealed no fractures. “Nothing was there,” he joked.

  While Roseboro talked, Marichal stayed quiet. He had kept to himself on the Giants’ flight to Pittsburgh and napped fitfully.

  Roseboro’s telling his side of the story and displaying his bandaged wound to the New York media cast him as the victim and Marichal as the villain, roles that the majority of the public outside of the Bay Area accepted. “If Marichal is permitted to continue in Major League Baseball, the game will never be the same to me,” Harry Evans of Los Angeles wrote to the Los Angeles Times. Joseph Danvers of Monterey Park, California, called the paper to insist that Marichal be “disqualified from baseball or placed in an asylum.” They represented the hundreds who voiced their opinion to the ball club, the newspaper, and the National League president’s office with advice for how Giles should deal with Marichal.

  The San Francisco press deferred judgment. “What he did was a terrible thing, yet I don’t think anyone in San Francisco really criticized him,” said Nick Peters, a beat reporter covering the Giants at the time. “I think he had the benefit of the doubt because we all knew what a good guy he was, and we gave him that.”

  Elsewhere, the press hammered Marichal. They condemned his “brutal attack” as “atrocious,” “reprehensible,” “outrageous,” “disgraceful,” and “cowardly.” Howard Cosell called it “dastardly.” A Los Angeles Herald-Examiner headline declared, Juan Disgraces Baseball. Even if Marichal had been afraid that Roseboro was going to attack him, Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times, “It has to be a pretty warped instinct, though, for one ballplayer to flail another on the skull with a bat.”

  The day after the incident, Giles, having concluded his inquiry, sent Marichal a telegram: “I am sure you recognize how repugnant your actions were in the game. Such actions are harmful to the game, have no place in sports and must be dealt with drastically. . . . My investigation indicated there were underlying currents by others throughout the series, but your sudden and violent action Sunday was unprovoked and obnoxious and must be penalized.” His penalty: a $1,750 fine and eight playing dates. Giles stipulated that the team could not pay the fine, that the money must come from Marichal himself and be paid prior to his reinstatement.

  Giles’s interpretation that Marichal’s action was “unprovoked” seemed to exonerate Roseboro, laying the blame squarely on Marichal. The fine, a record amount at the time,* underscored the drastic measures the league president felt he must take. Giles said he calculated the amount based on what he thought Marichal would earn during the term of his suspension.*

  * Ted Williams had been fined $5,000 for spitting at fans in Fenway Park in 1956, and Babe Ruth had been fined $5,000 for reporting out of shape in 1925, but both of those fines had been imposed by the players’ clubs. The $1,750 levied by Giles against Marichal was the largest amount either league had fined a player.

  * To put it in contemporary terms, the same percent applied to Tim Lincecum’s $18,250,000 salary in 2012 would be $532,292.

  When Juan arrived at Forbes Field on August 23 for that evening’s game with the Pirates, reporters wanted his reaction. He tried to avoid them and kept mumbling, “No comment.” After an hour and a half of that, Giants manager Herman Franks finally convinced Marichal to tell his side of the story. The club released a statement in Juan’s name that read: “First of all, I want to apologize for hitting Roseboro with my bat. I am sorry I did that. But he was coming toward me, with his mask in his hand, and I was afraid he was going to hit me with his mask, so I swung my bat.” The statement went on to explain how the anger between the two teams had mounted with Maury Wills and then Matty Alou taking swipes at the catchers’ mitts and Roseboro delivering threats via Alou and Orlando Cepeda. It recounted how Roseboro had deliberately dropped the ball and then thrown it back close by Marichal’s head, and asserted that the ball “ticked” Marichal’s ear. The statement repeated that Roseboro had taken off his mask and Marichal was afraid he was going to hit him with it.

  The statement ended, “I am sorry but many times our players on the Giants are hit by pitches and sometimes hurt, and nobody says anything then.” The final line echoed Marichal’s comments after Drysdale had thrown at Willie Mays earlier in the season. It hinted that the Marichal-Roseboro conflict was not an isolated incident but one layered in the history of the long-running feud between the two teams. Juan sat at a table in the clubhouse with Franks at his side. He fiddled with a deck of playing cards while the manager clarified events for the reporters and complained that his star pitcher’s suspension would hurt his team.

  When the press asked Roseboro for his reaction, he said he had not taken off his mask. Video footage and photographs show that Roseboro did indeed have his mask on until the scuffle reached the grass in front of the mound and Marichal pulled it off. Roseboro admitted that he had challenged Marichal and Franks in the shouting between the catcher and the Giants bench on Friday night but denied that he had ever threatened Marichal. He also asserted that the ball he threw had not ticked Marichal’s ear. “How does he know I dropped the ball on purpose?” he demanded angrily and added, “If Marichal doesn’t want to get in a fight on the field, he should keep his mouth shut.”

