by Felipe Alou
One of the early repercussions from Rafael Trujillo’s assassination was mounting civil unrest and mob violence in the Dominican Republic, which forced us to play a truncated Winter League season. I used that limited time wisely, purposely standing closer to the plate in my ongoing quest to conquer the inside fastball.
At spring training everything clicked, as if all the puzzle pieces finally fit. I recall that Dark played me in every game, which wasn’t the normal thing to do, and I rewarded him with the best spring of my career, hitting .461.
“Felipe, are you tired?” Dark asked me one day.
“No,” I said. “Keep playing me. I want to carry this into and through the regular season.” And I did.
The stats might say that my 1966 season with the Atlanta Braves was better, but I believe 1962 was the best season I had in the big leagues—a .316 batting average, with 25 home runs and 98 RBI.
Whereas I used to be a leadoff hitter, Dark shuffled me all over the lineup, hitting first, second, third . . . everywhere but eighth. A sportswriter asked him about it one day. “How come you’re using Felipe Alou everywhere?”
“Felipe Alou is a time bomb in the lineup,” Dark replied. “He can surprise you anytime, anywhere in the lineup.”
Boy, my chest puffed out after reading that in the newspaper. It really boosted my confidence. I felt great, as opposed to what Bill Rigney did two seasons earlier, when he told a sportswriter at the All-Star break that he wasn’t making any changes with our struggling lineup because he didn’t have anybody on the bench to turn to. I took that personally. I believed Rigney singled me out, that his comments were directed specifically at me.
It was a lesson I carried with me years later when I became a manager. I learned that when you’re managing people, what you say to the media impacts a player—especially a young player. You can send messages through the media, but not destructive ones. You can say things like We’re not hitting instead of A couple of guys are not hitting. If I’m struggling as a hitter, nobody has to tell me. It’s everywhere—on TV, on the radio, in the newspaper. As managers we have to be careful that we don’t aggravate the situation.
It probably helped that I wasn’t giving Dark many opportunities to doubt me. I started the season with a twelve-game hitting streak that saw my batting average soar to .438 with 4 home runs and 14 RBI. One of those homers was a moon shot at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, where they had a large clock with the words OFFICIAL WATCH situated above the scoreboard in left field. My home run busted the W in that sign, which stood 50 feet off the ground and 328 feet from home plate. No wonder Dark said what he did about me: “Felipe Alou is a time bomb in the lineup.”
That doesn’t mean it was always smooth sailing with Dark. We lost one day to the Houston Colt .45s, a woeful expansion team that later became the Astros. Those early seasons in Houston, before the Astrodome was built, the Colt .45s played at old Colt Stadium, where it seemed as if all the mosquitoes in Texas flew in for the games. That night we suffered a bad loss to a bad team in a bad ballpark; afterward Dark was in one of his dark moods. There was a spread of food on a clubhouse table—a postgame feature relatively new to baseball. In a spasm of startling rage, Dark jerked the tablecloth and knocked over the table, sending food everywhere.
Three thoughts raced through my mind. The spread was provided for us by this nice white couple, and to this day I wonder how they felt seeing all their hard work ruined by an immature fit of anger. I thought about how we had come to rely on the postgame clubhouse food—especially the black and Latino players, since it was still tricky finding restaurants that would serve us, especially late at night. Mostly, I thought about hungry and starving people, like those in my Dominican Republic homeland.
The visiting clubhouse at Colt Stadium was makeshift, with a dirt floor, and after Dark sent the food flying I saw a boiled egg rolling along it. I picked it up, dusted off some dirt, and started eating it. Looking Dark square in the eyes, I said, “You’re not supposed to throw food away. When people are starving, you don’t throw food away.” The room fell silent. It was tense. But I made a statement I thought needed to be made.
Because we were winning, and winning a lot, the problems that season were few and the mood mostly upbeat. In the Bible it says love covers a multitude of sins. Well, in a big-league clubhouse, winning covers a multitude of problems.
Speaking of the Bible, I was delving deeper into my faith. I had already connected with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and now I had fallen in with a man who introduced me to the Pocket Testament League. I was speaking in churches and prisons and working in the offseason with missionaries in Latin American countries.
I was a young father, too. My firstborn, Felipe, was a baby, with Maria, José, and Moisés soon to arrive.
