On a winter evening following the 1966 season, the president of the Dominican Republic invited Señor Juan Marichal to his residence. Joaquin Balaguer pinned the nation’s “citizen supreme” medal on Juan’s chest. The political payback for Marichal’s support did not diminish the sincerity of his countryman’s esteem. The moment symbolically restored Juan’s hero status in his native country.
But his reputation remained tainted in the United States. With Koufax retired, Marichal reigned as Major League Baseball’s best pitcher in 1967. Chub Feeney could not blame the Giants’ previous late-season stumble on his ace, and Juan was not feeling as angry and stubborn, so they agreed on a $100,000 salary for 1967—a level finally commensurate with his talents, though still behind Drysdale, who had won only 13 games in 1966 (and lost 16) while collecting $110,000. But the Dominican pitcher’s legacy had begun to calcify. “An Angeleno remembers only the sight of Marichal’s bat against the side of John Roseboro’s skull,” Furman Bisher observed in the Atlanta Journal. “How’s that for injustice, for the greatest pitcher in baseball to be remembered for a hit that didn’t even make the Baseball Guide?”
Marichal published his first book, A Pitcher’s Story: The Greatest Pitcher in the Major Leagues Tells the Inside Story of His Rise to the Top, authored with San Francisco sportswriter Charles Einstein, which recounted parts of the 1966 season and explained his part in l’affaire Roseboro by excerpting Harry Jupiter’s article from Sport. With Koufax retired it was not only the opinion of Marichal, Einstein, and Bisher but widely accepted that Juan currently held the title of “greatest pitcher in the game.” The book seemed to be the pitcher’s reply to the questions about whether his temperament could withstand the aftermath of that event.
Another publication distracted Juan that summer. In late July the Saturday Evening Post published an article by Al Stump that cast Marichal as discontented, victimized by the system and game. It detailed his troubles, from the city of San Francisco making him tear down a greenhouse in his backyard to spectators booing him. “They [the boos] hurt,” Stump quoted Marichal. “Trouble with baseball is that always they want more, more, more . . . without thinking of what suffering they bring a player who happens to be down.” Stump identified prejudice as the underlying cause of the Latino’s problems. “Inequality seems to be an obsession with Marichal,” Stump wrote. “He believes that he and the rest of the major-league Latins are victims of a subtly functioning prejudice.”
Marichal claimed Stump had misquoted and unfairly characterized him, dismissing the article as “muy, muy, muy malo.” The writer had indeed made factual errors and embellished facts. Marichal’s attorney claimed his client had been libeled but did not file a suit. The profile may have been more caricature than a realistic portrait but at its core probably contained the truth that Juan had felt the sting of prejudice and resented it.
His trouble played out on the mound. He lost his first three games of the ’67 season, getting hammered for 13 earned runs in 181⁄3 innings. He won his next eight starts but after that lost more games than he won. Another fluke injury—liquid sprayed into his eye when he cut open a golf ball—and a pulled hamstring hampered him. What hurt worse, though, was the sense Juan had that the front office did not take his injuries seriously, perhaps dismissing them with the stereotype of Latin players as malingerers. “They thought I was jaking,” Marichal said. “This simply is not true.” Rumors bubbled up that the Giants might trade him after the season.
Before Johnny and Jeri left Los Angeles, they added a son to their family. Though he loved his daughters deeply, Johnny had always wanted a son. He and Jeri decided to adopt. They visited an adoption agency near their home. Johnny spotted a small boy sitting on the floor surrounded by toys. From among all of the toys, the boy selected a Nerf football and held it in his little hands, as if to show Johnny. “That’s my boy,” Johnny said.
Jaime, five years younger than Shelley and seven younger than Staci, completed the family. Johnny’s instincts for Jaime’s athletic ability proved accurate. He would go on to star in high school and play seven seasons of professional baseball.
But the move to Minnesota also meant Johnny had to say good-bye to his parents. John Sr. and Geraldine had moved out to the Los Angeles area after the 1965 World Series, and Johnny had bought them a house in Pomona. The elder Roseboros had enjoyed the chance to be closer to their grandchildren and vice versa. Johnny, still very close to his parents, also loved having them around. The trade spoiled all that.
