Willie Stargell

by Frank Garland

  Although Stargell ultimately became the most successful player ever to come out of Alameda, during his days at Encinal, he wasn’t even the best on his team. That honor went to Harper, who not only stood out in baseball but was an accomplished basketball and football player. “Tommy Harper was an adult man at 17,” Cabral said. “He didn’t fuck around. He was quiet—he was focused at a very young age. He was the same guy at 10 as he is today—very focused.”

  Anthony “Lil” Arnerich, who ran the Alameda Recreation and Parks system when Stargell, Motton and Harper were growing up, said Harper—who would go on to play for 15 seasons in the major leagues—was the best all-around player and athlete of the bunch. “He was a good baseball player, a very good football player and a good basketball player,” said Arnerich, who himself advanced to the highest rung of minor-league baseball before ending his playing career and then watched dozens of top-rate players come up through the Alameda parks system. “Willie was not what you would call a great or even very good high school baseball player. He was an average player for high school.”8

  But William Patterson, the director of the Brookfield Recreation Center in nearby Oakland during Stargell’s teenage years, recalled Stargell as an outstanding athlete with very good body control. “He was a little shy around the girls,” Patterson said. “But playing baseball or something like that, he had no problems.” Patterson said he was friends with Gladys and Percy Russell, and it was Gladys Russell who encouraged Willie to frequent the Brookfield club on occasion. Patterson remembers Stargell as a well-behaved youngster. “When he was with the guys alone, he might have been different,” said Patterson, after whom Brookfield Park was renamed in 2008. “But around me he was always a little subdued. Of course, I knew his mother and father. And when you have that kind of a relationship, a guy is going to tend to not do anything to get in trouble. His mother had told him, ‘Go over there with Bill; you can’t get into trouble there.’”9

  It might have been more than just a matter of staying out of trouble. The Oakland area was most progressive when it came to providing safe, structured havens for its minority youth—in fact, it was far ahead of its time. Patterson, a retired Oakland Parks and Recreation manager, saw firsthand at the Brookfield and deFremery Recreation Centers how an emphasis on leadership—rather than simply a roll the ball out and let ’em play approach—could pay huge dividends both at the time and for years to come. “We would try to get guys to see where they had weaknesses that they had to work on in terms of social development,” Patterson said. “They were already talented athletes; you couldn’t teach them much more in terms of sports. But our thing was to make men out of them.”

  Dorothy Seal Pitts, who would spend virtually her entire adult life working as an advocate for minority youth, served as deFremery’s leadership director and was instrumental in stressing the fact that there was more to life than hitting a baseball square or putting a ball through a hoop. “We had leadership classes,” Patterson recalled. “And Dorothy was the hero of the whole East Bay in terms of her impact on young people. She was the one who drove many people to UCLA and pushed them to get into the University of California, Berkeley. It was the training she gave.”

  Patterson said there was a time when the black high school athletes in Oakland were not getting the publicity that some of their white counterparts received, even though some of those athletes proved to be among the greatest in their respective sports. The list included Hall of Fame basketball player Bill Russell, who starred at Oakland’s McClymonds High School before going on to stardom at the University of San Francisco and later with the NBA’s Boston Celtics.

  Patterson said he and others felt that publicity might be the key to getting those youngsters noticed by college recruiters and professional scouts. But it wasn’t just a matter of harping to the press about providing more coverage—Patterson and others would work with the youngsters to prepare them in case the press came calling. “We provided them guidance and that helped in terms of their self-confidence,” Patterson said. “We made them think about how they would respond to questions and how they could be able to articulate. We didn’t just stay in the gym. When Bill Russell spoke at my retirement, he said the discussions that we had at deFremery prepared him for the world.”

  When Stargell arrived at Encinal High School, he wanted to make his mark not only on the baseball diamond, but on other fields of play. At one point, Stargell—at Harper’s urging—tried out for football, ostensibly to haul in Harper’s passes. But Stargell hurt his knee in practice before the regular season started and that ended his football career. He also played basketball, but at 5-foot-10 did not distinguish himself on the court.