That doesn’t mean my teammates and I weren’t prone to our own immaturities, typical of young men in their twenties thrown together to live, work, and travel on a day-to-day basis. We were ballplayers, full of machismo and short on experience, which is never a good combination.
One of the dumb things we were doing was playing chicken with our automobiles. We would climb in a couple of cars and race down Army Street—now called Cesar Chavez Street—toward the San Francisco Bay. Usually, the main culprits were Carlos Virgil (Ozzie’s brother), José Pagán, and Juan Marichal, who enjoyed fast cars and speed. I never drove, but I foolishly rode along. They would race down Army Street straight for the bay, with neither driver wanting to give in and slow down. Only when it was imminent that we were going to die, or at the very least plunge into the bay, would they hit the brakes. A few times I would get out of the car after our wild ride, trying to calm my adrenaline rush, only to see that we had stopped only feet from the seawall. We felt invincible.
The cops, as they tend to be with professional athletes, were more fans than enforcers of the law. One time Marichal and I were riding to the airport, and we were late for our team flight to Los Angeles for a series against the Dodgers. Typical of Marichal, he was speeding, and it led to that dreaded sound of a police siren.
The officer recognized us. “You with the team?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you driving so fast?”
Marichal explained that we were running late to the airport for our team flight. Fumbling for a U.S. driver’s license he did not have, Marichal first handed the officer a lottery ticket and then his Dominican Republic driver’s license.
“Don’t worry. Don’t look for it,” the officer finally said. “I’m going to let you go because you’re with the Giants. Go ahead and catch your flight.” He might as well have also added, And beat those Dodgers!
Earlier in the season Marichal and I bought handguns in Houston—Marichal a Smith & Wesson revolver and I a Browning .380 pistol. We were planning to take them back with us to the Dominican Republic.
We were in Cincinnati on a road trip, and, common for teams at the time, the white players and coaches stayed on one floor and the blacks and Latinos on another floor. Marichal and I were rooming together, and Willie Mays, who always had his own room, was across the hall. Like a couple of big, fun-loving kids, Mays and Marichal would wrestle each other. The doors to our hotel rooms were open that day, sort of like a loose setting in a college dorm. Mays was straight across the hallway, waiting for room service to arrive, since he rarely ate out because of the crush of people who followed him.
He walked across the hallway into our room, wanting to wrestle. Marichal obliged, and they started to grapple—these two strong men, future Hall of Famers. After a struggle full of grunts, Marichal pinned Mays to our hotel room floor. Getting up, Mays wanted to wrestle again. They did, and this time Mays pinned Marichal. Getting up again, Marichal wanted to go a third time for a tiebreaker, but Mays wanted to stop. Marichal goaded him for another contest, but Mays refused.
Jokingly, Marichal picked up his Smith & Wesson off his bed and said, “You want to wrestle with this?”
“Put that thing away�
�don’t play!” Mays said, his normally high-pitched voice an octave higher than usual.
Marichal later learned that there was a single bullet in one of the chambers. It was a sober reminder that even though we were young and having fun and feeling invincible, we still needed to be careful.
But that’s the kind of team we had, guys who could joke and kid and even wrestle with each other. Given that we were a team with a mixture of whites, blacks, and Latinos, more so than any other big-league club at the time, we genuinely enjoyed each other and wanted to be around each other. We had what teams call chemistry. Again, winning helps create that closeness.
I didn’t maintain the torrid pace I started the season with—there would be no challenges to becoming the first batter to hit better than .400 since Ted Williams in 1941—but I did go on a sizzling hot streak where I got nine hits in nine consecutive official at-bats.
The streak started in September, and by then I had made my first All-Star team. I wasn’t the starting right fielder, however. That honor went to Roberto Clemente. But I did pinch-hit a sacrifice fly, knocking in one of our three runs in a 3–1 victory against the American League.
My streak started September 8, against the Chicago Cubs. I started 0 for 2 before pounding three straight singles. I would get six more consecutive hits—going 9 for 9—before recording an out. This is how the streak went:
September 8: I hit three singles versus the Cubs after going 0 for 2 at Candlestick Park.