Minnesota made Roseboro appreciate Los Angeles. The Twins had a talented roster—witness Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew, Dean Chance, Dave Boswell, Jim Perry, et al.—“but they were a troubled team, full of bickering and bitterness,” Roseboro wrote. Whereas the Dodgers had blended well, the Twins divided into racial and ethnic cliques. Roseboro observed that the Latinos, like the Venezuelan Cesar Tovar, who was making only $17,000 in 1968 despite finishing seventh in the MVP voting the previous season, were “badly underpaid and understandably bitter.” The blacks were treated worse. The American League in general did not seem as welcoming to African-American players as the National League, which had hired more Negro League players than the American League after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers. The Twins in particular made things tough on black players because of their owner, Calvin Griffith, whom Roseboro called “the least likable person I met in baseball.” In 1978 Griffith would say under the influence that he had moved the Washington Senators to the Twin Cities because Minnesota had only 15,000 black residents. “Black people don’t go to ballgames,” Griffith said. “But they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death.”
Roseboro found that Griffith “acted as though he was a plantation owner and the rest of us were slaves.” Johnny’s bat weakened against unfamiliar pitchers in a new league, but he played strong behind the plate, winning the respect of his team’s pitchers. “I shook him off only once during the opening game in 1968 against Washington and that guy got a base hit off that pitch,” said Twins ace Dean Chance, who had won 20 games the previous season. “That man [Roseboro] is all right.” But Griffith, who had acquired Roseboro’s contract along with the catcher, thought the Dodgers had overpaid him. Los Angeles general manager Buzzie Bavasi had, in fact, raised Johnny’s salary to $60,000 before trading him to the Twins to soften the blow. The following spring, when Roseboro did not sign Griffith’s contract, which would have slashed his pay by 33 percent, Griffith sent him a letter that said, in effect, “Boy, where else can you work and make $40,000 a year? Take this, or you’ll never work again.”
Roseboro pointed out that the maximum cut allowed by the collective bargaining agreement was 20 percent, or $12,000 in his case, so that’s what Griffith offered next. Johnny tried holding out, but Griffith didn’t budge. Johnny finally accepted the cut but didn’t forgive the cutter. That summer, 1969, Billy Martin took over as the Twins manager. Roseboro liked Martin’s gambling style and winning spirit. He didn’t like Martin’s aggressiveness in ordering pitchers to throw at batters or the way he criticized them, and Johnny told him so. But playing under Martin, his hitting picked up. Roseboro’s average fluctuated between .285 and .320 much of the season, finally dipping to .263 at the end due to fatigue. Roseboro also improved the pitching staff, which he had discovered when he arrived in Minnesota “didn’t know how to set up batters, knock people on their butts, and stuff like that. It took me a year to where we were cooking,” Johnny said. “Dave Boswell and Jim Perry won 20 games that year because they learned how to follow my direction. That’s not being egotistical. That’s because I knew what I was doing.” To back that up, he could point to the spot on the American League All-Star team he earned that season.*
* Roseboro replaced starting catcher Bill Freehan of the Detroit Tigers in the seventh inning and flew out to center field in his only at-bat of the AL’s 9–3 loss in Washington.
Th
e Twins won the American League West division* but lost the league championship series to the Orioles. Griffith fired Martin, who had bloodied Boswell’s face in a bar fight in August, and released Roseboro, whom he thought he was still paying too much damn money. Roseboro initially challenged his release, calling up American League president Joe Cronin to ask, “How in the hell can he release me when I made the All-Star team?” But he found out no rules prevented Griffith from making roster decisions guided by stinginess or stupidity. In the end, Johnny realized, “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
* 1969 was the year the American League and National League expanded to 12 teams each and both leagues split into two divisions.
