The Fight of Their Lives

by John Rosengren

  Roseboro had been one of the best defensive catchers in the game and a competent coach, but he had not shown an aptitude for business. He had worked every off-season at various jobs, yet a string of bad investments over the years had drained his savings and left him in debt. He had invested in apartment buildings whose value depreciated in decaying neighborhoods. He tried flipping houses—sometimes by relocating them—but couldn’t come out ahead. He started a travel agency that flopped. He opened a television retail store, but his partner cleaned him out, and he could not collect on a lawsuit judgment against the partner. He bought into a Union 76 station, even pumped gas and cleaned windshields himself, but was not able to stay ahead of the fuel bill. He started a record company but wasn’t able to make any money on an album cut by Ike and Tina Turner. Another venture, a nightclub in Pomona, cost more to set up than it ever generated in revenue. The common theme throughout was bum partners blowing Roseboro’s money.

  After the Angels let him go, Roseboro auditioned for the sports commentator’s spot on the Today Show but lost out to Bryant Gumbel. He tried to land a broadcasting job with a Philadelphia station but did not have the experience. He interviewed with Princeton to coach the baseball team but didn’t get the job. He put out feelers in professional baseball but didn’t catch any leads. He tried to get a job at United Airlines but it didn’t pan out. He couldn’t even find work as a security guard at minimum wage. He eventually had to file for unemployment. He couldn’t afford his monthly $195 rent and had to move in with a friend. He ate cookies and drank soda for meals.

  All the while, collection agencies pursued Johnny. He cleared only $2,500 in 1975, but his debts had multiplied to nearly $150,000. “The worst thing about being out of work is being in debt,” he wrote. “You can’t even starve in peace. They made my life hell, coming around and calling and threatening me with all sorts of things.” Johnny was so desperate, he thought about holding up a store or mugging someone just to stave off the creditors. The days got so dark—hopelessly in debt, unable to make a buck, and estranged from his children—that in the summer of 1975 he fondled a .357 Magnum and contemplated plugging a bullet though his brain.

  He might have pulled the trigger if it hadn’t been for Barbara Fouch. They had met in Atlanta when he was still playing for the Dodgers. She worked as the publicist for the Office of Economic Opportunity with the task of promoting a tape Roseboro made urging kids to stay in school. Barbara was tall, thin, and beautiful. A college graduate and former model. But married, like Johnny.

  Barbara split with her husband about a year before Johnny left Jeri. They talked frequently on the phone, commiserating about their troubles. When Johnny felt his lowest, Barbara seemed to be able to bring him up. They eventually decided what they had must be love. Barbara left Atlanta with her small daughter, Morgan, whom she called “Nikki,” to be with Johnny in Los Angeles. Johnny suddenly had a family again. Which proved to be the tonic he needed.

  Marichal and Roseboro met again in August 1975 at the Dodgers’ fifth annual old-timers’ game. Marichal had been a Dodger only briefly earlier that season, but he had agreed to return for the event, perhaps figuring he owed it to the team because he hadn’t been able to help out in the starting rotation. Roseboro, amid the mess of his personal finances, welcomed the chance to be back in a Dodgers uniform and to see old friends. Almost 10 years to the date of their famous brawl, the two former combatants shook hands, though Johnny joked that maybe they shouldn’t because then the sportswriters wouldn’t have anything to write about. The two men even agreed to a joint television interview. “I’m not the type to do what I did that day,” Juan said. “It is a game of passion. I’ve been sorry all these years that it happened.”

  No one knew, of course, just how sorry he was, how his guilt had invaded him, how he had prayed for forgiveness.

  “Years go by,” Johnny said. “You can’t keep a grudge.”

  And he didn’t, really. He wasn’t the type. He did not resent anyone. Other than Calvin Griffith. He didn’t resent the business partners who had betrayed him. He didn’t resent his ex-wife. He didn’t resent Marichal.

  The two had not come completely clean. They had downplayed their feelings for the cameras. But it was the beginning.