  Despite featuring three players who would eventually make a living in the major leagues, the Jets’ baseball team did not even win its league title during the senior year of Stargell, Harper and Motton. First-year coach George Read had plenty of firepower in the lineup—in addition to the trio he also had Davis, whom he called the best third baseman he ever coached—but no pitching, and that’s what kept the Jets from winning a league title. That, and an overall knowledge of the game. “It was a good group, but I would have given anything if they were juniors,” he said. “They were very good athletes and could do a lot of things, but they really didn’t know a lot about baseball. It takes a little time to get kids to understand the game and what you should do in different situations.”10

  Read remembered Stargell as a good-natured youngster who loved to hit. “He couldn’t come out for the team right away because he was still playing basketball and they were going for the championship,” Read said of Stargell, referring to his senior season. “But he would come out early before practice and want to hit. He was always eager to practice baseball—and especially hit.” When Stargell eventually joined the team and took his position at first base, he was a force in more ways than one. “He was not what I would call a character, but he was fun to be around,” Read said. “He’d talk it up—he was always in the ballgame. He would keep the team alive. If I would have had him for two years, I think he would have been on the mound also. He had a great arm from the outfield—he could really throw.”

  The idea that Stargell would sign a professional baseball contract immediately after leaving Encinal never entered Read’s mind because he figured Stargell would accompany some of his teammates to Santa Rosa Junior College. But Read, who later was later asked by Stargell to present him at his induction into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame, said he wasn’t exactly shocked that Stargell developed the way he did. “When you get to be that good, maybe it’s always a surprise,” he said. But Read said Stargell had decent size and the promise of growing much bigger and that helped him stand apart from some of his contemporaries. “Nowadays, my goodness, there are so many players who are big, strong guys,” he said. “Back then, a lot of guys didn’t have the power that he had. He had to have the good eyes, too, but I think the strong hands, the arms and the wrists were the big thing.”

  But Stargell had something else, something that couldn’t be measured or taught—the passion to develop his baseball skills. “That was the difference between him and the others,” Read said. “Harper was an outstanding athlete—he was athlete of the year in the North Coast and all-conference in three sports. He and the other guys were good, but they all needed a little more motivation than Willie. Willie was always the one who was eager to play. He was always, ‘Let’s get going.’ And I’m sure that’s the way he was on his pro teams. He enjoyed the game and he was always eager to play. That was just his personality.

  “His desire to get out and practice played such a big part in his success. Lots of guys can be big and strong, but if they were natural athletes, they didn’t always have to work that much. They don’t think about it as much as the guy who really enjoys the game and has to work at it, although I don’t think Stargell had to work at it more than anyone else. He just grew into it. He was tall and skinny in high school, but he certainly grew into a b
ig man.”

  Willie shows off his ability to stretch at first base in a game during his senior year at Encinal High School in Alameda, California (courtesy Sandrus Collier).

  Stargell’s growth and development as a man wasn’t limited to his physical traits. A major change occurred during his junior year of high school, when his family left Alameda for a home that Gladys and Percy purchased on 82nd Avenue in East Oakland. Although relatively close geographically, the move was a big one for Stargell, since he and his Alameda friends had often left their mark on their East Oakland adversaries, whether it was during competition on the athletic field or vying for the favors of young women. Now he had to make his home essentially behind enemy lines.

  Patterson recalls the move was not easy for Stargell. “Having grown up in Alameda, he was kind of a step out of place in Oakland,” he said. “He had given Oakland guys a bad time, and of course anytime you come into someone else’s territory, the girls always look more interesting. So you follow the girls. But it was a little more than that with them at the time. Alameda had some outstanding athletes, as did Oakland. These guys were always in competition. They met not only in real games, but on the sandlot. At Brookfield, half the guys hanging out were from Alameda—they had gravitated there with Will and some of the others.

