Everywhere Juan went that winter in San Francisco and back in the Dominican Republic, all anyone wanted to talk about was the fight. The letters kept coming. The taunts were incessant. No one would let him forget.
Meanwhile, Johnny, still troubled by what had gone down in Watts, had offered his services to the LAPD “in any capacity.” The police department hired him as a community relations officer to soothe relations between the police and the people that the riots had scorched. He spoke to students at schools, kids in juvenile detention, seniors at community centers, and congregations at churches. They listened to his message of viewing the police as fellow human beings and engendering mutual respect. “He’s winning friends in the field for the LAPD,” Bud Furillo noted in the Sporting News. But his audience’s first question invariably seemed to be about the fight with Marichal.
The questions continued into spring training at Vero Beach. Juan’s apology had not appeased Johnny. It had come through the press, not in person. “But even if he had come to me face to face, I wouldn’t have been impressed because apologies in my book don’t make up for the original deed,” Johnny told Los Angeles Herald-Examiner columnist Melvin Durslag. “There are too many people in this world who do terrible things intentionally and feel they can ease out of trouble with an apology.”
He still thought about retaliating. It frustrated him that Juan had scored the decisive blow. Johnny said if he had landed several convincing punches himself, he probably would have considered them even and not filed the lawsuit. But, having come out on the losing end, he wanted some sort of vengeance. He, too, had replayed the fight in his mind many times, wishing he could have altered the outcome, thinking how he should have applied his training in the sweet science, that he should have parried and grabbed. “Instead I started flailing away with crazy punches, throwing a lot of street rights,” he told Durslag in spring training. “This isn’t the way to neutralize a man with a weapon. But I lost my head.”
And now here they stood, face-to-face again, having swapped weapons, Johnny with the bat, Juan with the ball. The naked sun blazed upon them.
Juan’s first pitch missed outside. The second high. Cautious.
Johnny took the next for a called strike, then fouled one off. Patient.
Juan delivered a 2–2 slider belt high. Johnny stroked it cleanly to right.
Jesus Alou, the Giants right fielder and Marichal’s roommate, charged in to play the line drive on its first hop, but the ball leaped over his head and continued back to the fence where hundreds stood. Johnny sped around the bases and beat the throw to the plate. He had legged out an inside-the-park home run, good for three runs in the Dodgers’ eventual 8–4 victory—a small drink of revenge but not enough to quench his thirst.
During the off-season, when the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale had famously teamed up to demand more money, $235,000 between them, Marichal believed his 22 wins, 10 shutouts, 2.13 ERA, and All-Star Game MVP performance deserved a significant raise. He asked for $80,000 in 1966, increasing his ’65 salary by a third. Giants general manager Chub Feeney, who blamed the team’s late collapse the previous summer on Marichal’s suspension, did not think Marichal deserved a raise at all. He pointed out that Juan had lost his last three games and the Giants had finished two games back. The team offered Marichal the same $60,000 it had paid him in 1965.
That offended Juan. “Juan seldom gets angry,” his wife, Alma, said. “It takes a lot for him to get angry about something, but when he does get angry, he will stay angry for a long time.”
Marichal came down to $75,000 but insisted it was that or nothing. He would quit baseball before accepting the Giants’ insult of an offer. Spring training started without him.
One Giants official thought Marichal should wise up and accept the club’s offer. “What’s he going to do?” the official scoffed to a reporter. “He isn’t going to make $60,000 in the Dominican Republic cutting sugarcane.”
When Juan read the comment in the newspaper, it further infuriated him. “Lots of people earn good livings in the Dominican Republic,” said Marichal, who had been buying up the land around his family farm outside Laguna Verde. “I can earn a lot of money growing crops on my farm. In the United States there are those who think all Latin Americans are peasants. Well, we are not. I will do very well here without playing baseball for the Giants.”