  When Johnny had scraped bottom, some former teammates had reached out to him, offering loans and support, but his pride had blocked him from accepting their help. One person he had let in was Don Newcombe, the former Dodgers pitcher who had known his own dark nights and encouraged Johnny to let go of his bitterness toward baseball and make his own way. No one had been able to help him like Barbara, though. When he was drowning in his depression, she threw him a life ring.

  Johnny, Barbara, and Nikki, still a preschooler, settled into a house in the Crenshaw area, one of Los Angeles’ respectable African-American neighborhoods. Johnny and Barbara married, and Nikki called Johnny “Daddy.” The new couple set up a public relations firm, blending the popularity of Johnny’s name and the experience Barbara had acquired. They opened Fouch Roseboro & Associates on Sunset Boulevard. Their client list steadily grew to include the Miss Black America contest, the author Alex Haley, and Andrew Young, then with the United Nations. Soon they were able to move into a larger office down Sunset Boulevard.

  Johnny’s relationship with Barbara, which Jeri knew predated their breakup, drove a bitter wedge between him and his soon-to-be ex and their children. After Jeri was forced out of their house, she did not tell Johnny where they had moved. In divorce court she returned the Christmas present he had given her. Barbara would remain the other woman, a troubling presence between them.

  Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch suggested Johnny write a memoir. Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, published in 1970, had inspired a genre of baseball tell-alls. Johnny added his, Glory Days with the Dodgers and Other Days with Others, to the collection in 1978. In addition to detailing his career, Roseboro confessed to occasional extramarital philandering, related arguments with Billy Martin and Ted Williams, and exposed some of organized baseball’s racial troubles. But most significantly, he tried to set the record straight on his altercation with Juan Marichal. That’s how he opened the book: “The thing I’m remembered best for is the Juan Marichal incident.”

  He knew he would not be remembered for his .249 career average. That his four All-Star Games, two Gold Gloves, four World Series performances, and the pair of Koufax no-hitters he caught had not seared themselves into people’s memories the way that moment with Marichal had. So he addressed the incident up front rather than hide from it.

  He reported the events in the four-game series that led up to Sunday’s game, then admitted telling Koufax he would throw at Marichal himself and how he purposely threw the ball back close to Marichal’s face, right in front of his nose. “It was intentional all right,” Roseboro wrote. “I meant for him to feel it.” He also admitted that he was ready to fight. “I was so mad I’d made up my mind that if he protested, I was going after him. He protested, so I started out of my crouch. . . . I went to hit him with a punch, and he hit me with his bat.”

  There it was. His admission of guilt. While Marichal had gone to the plate that day wondering if the pitcher might throw at him, he had no idea the catcher had plotted to intimidate him with a point-blank throw and intended to attack him. Johnny’s version finally gave credence to Juan’s explanation that he had been frightened and acted in self-defense. That provided Juan with a glimmer of validation. See, it’s like what I told you all along. And it relieved Roseboro’s guilt for having let Marichal absorb all of the blame for the past 13 years. “John felt that because Juan suffered, he suffered, too,” Barbara said.

  Other than the odd appearance at events like the August 1975 Dodgers old-timers’ game, Marichal did not have much to do with baseball after retiring. For the first two years, he stayed in San Francisco and played a lot of golf with his friends Matty and Felipe Alou. He also enjoyed bein
g with his wife and four daughters, to whom he had said good-bye so many times during his playing days. And he spent a lot of time watching baseball games on television, feeling estranged from the game and a bit lost. He tried moving his family back to the Dominican Republic, but the girls, ranging in age from 7 to 15, had been raised mostly in the United States and had difficulty adjusting to the Caribbean culture. The Marichal family came back to San Francisco with plans to buy a house outside of the city, but when a deal on a property they liked fell through, they returned once again to the Dominican Republic. He sold insurance for a while. He and Alma had two more children, another girl in 1980 and a son in 1981. They built a house in the Dominican Republic, and that became their family’s home.