  While no one approved of Marichal hitting Roseboro with his bat, there were those, primarily in the Bay Area, willing to forgive him and support him. The Archdiocese of San Francisco wrote an open letter to Marichal in its newspaper expressing support for the weekly communicant: “We see young boys in school yards and all over the Bay Area imitating your high leg-kick delivery. Whether they know it or not, they also imitate your beha
vior. One thing they learned this week is the manliness of your public apology. It suggests that your basic character is as big as your baseball talent.”

  California Secretary of State Frank Jordan thought the $1,750 fine was too large for the crime and offered to start a campaign to raise the funds to cover it. One San Francisco woman actually did begin collecting money to pay Marichal’s fine.

  Some supporters remained blindly partisan. Giants fan R. A. Kelly wrote to the Los Angeles Times, “Every time the Dodgers play in San Francisco and lose a game, they start to whine. I’m getting so I hate the Dodgers. Hitting with a bat is inexcusable, I know, but some of those whiners really deserve it.”

  There were also those who saw the incident as more nuanced, not so clearly black and white, despite their obvious allegiances. Giants radio broadcaster Lon Simmons, who had been calling the game on KSFO radio, thought the two players should share the blame. “It was wrong for Marichal to hit him with the bat, but that was a lethal weapon Roseboro used, throwing the ball from that distance,” Simmons said. He considered Juan’s use of the bat an impulsive act of self-defense. He also insisted that Roseboro started the incident—provoking Marichal by throwing the ball so close to his face—while his counterpart in Los Angeles, Vin Scully, persisted in the belief that Marichal had been the instigator. “I thought the punishment was really unjust with Roseboro not getting anything,” Simmons said. “They were both involved, both liable.”

  The Dodgers protested what they considered Giles’s leniency. “He should get kicked out of baseball,” said Ron Fairly, one of the Dodgers whom Marichal had put in the dirt during Sunday’s game. “He should have been suspended 1,750 days and fined eight dollars. Using a bat is the same as going out with intent to kill. If I’d done something like that on the street, I’d have been arrested. He should be arrested, too.”

  “I thought it was a real gutless decision,” said Maury Wills, the other player Marichal knocked down. “I think the punishment should have been much more severe.”

  “This ain’t over,” said Dodgers outfielder Lou Johnson, who had jumped into the fray and been spiked by Marichal. “I’m going to get me one of them.” Indeed, in the inning after Marichal and Roseboro had fought, Johnson had slid hard into Tito Fuentes at second base, but San Francisco’s shortstop had sidestepped the challenge.

  Giles tried to justify his decision—which he called the toughest he had ever made—by explaining that he wanted to take into account how Marichal’s suspension would affect his team’s pennant chances. He factored in the World Series money at stake and the fact that Roseboro had not been seriously injured. “If I’d have been influenced by the calls and wires I received, I’d have had him shot or put him out [of baseball] for life,” Giles said. “But you can’t penalize the other twenty-four guys or the club itself. You want to penalize a guy for a terrible thing like this, but you also want to be fair.”

  Reaction to the National League president’s justification was as widespread and mixed as it was to the punishment he levied. Most seemed to think Marichal deserved a longer suspension, but they believed Giles had been wise to take the long view. “Pitching an entire club out of the race—which the permanent loss of Marichal would have done—is a little too stiff a deal to hand out for the misdemeanor of a single player,” Chester L. Smith wrote in the Pittsburgh Press. Others found fault with Giles’s reasoning. “It would appear that the penalty is determined by the position of the player’s team in the pennant race, rather than by the severity of his crime,” Dr. Karen Koziara of San Jose, California, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Sporting News. “Pretty sad justice.” Sandy Koufax also observed, “If it had happened in April, he probably would have been suspended for thirty days.”

  The incident and its aftermath dominated national news in late August, overshadowing other events, such as President Johnson signing a law that imposed penalties for burning draft cards, Gemini 5 returning to earth after a record 120 laps around the earth, and Casey Stengel announcing his retirement. Sports Illustrated ran an oversize photo—a page and a half wide—in its August 30 edition that showed Marichal with his bat raised over his head, Roseboro tumbling to his knees in front of him, and umpire Shag Crawford reaching to subdue Juan with a very concerned Koufax and others looking on. The image depicted Marichal as the criminal and Roseboro as the casualty. So did the text: “Giants’ pitcher Juan Marichal, swinging his bat like a headsman’s ax, had opened a two-inch gash and raised a swelling the size of a cantaloupe on the left side of Roseboro’s head.” Life, the nation’s most popular magazine, ran a two-page spread in its September 3 edition under the headline A Pitcher Goes to Bat Against the Catcher with a sequence of four photos showing Marichal swiping Roseboro and Roseboro punching Marichal along with a larger shot of Juan on his back with his spikes up after being tackled by Crawford. The most arresting image, though, was the one blown up to cover almost two pages that showed Mays holding a fistful of Roseboro’s jersey and leading him away while Johnny, blood drizzled down the side of his face and his chest protector, studies the blood on his hand after touching it to his wound. The small section of accompanying text read in part: “Pitcher Juan Marichal of the Giants suddenly lashed out with his bat (top pictures) at catcher John Roseboro of the rival Los Angeles Dodgers, who fought back bare-handed.”