Feeney finally realized Marichal did not intend to budge and signed him for $75,000. Marichal pitched only 13 innings in Arizona, but he was ready for Opening Day. Physically, if not emotionally. More than the insults from the Giants during his salary negotiations, the condemnation, the suspension, the derogatory comments, his own remorse had all hardened something inside. The smile that puffed his cheeks shone less frequently. He withdrew, became sullen.
Once he finally had arrived in spring training, Juan opened up to a writer he trusted, Harry Jupiter of the San Francisco Examiner, in an article that would be published in the June issue of Sport under the headline Juan Marichal’s Hard Fight to Redeem Himself. Juan said he decided to talk because, “When it happened, only Roseboro’s side of the story was emphasized. I don’t think my side was ever really considered by Mr. Giles or anybody else.” In the article he repeated his version of events. “Look, I never in my life ever thought of hitting anybody with a bat,” he said. “But in that second, when the ball brushed against my ear, the thought I had was that it could have killed me. Unless you experience something like this, you can’t understand the feeling I had at the moment.”
Even after talking about it, he still felt isolated with that feeling—and those he’d had afterward. People wondering how the incident with Roseboro would affect Marichal noticed the different demeanor and perhaps a subtle change in his pitching. He was afraid to throw inside. He didn’t want to hit a batter. Which set Willie Mays against him on Opening Day.
After Mays had homered, Cubs pitcher Bill Hands aimed a fastball at Mays’s head in his next at-bat that Willie barely escaped. He got up and took several steps toward the mound before he could be restrained. Marichal had never seen his teammate so mad. But when a payback pitch came due against the Cubs’ leading hitter, the best Juan could manage was a weak toss over Ernie Banks’s head. “It was just nothing,” Juan admitted. “And everybody knew it.”
After the game Mays confronted Marichal. “I’m trying to win for you. How am I going to do it if you won’t protect me?”
“He’s a nice guy,” Juan said lamely.
“So am I,” Willie fumed.
But, more than his teammate’s anger, Marichal feared the wrath of National League president Warren Giles if he struck a batter with a pitch.
The Giants and Dodgers played their first regular season matchup in Candlestick exactly a month after their Phoenix exhibition. Roseboro had started haltingly at the plate, 9-for-43 in the young season. He faced Marichal in the second inning with one on and one out. The threat of danger did not permeate the atmosphere that Tuesday evening the way it had in Phoenix, but the animosity was present. Prior to their fight, Roseboro had done well against Marichal, better than against most pitchers, going 21-for-71, a .296 average. This time Roseboro did not hit the ball. Marichal struck him out. His next at-bat, Roseboro reached on Marichal’s error, when Juan dropped the ball. His next time up, he singled. But with an 8–1 lead and two outs in the top of the ninth, Marichal induced Roseboro to fly out to the shortstop to end the game.
Two weeks later, they squared off again at Chavez Ravine. It was Juan’s first time in Los Angeles since August 22. The Angelenos booed Marichal vehemently when his name was announced, a thunderous roar from 53,561 zealous fans. Marichal did his part to quiet them by slapping two hits and pitching 10 innings of one-run ball until he was replaced by a pinch hitter in the 11th. Roseboro went 0-for-5 against Marichal, but the Dodgers won in the 13th, bringing them within four games of the league-leading Giants after five weeks of play
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The cut on Johnny’s head had closed, the small scar obscured by his curly black hair, but Juan’s wound could not be stitched shut. “You see a lot of scars in baseball,” Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch said one day when talking about the Giants pitcher. “On the face, on the chin, on the cheeks. On the legs and arms sometimes. We don’t know about this scar. This one might be someplace in Juan Marichal where you can’t see it.” Mauch drew an X across his heart.
Fans continued to taunt him, “Hit anybody with a bat lately?” Letters stained with racial ugliness continued to arrive. On the mound he heard the boos. The antipathy was anathema for a man who desired others’ affection. “Juan needs love,” Jesus Alou said. “You see, we Dominicans do not play just for money but for appreciation.”