  Juan still attended church on Sundays, said his prayers in the morning and evening, recited the Psalms—“My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth”—and tried to live by the principles set out in the Bible. His mother had taught him right from wrong and that when he did something wrong, he should pray for forgiveness. He was so proud of the many things he had accomplished in his baseball career—the 243 career victories, .631 winning percentage, 244 complete games, 2,303 strikeouts, 2.89 ERA—but one regret persisted. He had become friendly with Roseboro but still carried the guilt. So he often prayed for God’s forgiveness. He also prayed that God would help Johnny forgive him. “It was hard for me to live with that on my conscience,” he said.

  More than 20 years earlier, during his second summer playing professional baseball in the United States, Juan had visited the Hall of Fame with some Springfield teammates. He had been awed then by the giants revered there. And he couldn’t help but notice the absence of Latin players among them. Now, on the other side of his playing days, he wanted his career to culminate in the Hall of Fame. To be enshrined among the game’s immortals, to be anointed one of the legends, to be granted his plaque in the pantheon. The dream of that young island boy who had wanted his mother to hear his name on the radio had matured to this, his desire to be honored as one of the greatest of all time, a distinction he believed he had demonstrated during his 16 seasons in the big leagues.

  Marichal certainly had had a career worthy of the Hall of Fame, but in 1981, his first year of eligibility, he received only 233 votes or 58.1 percent. Seventy-five percent was required for induction. He finished behind Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, Gil Hodges, Harmon Killebrew, and Hoyt Wilhelm. Gibson was the only one who received enough votes (84 percent) to make it in.* But even Gibson could not believe Marichal had not made it. No way did Gibson think he was 104 votes better than his former rival. “He was the greatest pitcher I ever saw,” Gibson said.

  * Each voting cycle, qualified members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America name no more than 10 eligible players whom they consider worthy of Hall of Fame honors. To be enshrined a player must be named on at least 75 percent of the voters’ ballots.

  The most obvious knock against Marichal was that he had never won a Cy Young Award. Despite the fact he had been the most dominant pitcher throughout the 1960s, someone had always outshone him in his best individual seasons.* It also hurt that in his best seasons his team never won the pennant. There were plenty of pitchers in the Hall of Fame who had never won a Cy Young Award and plenty who had won the award but not been inducted, yet it did seem a costly omission on Marichal’s curriculum vitae.

  * In 1963, when he went 25–8 with a 2.41 ERA and 248 strikeouts, Sandy Koufax had gone 25–5 with a 1.88 ERA and 306 strikeouts. In 1964, when Marichal went 21–8 and had a 2.48 ERA and 4 shutouts, Dean Chance of the Los Angeles Angels was 20–9 with a 1.65 ERA and 11 shutouts. In 1965 Marichal was 22–13 and posted a 2.13 ERA with 10 shutouts, but Koufax was 26–8, posted a 2.04 ERA with 8 shutouts, and a record-setting 382 strikeouts. In 1966, Marichal went 25–6 with a 2.23 ERA, but Koufax again bested him with a 27–9 record and 1.73 ERA. In 1968, when Marichal won his career-high 26 games against only 9 losses and had a 2.43 ERA, Bob Gibson was 22–9 with his amazing 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts.

  Marichal’s style also came up short when contrasted against his contemporaries. As a control pitcher with an abundant variety of pitches who preferred the efficiency of a groundout to the flamboyancy of a strikeout, he lacked the overpowering fastball of Koufax, the intimidating approach of Drysdale, and the rapid working pace of Gibson. Frank Robinson, the power hitter who became the first player to win MVP awards in both leagues, “once complained that you couldn’t appreciate Marichal like you could Koufax,” writer Peter C. Bjarkman observes. “And it was a complaint shared by Sixties’ fans as well, who on the whole preferred powerhouse strikeout displays to hidden or subtle mound craftsmanship.” So Marichal likely lost votes because some writers did not appreciate his sublime finesse.

  His reputation had been confused by inconsistent remarks from Alvin Dark, his manager from 1961 to 1964, who at times praised Marichal’s competitiveness and at others criticized him for being “without guts.” Some viewed Marichal as dominant only when he had a lead but ready to surrender when he fell behind. Games lost to odd and conventional injuries over the years seemed to complete the indictment against his will to win. His .631 winning percentage notwithstanding, some may have been seduced by the stereotype that Latin ballplayers did not care as much about winning, which also probably reduced his vote total.