Marichal came back strong in 1968. On July 28 he drove in the winning run with a Baltimore chop over the third baseman’s head in the 11th inning to win his 19th game of the season. More significantly, it marked the 95th time in his last 96 wins that he had gone the distance, a feat the Houston Chronicle called, even in those days when starters routinely pitched complete games, “one of the most amazing statistics in baseball.” Marichal did it by taking special care of his arm. He squeezed a rubber ball to strengthen his hand and arm but didn’t lift weights because he wanted to maintain his flexibility. After games he soaked in a hot shower for 15 minutes with a towel wrapped around his arm. He ran to keep his legs strong and his conditioning up. He won 26 games that season, losing only nine, but he felt like he could have won 30 with more run support from his teammates.* He had notched five shutouts and allowed only 2.43 earned runs per nine innings. He had made a convincing comeback from his subpar ’67 season.
* Indeed, in six of the games Marichal lost, his teammates produced an average of only 1.17 runs.
Good as Marichal was in 1968, yet again another pitcher eclipsed his performance. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Bob Gibson didn’t win as many games, going 22–9, but he recorded 13 shutouts and posted a dazzling 1.12 ERA, which won him the National League’s Cy Young Award and Most Valuable Player honors. Marichal and Gibson’s dominance along with Denny McLain’s 31 wins (making him the AL’s Cy Young and MVP winner) in 1968 motivated Major League Baseball to lower the pitching mound by five inches—or 33 percent—the next season. Juan complained that the change disrupted his precision, and he struggled to keep his pitches down.
In May 1969 he pulled a muscle in his rib cage throwing a fastball in Houston. He finished the game but lost. He missed his next start and won the start after that by throwing sidearm because the pain wouldn’t allow him to pitch overhand. He couldn’t get past the sixth inning in his next two outings. Marichal recovered and pitched solidly, burnishing his record to 13–4, until he skidded in late July, losing four games in a row for the first time in his career. Pitching coach Larry Jansen sat him down to study some film and compare his motion from the previous year to his recent performances. They discovered he was not kicking his leg high enough and not following through as completely. After adjusting his delivery he finished the final five weeks 7–2 and pitched a game on September 12 against the Reds that he considered finer than his no-hitter in 1963 or even his 16-inning marathon against Spahn later that ’63 season. He faced only 28 batters in a one-hit shutout against a team that included three future Hall of Famers: Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and Johnny Bench. “He was a master, a Rembrandt,” Giants manager Clyde King said. Despite his four-game slump, Juan put up good numbers in 1969: a 21–11 win-loss record, eight shutouts, and 2.10 ERA, lowest in the majors. He was frustrated that his team finished second in the National League West but still had to endure perceptions that he was not a team player, perhaps lingering from Alvin Dark’s earlier criticism. One scout noted, “Don’t really think he cares if the Giants win the pennant. All he wants is about 25 games each year.”
In February 1970, Roseboro and Marichal settled the lawsuit that Roseboro had brought against Marichal. Though the catcher had originally sued for $110,000, he agreed to accept $7,500 paid by the National Exhibition Company, which owned the Giants. Johnny’s anger had dissipated, but the settlement did not appease either man’s feelings. Remorse still troubled Juan. No matter how much he prayed for absolution, absent Johnny’s forgiveness he still shouldered the guilt for his action. Roseboro, on the other hand, knew he had let Marichal absorb all of the blame for their fight, and that had started to gnaw at him. But he was not ready to ask forgiveness himself.
When Johnny’s parents had moved out to California, his mother Geraldine had been able to transfer her employment to the J. C. Penney store in Pomona and keep working. Her heart troubled her at times, though she did not like to complain about her ailments, much like her son. She saw a doctor who prescribed her medication, but she stopped taking the pills when the prescription ran out—and landed in the hospital with fluid in her lungs in late January 1970. Jeri flew from Minneapolis to California to visit her at the Pomona Valley Community Hospital. After three days Geraldine was doing better, and Jeri flew home. But then a blood clot lodged in Geraldine’s brain and killed her. She was 52 years old.
The death of his mother hit Johnny hard. It had come so unexpectedly. And early.