Marichal seemed determined to show them that he could overcome the derisive reminders and the internal wound with his performance. Through the end of May he was 10–0, having won every start except for the game against the Dodgers when he came out after 10 innings and one earned run. He had pitched nine complete games and four shutouts. His ERA stood at 0.80. Time magazine placed him on the cover of its June 10, 1966, issue and tagged him “the Best Right Arm in Baseball.”
The qualified praise came in deference to the Left Arm of God, though the article did declare that “Better than Koufax or not, Juan Marichal without question . . . is the most complete pitcher in the game today, or any day.” The magazine based that assessment on his assortment of pitches and how he used them. Two weeks earlier, the Mets’ Chuck Hiller, who, as Marichal’s teammate in 1962 had become the first National Leaguer to hit a grand slam in the World Series, told the San Francisco Examiner, “As far as I’m concerned, he’s better than Koufax. Sandy may be quicker, but he doesn’t have the pitches Marichal does.”
Tom Sheehan, a pitcher-turned-scout for the Giants, had pointed out to Marichal his recent tendency to pitch away from the batter rather than inside. “I am glad he said this, because a lot of it was subconscious—I did not want to make a mistake and hit a batter, with the Roseboro thing so recent in people’s minds—so I was not going for the inside,” Marichal wrote. “It is bad for a pitcher not to use the inside part of the hitter’s area, but double bad for a control pitcher not to do it.” Once Sheehan alerted Marichal and he made the necessary correction, he became, once again, a complete pitcher.
The civil war ceasefire had promised elections now about to take place in the Dominican, which renewed Juan’s anxieties in June. Marichal had become one of the biggest landowners in the Dominican Republic, having acquired 1,065 acres where he grew hay, beans, plantain, rice, and corn in addition to raising 300 dairy and beef cattle. Given his position as a landowner and connections to Trujillo through his in-laws, he supported the conservative cause headed by Joaquín Balaguer, whose political posters touted the presidential candidate as “the Marichal of the Palace.”* Balaguer’s backers solicited Juan to sign his name to an advertisement in the Dominican papers that urged his fellow countrymen to vote to “bring peace to all so that we can have revolution without blood.” Referencing the ad, Sports Illustrated snarked that Marichal “perhaps mindful of the good example he ought to be setting, has not bloodied an opponent with a baseball bat all season long.” In the days leading up to the election, the sinus troubles that had bothered Juan in 1965 returned. Balaguer’s victory in the elections, which were free of disturbance, provided some measure of relief.
* Juan’s cousin, also named Juan Marichal, was Balaguer’s running mate.
Fluke injuries dogged Marichal the next two months—his pitching hand caught accidentally in a car door, a turned ankle, and a line drive off his foot—but he continued pitching complete games and winning. By the time the Giants played the Dodgers again, on August 27 at Candlestick, Juan was 18–5 with a 2.18 ERA. Only one game separated the two teams in the standings with the Giants ahead in the pennant race, though they still trailed Pittsburgh by half a game. Roseboro had picked up his average by cutting out batting practice, which he said threw off his timing, and was batting .298, better than he had ever hit over an entire season. He worked a full count off Marichal in the second with one on and no outs, then lined a single to center. Another single and sacrifice scored a run and moved Roseboro to third. Maury Wills laid down a surprise bunt, but Giants third baseman Jim Hart threw out Johnny at home to get Marichal out of the inning.
After Hart homered, Don Drysdale, whom Dodgers manager Walt Alston had again started regularly against Marichal all season, knocked down Willie Mays. It was Drysdale’s turn to go down when he led off the fifth. “He may be wondering . . . whether I will retaliate by putting him down the way he put Mays down,” Marichal wrote in his first book. “The setting here in Candlestick is the same, almost to the day, as a year ago when the Roseboro episode occurred. I get him to a count of one ball and two strikes—now he must really be wondering—for you could waste a close pitch if you were of a mind to.” But Juan decided not to risk another altercation, another suspension, another regret, and grooved a fastball that Drysdale watched for strike three.