  “Eventually, a lot of Alameda families moved into East Oakland. But in the beginning, it was not so easy for Will. He had never expected his parents to move to Oakland. But it wasn’t easy for people of color to buy homes anywhere at that time, and East Oakland was one of the areas that began to open up.”

  The transition wasn’t entirely smooth. But eventually, Davis’s family also relocated to East Oakland, and Stargell had a natural ally. And over time, he became accepted by those in his neighborhood. Patterson was not surprised. “Will was different,” he said. “He was always like a father figure, always helping other kids. He had a knack for the kind of leadership that you’d call indigenous. Willie would show up and then everyone else would come. He was kind of magic that way. He was kind, he was friendly and he was outgoing—and he didn’t misuse people. He had the trust of his friends. He was the kind of guy you’d want to be around. He looked out for you. He was never worried in his group—he was always secure in his group and people wanted to be around him. He took that everywhere he went. He was a leader on all the teams he was on. His leadership wasn’t the kind where you were out front screaming, but more of a quiet leadership. The kind when you’re down, he’d want to know how you’re feeling—he’d want to spend time helping you turn things around. If you had a problem, he could speak to that and help you change your course. He was smart that way.”

  Stargell’s senior year at Encinal High School was marked by another significant event. It was then that he met and began cultivating a relationship with the woman who would turn out to be his first bride, Lois Beard. Beard and her family had moved to Alameda in 1950; the Beards lived on 78th Avenue, just a few blocks from the Russell home on 82nd Avenue. And it was in 1957, as a freshman at Encinal, that she remembered seeing Stargell for the first time. “I’m going to PE class and he’s coming out,” recalled Lois, who would divorce Stargell in 1966 and later marry a man named Leonard Booker. “As a freshman, you were just awed by the seniors. Back then, they had these ‘49er coats’—jackets with leather sleeves and cloth in the middle. That was the big thing back then. And you were hot stuff if you got a guy’s jacket. I went to his prom and later, he went to mine.”

  Lois said what attracted her to Stargell was his outgoing, friendly nature.

  “He was kind of the class clown person,” she said. “He was always positive and he was always playing jokes on people. His one thing with me was, whenever we’d meet, no matter where we were, he’d step on my toe. I’d hit him in the chest and he’d say, ‘How does it feel to hit steel?’ This is when he weighed about one-sixty.” The two shared a love of music—and a love of dancing. “He was known as a dancer,” Lois said. “And he dressed well. He was just very outgoing and he was popular with guys as well as girls.” Even then, Lois said, Stargell was dedicated to his sport. “He breathed it, ate it, slept it,” she said. “Baseball. You couldn’t get him interested in anything else. He was focused. A lot of our dates we’d end up at the batting cages in San Leandro. I’d go out and sit in the fog while he hit the ball. He always wanted to be playing baseball. For him, it was breakfast, lunch and dinner.”11

  Although Stargell’s Encinal Jets team failed to win a league title his senior year, it was hardly a lost season for him. Scouts looking to secure talent for their respective major league baseball organizations—all of which had deep minor league systems in those pre-amateur draft days—had found their way to the East Bay. One of those scouts—a young West Coast bird dog named Bob Zuk—came out to take a look at Harper and Motton and then, at the behest of Read, turned his attention to Stargell. After a couple of non-productive appearances before Zuk—once at a tryout and once at an Encinal game—Stargell showed the scout some of his skills at a third and final attempt, and Zuk eventually called the Stargell family to arrange a meeting to talk contract.

  Arnerich recalls that scouts were not beating down the doors to get to Stargell. “No scouts except one scout—and that was Bob Zuk,” Arnerich said. “I knew Bob very well and he had a penchant for looking for something that somebody else didn’t see. He took a flier on people and he took a flier on Willie. He was this untapped person—everything had not developed.”

  Arnerich believed Zuk saw one thing—raw power. “That’s all he saw,” he said. “Willie was a pretty big kid. He was an average player for high school. He wasn’t much on finesse. He was a big, awkward kid. Sometimes it’s just something you see in someone. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Like when the scouts went to see Mickey Mantle—some of them didn’t like him.”