September 9: I went 4 for 4, with a double and a home run to left field off Cubs pitcher Bob Anderson, who used to give me a lot of trouble. That night I spoke at a church in Palo Alto, about thirty-five miles from San Francisco. Some of my teammates didn’t like that I was spending more and more time speaking at churches, thinking that I was taxing myself too much, but I didn’t allow that to dissuade me. There were about two thousand people in attendance, and I didn’t notice one particular face until after I was done speaking—Alvin Dark. When our eyes met he beamed one of the biggest smiles he ever gave me.
September 10: I went 2 for 2 with two walks against the Pittsburgh Pirates, again at Candlestick Park. Guys were now pitching around me, and I drew the walks from Harvey Haddix and Roy Face, the only walks they surrendered that day.
September 11: The Pirates started knuckleball pitcher Tom Sturdivant. I always hit knuckleballers and Sturdivant well, and by now I was seeing the ball like a grapefruit, so I felt confident. I should have known something was up, though, when I looked to the sky pregame and saw a buzzard circling overhead. My first at-bat, with a runner on second, I hit a rocket between third base and shortstop, probably the hardest-hit ball of the streak. Third baseman Dick Schofield lunged for the ball and was able to knock it down with his glove. It went straight to shortstop Dick Groat. Because the ball was hit so hard, Groat had time to barely throw me out at first base. Too bad, because in my other two at-bats I got a single and a home run off Sturdivant to boost my batting average to .327.
Then, as if in a finger snap, I sank into a slump. I went 0 for 4, 0 for 4, 0 for 3, 0 for 4, and 0 for 1 over the next five games, going from seeing the ball like a grapefruit to crying for a base hit. Finally, on day six of my drought, I got a single . . . off Tom Sturdivant. I was 0 for 17 at that point. My hitting streak and my hitting drought both ended against Tom Sturdivant. That’s baseball.
I learned something from that experience, something I took with me when I became a coach and a manager. I learned that when you’re hot and you’re on base a lot, you get tired—especially if you’re a hitter and a base runner, as I was. Baseball is a grind, and fatigue in general is an ongoing opponent. The day after my 9-for-9 hitting streak ended, Willie Mays collapsed from exhaustion in our dugout at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, with my brother Matty replacing him in center field. That’s why I have the utmost respect for Pete Rose. I don’t know what he took, and I don’t care. All I know is that Pete Rose hit a lot, was on base a lot, and ran the bases a lot, and he was never tired.
They say that in baseball good pitching beats good hitting. I’m not so sure about that, because when you’re hot as a hitter, it doesn’t seem as if anybody can get you out. Mays had a saying: “When I’m not hitting, I don’t hit nobody. But when I’m hitting, I hit anybody.”
One of the hottest hitters in baseball that season was Frank Robinson. He batted .342 while leading the National League in runs scored (134) and doubles (51), along with what modern metrics have introduced to us—on-base percentage (.421), slugging (.624) and on-base plus slugging (1.045). Two other statistics from that season were also telling—Robinson led the league in intentional walks (16) and being hit by pitches (11).
Pregame on the same day Mays collapsed in our dugout, we were in Cincinnati for the start of a two-game series against the Reds, and I overheard Alvin Dark telling the pitchers and catchers how they were to handle Robinson, who was really doing damage against us and was notorious for defiantly crowding the plate. “Pitch him inside, hit him, walk him—but whatever you do, you’re going to pitch him inside!” Dark said. Our pitcher was the veteran Billy Pierce, who was having a great season. First at-bat, first pitch, Pierce goes inside, and Robinson crushes it for a two-run homer. Third at-bat, first pitch, Pierce goes inside again, and Robinson hits a rocket for a solo homer. Three at-bats, two home runs.
“F—!” Pierce shouted as Robinson circled the bases. “I’m going to pitch him the way I want!”
He didn’t get the chance. Thanks to Robinson’s two bombs, Dark lifted Pierce after six innings, relieving him with Don Larsen. It was the first and only time I ever heard Pierce curse, so I knew he was upset. The game will do that to you.
As with hitters, who can go on hot streaks and then suddenly turn cold, the same happens with ball clubs. I was on that 9-for-9 hitting streak in the middle of a seven-game winning streak for our team, a stretch that also saw us go 16-3 over nineteen games. Then, in that inexplicable way that is baseball, we lost six straight.