  In the days before the 24-hour news frenzy fed by Twitter, countless websites, and CNN, Fox, MSNBC, et al., these photos prominently displayed in widely distributed magazines placed the story in the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. For most Americans these were the only images they saw of the incident. The visual and textual depictions further influenced public opinion that Marichal was the villain and Roseboro the victim. The Sporting News, known as “Baseball’s Bible” because it was considered the primary authority on the national pastime (and perhaps because of the moral tone it frequently adopted), excoriated Marichal in an editorial dated September 4, 1965. Declaring that Giles’s punishment was too lenient and that a 30-day suspension would have been more effective, the weekly granted that Marichal’s teammates and Giants fans deserved consideration in determining the sentence “but their importance pales when one ponders the possible consequences of an act as vicious as Marichal’s. To us it appears an open invitation to a Marichal type for a repeat performance.”

  A “Marichal type” suggested a similarly impetuous Latino. The reference was widely understood in a culture rife with stereotypes. Earlier in August, Sports Illustrated had published an article about the infusion of Latin players in the big leagues that reflected the nation’s attitude, suggesting that “they”—as though all Latinos were alike—displayed reckless individuality, must be managed carefully because of their pride, and could be easily manipulated. “Caribbeans in general have the reputation for being temperamental, and the ballplayers are no exception,” the article asserted. Marichal’s actions were filtered through the lens of this widespread attitude.

  The Sporting News editorial condemned Marichal from a position of cultural arrogance: “Baseball in America would enjoy the status of cockfighting if its players descended to Marichal’s fighting style.” The statement jabbed at a pastime that enjoyed widespread popularity and acceptance in Juan’s homeland. The editorial also chastised him with a condescending tone: “A baseball bat is a deadly weapon; even a child knows that.” And it showed no compassion for Juan’s emotional state: “In Marichal’s defense, some have mentioned worry over the turmoil in his native Dominican Republic and the super-charged atmosphere surrounding a collision of pennant contenders. These alibis might carry weight if Marichal had used his fists. They are a mockery when viewed alongside his actual defense. There is no excuse for Marichal’s actions.”

  The Sporting News editors weren’t the only ones who deferred to stereotypes in berating Marichal. “These young Caribbean hot bloods absolutely must be taught restraint,” Bob Broeg pontificated in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “In a
situation like that, you act first and think later,” William Chapin wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Especially if you’re a fiery Dominican.”

  Dick Young, the often contrarian columnist for the New York Daily News, objected to what he perceived as prejudice biasing his colleagues’ opinions: “I am frightened . . . by what my hysterical fellow journalists want to do to Marichal. They want to lynch him. . . . These fine noble members of a fine, noble profession, these men who decry emotional violence of any kind and plead constantly for level-headed calm—these men have formed a mob. They want to drag Marichal into the street and hang him from a telegraph pole.

  “I wonder if the mob would be shouting so if his name weren’t Juan Marichal. What would the mob shout, I wonder, if his name were a nice Nordic name like Frank Thomas, which it just happened to be a couple of months ago. I seem to recall that Thomas hit Richie Allen on the side of the head with a bat and the only penalty he got was being sent to Houston, which is pretty drastic, I’ll grant you . . . but I didn’t hear the mob screaming for Frank Thomas’s head or calling him a savage.”

  Young was referring to the incident earlier that season, in July, when the Philadelphia Phillies’ Frank Thomas had an altercation with his teammate Richie Allen and swung his bat at him, striking Allen in the shoulder, not the head. Giles did not take any disciplinary action, though the Phillies sold Thomas to Houston only days later. That incident did not receive national press coverage or universal condemnation for many reasons—one of them may very well have been that Thomas was a white man born in Pennsylvania.

  In truth, Juan wasn’t a “young Caribbean hot blood” or a “fiery Dominican.” He was competitive, yes, but also a man of deep faith, sweet natured and fun loving. The afternoon of August 22, he got caught up in a moment of passion at a time when he was emotionally fragile. That does not excuse his behavior—he would be the first to say that—but it does help one understand that his action was uncharacteristic, not a natural reflection of his personality but an aberration. Perhaps that is why it would haunt him so.