  Whether due to bias explicit or implicit, the fact remained that the members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America had not as of 1981 elected a living Latin player to the Hall of Fame. They had elected Roberto Clemente in 1973 in a special vote immediately after his death in a plane crash on a mission to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua, but other deserving candidates such as Luis Aparicio and Orlando Cepeda had not made it on traditional votes. The Negro League Committee, formed after Ted Williams’s observation in his 1966 induction speech that no Negro League players were in the Hall, did nominate Martin Dihigo, the deceased dark-skinned Cuban who had starred as a pitcher and hitter. So perhaps the threshold remained higher for the Latino who would become the first living player to be selected by the BBWAA.

  All of those factors may have cast doubt about Marichal’s rightful place in the Hall of Fame, but the overwhelming barrier to his induction was the Roseboro incident, the way it tarnished his reputation and threatened to permanently mar his legacy. That incident portended to reduce his remarkable career to a singular immortal moment one Sunday in August when he made a mistake as a young man that he had regretted ever since. “If the vagaries of baseball lore have established one thing, it is that a man can win 243 big league games, win over 20 games in a season six times, strike out over 200 batters in a season six times, lead the league in shutouts twice, lead in earned-run average, pitch a no-hitter—and end up being remembered most vividly for hitting another player over the head with a bat,” wrote baseball historian Donald Honig.

  The way the BBWAA snubbed Marichal elicited protests from players, fans, and pundits. “He was the best,” said Gaylord Perry, Marichal’s teammate in San Francisco from 1963 to 1971. Perry used to bet other guys in the dugout when the bases were loaded with none out that Juan would get out of the fix without allowing any runs—and won eight of ten dinner wagers that way. “He was a great competitor.”

  Sportswriter Leonard Koppett, who himself would be given the Hall of Fame’s J. G. Taylor Spink Award in 1992, wrote in the Sporting News, “How anyone who did vote for Gibson could find a way to not vote for Marichal is hard to understand . . . They were contemporaries and they were equivalent by any set of standards you want to choose.”

  Elsewhere in the same issue of the Baseball Bible, Bill Conlin observed, “The Baseball Writers’ Association of America members who did the voting didn’t all do their homework.” And an editorial remarked, “The results suggest that seniority doesn’t assure wisdom or conscientious scrutiny of the candidates. The voters didn’t show much expertise, for example, in giving Juan Marichal on
ly 233 votes, 104 fewer than Gibson. Such a gap isn’t evident in their remarkably similar records.” In response to that wide gap, Jerry Kirshenbaum declared in Sports Illustrated, “The procedure for election to the Hall of Fame clearly needs reform. Only writers who have held association membership cards for ten years are eligible to vote, but this doesn’t prevent some writers from being wrongheaded or spiteful [toward Marichal because of the Roseboro incident].”

  Juan himself was surprised and stung by the results, which aroused his fears. “If that [striking Roseboro with his bat] had something to do with the voting, I would like to ask all the writers who didn’t vote for me if they had ever done any wrong things in their lives,” he said. “I think in my career and in my life, that is the only wrong thing I have done.” Even though he had become friendly with Roseboro, the lingering memory of that moment gone wrong haunted him.

  The following year, Marichal led the list of pitchers on the ballot, which again included Wilhelm, Drysdale, and Jim Bunning. Marichal had more career victories, more career shutouts, and a vastly superior winning percentage than any of them. He came closer than he had the previous year, garnering 73.5 percent of the vote, but still fell eight votes short. Only Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson earned enough votes for induction, both in their first year of eligibility. Marichal’s fight with Roseboro proved to be a larger barrier than he had anticipated. Art Rosenbaum of the San Francisco Chronicle said he knew of at least two other baseball writers who did not vote for Marichal because of it that year. The outcome suggested that BBWAA members considered the severity of the incident warranted more than a single year of withholding their vote. “Everyone has their own idea of what a Hall of Famer is,” said Ron Rapaport, former Los Angeles Daily News sportswriter. “So much of it is image and reputation.”