On September 20, in the throes of that losing streak, we crossed paths with the Los Angeles Dodgers at our hotel in St. Louis. They had arrived from Milwaukee and had an off day, while we were finishing a two-game series against the Cardinals. We were playing poorly, and the Dodgers won eight of eleven games to build a four-game lead over us. With only nine games left in the season, I think most of us believed it was over. I’ll admit I thought it was. A lot of us—including me—already sent our families home in preparation for the offseason.
To be successful you have to have chemistry and teamwork. A team can lose that without even knowing it. And we had lost it. Good players alone don’t make a good team. If you don’t have chemistry, teamwork, and togetherness, you’re not going to win. We had it at the start of the season, but that desire got lost, and to this day I don’t know why or how it happened. Little did we realize that our manager noticed it, and he was about to do something about it.
In the hotel lobby in St. Louis some of us ran into Dodgers relief pitcher Ron Perranoski, and he jokingly said to me, “You might as well go home to the Dominican Republic. We have this pennant race sewed up.” Tommy Davis, a good guy and a great hitter for the Dodgers, echoed the same thought. “I guess we’ll see you guys next year,” he said. It was a friendship statement, not a dig. Not disrespectful. I don’t know whether Perranoski’s and Davis’s words reached Alvin Dark’s ears, but what I do know is we lost to the Cardinals in a walk-off that night and Dark called a team meeting the next day in Houston.
“Guys,” he said, “we have a chance to win this.”
I don’t think anyone believed him. He added that we were also going to conduct team practices every day before our games. That didn’t go over well. A lot of us thought it was a punishment.
At the first practice Orlando Cepeda showed up in one of those heavy workout jackets you wear early in spring training, when the weather is still cold. It was his way of showing up Dark. But Dark ignored him. Cepeda was complaining. I was complaining. We
were all complaining. But Dark adamantly and ardently practiced us every day, imploring us that we could still win the pennant. It woke us up. We won six of our last nine games. Meanwhile, the Dodgers stumbled to a 2-7 finish.
It didn’t help the Dodgers that Sandy Koufax was struggling with a vascular injury—numbness in his left pitching hand, particularly in his index finger, which left it cold and white. Koufax was 14-4 in July, with 209 strikeouts, when the Dodgers shut him down after he took his fifth loss on July 17—lasting only an inning against the Reds. They say he crushed an artery in his palm that season and at one point his index finger split open. These days you shut down a pitcher the rest of the season—especially someone of Koufax’s stature. But the Dodgers brought Sandy back in September. He still wasn’t right, finishing 14-7 after two more losses—one of them in a three-game playoff for the pennant and both of them ugly.
We were one game back going into the last game of the season. Dark had benched me the previous three games. He was playing Matty more, though, who rewarded him by going 14 for 27 in the six games he played in over the last eight days of the regular season. But now, in that regular-season finale, Dark benched both me and Cepeda. I had 97 RBI and Cepeda had 113 RBI and 34 home runs. Cepeda saw it as an insult, a slight, a slap in the face, but truthfully Cepeda struggled in September, batting .232 with only 3 extra-base hits—2 homers and 1 double. I believe sitting us was more a testament to our depth. How many managers could say they were able to bench one Hall of Famer (Orlando Cepeda) and start in his place another Hall of Famer (Willie McCovey)? And Dark’s options in the outfield with me on the bench were Matty Alou and Harvey Kuenn, who had been the American League batting champ three seasons earlier, hitting .353. I’m a proponent of the designated hitter, and it sure would have been nice to have been able to DH someone like Cepeda, McCovey, or me.
Our lineup was good enough to beat Houston 2–1 in a day game at Candlestick Park, thanks to Willie Mays and the solo home run he hit in the eighth. We rushed to the clubhouse afterward, crowding around a radio to see what would happen with the Dodgers. It was gut-wrenching, a scoreless tie going into the eighth inning, with the Dodgers’ Johnny Podres and the Cardinals’ Curt Simmons throwing gems. Finally, St. Louis catcher Gene Oliver delivered an eighth-inning homer. The run held, giving the Cardinals a 1–0 victory and the Dodgers their fourth consecutive loss. The regular season was over, and we finished in a flat-footed tie with our archrival—both teams finishing 101-61. A three-game playoff would decide who was going to the World Series.