Roseboro didn’t manage another hit—Juan struck him out in the sixth—and Marichal picked up his 19th win. He threw only 106 pitches (74 percent for strikes) in what he considered one of his best and most important games of the season. “After all the doubts, after all the worries about Marichal in the big ones, I can still pitch,” he wrote.
For Roseboro, his single was the second of only two hits he managed off Marichal after August 22, 1965, but he remained strong at bat and behind the plate. He finished the season with a .276 average, second highest in his career, 23 doubles, also second best in his career, and won his second Gold Glove. By September Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray had fingered Roseboro as the reason for the Dodgers success. “John Roseboro is at the moment the Most Valuable Player in the National League, if not baseball. He is the Dodgers’ glue and has been for nearly ten years. If the fans don’t know it, the league does. From dugout to dugout, the advice goes, ‘Don’t mess with John Roseboro.’”
Murray praised Roseboro for being a “no-nonsense, show-up-for-work guy” who was “conscientious—and ballplayers who are, are in shorter supply than .400 hitters.” He claimed Roseboro was even more valuable than Mays because, as a catcher, Roseboro was more involved in the defense. “You have to win the pennant to win the MVP,” Murray wrote. “But, if they have an award for Most Valuable Human Being, I know where my vote would go.”
Not many dwelt on the anomaly of a black man directing the defense, but Roseboro’s leadership was unusual at a time when, in some states, African Americans could not marry Caucasians, were denied housing, and were routinely passed over for employment. A time when there had not been a black US Supreme Court justice, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or US president. A time when there had not been a starting African-American quarterback in the modern NFL and fewer than a handful of regular African-American catchers in Major League Baseball (Elston Howard, Earl Battey, and Roseboro’s predecessor Roy Campanella). At a time when many white Americans believed that blacks lacked the intelligence and leadership skills the position required, Roseboro proved them wrong.
The Dodgers did end up winning the pennant, overtaking the rival Giants for the last three weeks of the season. Roseboro did not win the MVP Award; he finished 13th in the voting. Koufax carried the team through the final weeks, including a victory on the final day of the season with only three days’ rest in a must-win situation. He ended his last season by leading the majors in wins (27), complete games (27), innings pitched (323), ERA (1.73), and strikeouts (317). Marichal had a terrific season, going 25–6, giving him the best winning percentage in the majors, pitching 25 complete games with four shutouts and posting a 2.23 ERA, but, once again, “the Best Right Arm in Baseball” had fallen short of Koufax. Marichal had beaten the Dodgers three times in 1966 but never had the chance for a head-to-head rematch with Koufax.
Juan went home while Johnny and the Dodgers went to the World Series. Koufax had nothing left, however, and the Baltimore Orioles sent Los Angeles packing in four straight. The team headed to Japan to play a series of exhibition games, but what they had thought would be a victory tour “turned into a wake,” Roseboro wrote.
The funeral occurred the following summer. With Koufax retired and Wills exiled to Pittsburgh (traded after he abandoned the Japan tour), the team sank to the depths of the National League, finishing 73–89, 28½ games back in eighth place, better only than the bottom-feeding Astros and Mets. Johnny had a decent year, batting .272 in 116 games, but he was 34 years old, packing a few extra pounds and feeling the years spent catching in his knee and shoulder. It dawned on him that he was expendable, especially from a woebegone team. Sure enough, in late November 1967 the Dodgers dealt him to the Minnesota Twins along with pitchers Ron Perranoski and Bob Miller for shortstop Zoilo Versalles and pitcher Mudcat Grant. Johnny understood that the trade made sense—the Dodgers needed a shortstop to replace Wills—but emotionally he felt rejected. He cried at the news.
He would be 35 in May. Could he still play? The doubt shadowed him to spring training with his new team.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 15