  Arnerich said he wasn’t surprised that Zuk went after Stargell and in fact encouraged him to do so. “I told Zuk, ‘Give the kid 500 bucks or a thousand bucks and give him a chance,’” he recalled. Even if Stargell never developed into a star, Arnerich figured, major league organizations like the Pirates at that time had many more minor league clubs than they have now and someone had to fill those rosters. In the early 1950s, for example, more than 400 teams were active in some five dozen leagues. “When I played ball, there were 55 minor leagues,” Arnerich said.

  Cabral said that when Stargell was being courted by the Pirates and eventually signed with the club, no one in the neighborhood made too big of a deal about it. “It was kind of a quiet thing,” he said. “It’s not like it is today, with all the publicity. Baseball was still innocent. It wasn’t corporate. You just went. Willie was going to play baseball. We never thought anything of it.”

  Cabral said the fact that major league baseball didn’t arrive on the West Coast until the Giants and Dodgers moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, from New York and Brooklyn prior to the 1958 season might have had something to do with the lack of fanfare that accompanied professional baseball signings. “We weren’t a baseball area, really,” he said. “Willie just went off the play baseball. He played quite a few years before it struck us what he was doing.”

  Davis didn’t bat an eye when Stargell signed with the Pirates. “Nobody was surprised,” he said. “He definitely had the ability, even then. He always had the potential.”

  Motton said Stargell flew under the radar in terms of notoriety, as he wasn’t getting headlines in the local newspapers based on his performances at Encinal or in summer amateur ball. He didn’t get the publicity of, say, Curt Flood, who made his mark at Oakland’s McClymonds High School and the local American Legion circuit a few years earlier and went on to a successful major league career before ultimately challenging the game’s very foundation—its reserve clause—in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  “If I knew an American Legion game was being played that afternoon, I’d always get the Oakland Tribune the next day just to s
ee what Flood did,” Motton said. “He’d go 5-for-6, 6-for-6 with two home runs. Did he always do that? I’m not sure. But I’m thinking, ‘That Curt Flood must have hit .950.’ So, to put Stargell in that context, no, he didn’t come out of the area with expectations of stardom.”

  Looking back on it, Motton—who coached and later did some scouting with the Baltimore Orioles after he retired as an active player following the 1974 season—said he understood what Zuk saw in Stargell. “If I had been scouting in our area at the time Willie was in high school, I would have seen him as a better prospect than a lot of guys, for the simple reason that when he hit the ball, he always hit it good,” he said. “It always had good life on it. I’ve always felt that the key to being successful as a hitter is not how much you miss the ball, but what happens when you hit it. Do you hit it on the label, on the end of the bat or on the sweet spot? When Willie hit the ball, he pretty much hit it on the sweet spot. The ball had good life and good carry.

  With him, it was always a matter of how much contact he’d make. If he hit the ball, he always made good contact.... A lot of guys can hit the ball but when you put a defense out there, they’re going to take away a lot of hits from guys if they hit it softly. If Stargell hit a ground ball, it would be a one- or two-hopper into the outfield. I’d hit a nine-hopper—and if it didn’t go through, there’s a good chance I’d beat it out. Willie always had the potential to be the hitter he became because of the power—the life in his bat.”

  Motton also said Zuk likely saw something in Stargell’s physical build that led him to believe he had plenty of growing to do. “Willie was taller than the rest of us and he was lanky—he was on the thin side,” Motton said. “If someone would have told me then that Stargell would be playing at 225 or 230 pounds in the big leagues, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have said maybe 195 or 200, but not that big. But now, having scouted myself, maybe this is what (Zuk) saw: yes, he was lanky, but his shoulders were broad. And his arms were long. That’s all part of projecting—how much is this 16- or 17-year-old kid going to fill out? If he naturally puts on another 35 or 40 pounds, he’s going to be a good-sized man. Maybe that’s what Bob Zuk saw. Put 30 pounds on him and let him keep hitting like that, and those long singles are going to be long home runs.”