They flew back for the funeral at South Hills Presbyterian Church in Pomona. Johnny helped his father make the arrangements “and it was just terrible,” he wrote. “It’s a real ripoff, and they take advantage of poor people when they’re pushed off balance.” At the viewing, he stared at his mother, once a beautiful lady, reduced to “this waxy-looking woman with all the expression gone from her face.” He could not push that image out of his mind.
He hated funerals and tried to get out of going to his mother’s. He thought she would understand because they had joked with each other about not wanting anyone to go to their funerals. But the rest of his family insisted that he attend. So he did and wished his mother had more to her life and regretted that he had not shown her more of his love. “It became the ordeal I dreaded,” he wrote.
The good news for Johnny that winter was that after Calvin Griffith set him free, he found a home with the Washington Senators. The owner, Bob Short, hired him to catch but also told him he was Short’s insurance policy in case his manager, Ted Williams, blew a fuse and quit suddenly. The situation appealed to Johnny, who thought he could still play and wanted to manage one day. Roseboro liked Williams. He enjoyed hearing his stories and picked up a lot from the master about the science of hitting. “He taught me more about hitting in a few months than I had learned in a lifetime,” Roseboro wrote.
But it was too late. Johnny turned 37 in May. He was fighting his weight, nagged by shoulder and knee ailments, and not making contact. By late June he had managed only 11 hits. Williams called on him to pinch-hit occasionally but employed him behind the plate only a handful of times after that. They clashed when Roseboro argued with Teddy Ballgame about how to handle a young pitcher. Williams insisted the kid throw only curves.
“You can’t ask that poor kid to learn in front of all those people in the stands,” Roseboro said.
“Fuck the people,” Williams said. “It’s time the goddamn fastball pitcher learned to throw a curve.”
“I can’t catch that way,” Roseboro said.
“Then you can’t catch,” Williams said.
By mid-August Roseboro wasn’t catching anymore. Short told him he could try to find another team or stay on as a token coach for the rest of the season. The summer had been hard enough. His grief over his mother’s death remained raw. Johnny had withdrawn from teammates, embarrassed by his failings, sensing that the other players thought he wasn’t worth his inflated salary and feeling unhappy with the racial tensions among the Senators. Suddenly it had gotten worse.
This game he’d played since Bud Plank schooled him in the fundamentals back in Ashland, this game that had seen him into manhood, that had provided the platform for his skills to be watched and applauded and appreciated; this game that had given him two World Series and four All
-Star Games, countless other memories, and that had been his means of earning a living—it was no longer his.
What then? He stayed—what other team would take in a washed-out, middle-age catcher?—because he needed the money. That proved worse than walking away clean because every time he pulled on the uniform knowing he wouldn’t play and every pitcher he warmed up in the bullpen reminded him of how far removed he was from the glory days. Admitting that he could no longer play the game was the hardest thing he had done. “I spent many melancholy moments, lonely, feeling lost, wondering what I could do with myself, wishing I could go back twenty years to start all over again,” he wrote. Of course, no one gets that chance.
That year, 1970, marked the end of Juan Marichal’s dominance. The best pitcher of the 1960s would not be able to carry over his success into the new decade. From 1970 to 1976, when author Tom Wolfe dubbed the ’70s the “Me Decade,” would be pocked for Marichal by mediocre spurts, injuries, and comebacks—some successful but ultimately doomed.
An adverse reaction to penicillin given him to treat an ear infection kept him out of the 1970 season until May. He started slow, winning only three games while losing nine, and was left off the All-Star team for the first time in the past nine years. The sportswriters speculated that he was done, and Juan secretly worried they might be right. Then he found his fastball and control, staging a comeback that saw him win 9 of his last 10 decisions, including his 200th career win on August 28. He became the eighth pitcher to reach that plateau within only 11 seasons and the first Latin to win 200 games in the majors. But his ERA for the season had soared to a shocking 4.12, the first time in eight seasons it had been over three runs per game and the first time ever over four. The critics considered it a telltale mark.
The Fight of Their Lives Page 16