Willie’s senior class picture at Encinal High School—Class of 1958 (courtesy Sandrus Collier).
Zuk, who died in 2005, remembered the 17-year-old Stargell as a “boneyard.” “He had a real good swing, but he didn’t make good contact,” Zuk would say years later, following Stargell’s election to the Hall of Fame in 1988. “He couldn’t throw worth a lick. He showed me no physical ability at all.” But Zuk said Stargell did possess something special. “All the kids liked him,” Zuk said. “Everybody would help him. He had this tremendous charisma.”12
The Pirates weren’t the only ballclub interested in Stargell. Both the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies liked what they saw, but they dragged their feet in trying to sign him. The Yankees reportedly wanted to give Stargell a $20,000 bonus to sign. “If they had told me that before I agreed to the Pirates’ terms, I would have waited,” Stargell told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor Al Abrams in 1973. “But they told me after it was too late.”13
The Pirates offered Stargell a $1,000 bonus to sign, but Percy Russell countered with $1,500 and after some deliberation Zuk agreed. Stargell took the money and spent $288 on a 1951 Mercury, put $700 in the bank and “had a little fun” with the rest.14Although he signed his contract and received his bonus, Stargell did not report immediately and instead spent the summer following his high school graduation playing American Legion and Connie Mack baseball in the East Bay area with former high school teammates and other local standouts.
Zuk said he didn’t want Stargell to start playing immediately after his signing because he was so raw that he feared he might be released quickly without getting a true opportunity to show what he could do. During the days following his signing, Stargell toiled in a local Chevrolet plant and played baseball when he could. All was going well until Stargell decided to practice his sliding technique at nearby Santa Rosa Junior College. During one attempt, his cleats caught and Stargell crumpled to a heap, the victim of a broken pelvis. Doctors inserted a four-inch pin to aid with the healing process, and one doctor told Stargell his athletic career was history.15 Undaunted, Stargell had no interest in giving up his dream and he never complained about the pain he felt, even though it lingered for the next three years.
Stargell remained in the Bay Area for the next several months, even enrolling at Santa Rosa, where he hoped to be reunited on the field with his former Encinal teammates Motton and Harper. But Zuk got wind of that and told the Santa Rosa baseball coach, who quietly dropped Stargell—a professional who was ineligible to play at the amateur level—from the team. Finally, shortly after 1958 gave way to 1959, Stargell packed up and headed off to Jacksonville Beach, Florida, for his first professional big-league spring training camp. It would be an eye-opening experience in more ways than one.
Chapter 2
Life in the Bushes
STARGELL HAD EXPERIENCED his share of hardships during his early years—being abandoned by his father before he was even born and then being shuttled off to Florida to live with an aunt for the better part of six years were events that no doubt affected his development as a man and impacted the way he related to people. But nothing compared to his experiences in baseball’s on-the-job training ground—the minor leagues. It was there, over the next three years in particular, that Stargell would run smack into his most formidable adversary. It was far tougher to solve than the nastiest Steve Carlton slider.
Racial discrimination.
He got his first taste of it during his initial spring training with the Pirates organization in 1959 in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. There, white players stayed and ate separately from black and Latin players—an arrangement that Stargell would have to accept for his first three years in the minor leagues. It was a life-changing experience for some young players who had never been exposed to such treatment. Ron Brand, a white catching prospect from North Hollywood, California, spent his first spring training—as did Stargell—at Jacksonville Beach. There, the white players would receive meal tickets and be taken by bus to a local restaurant. “The first time I went in there, I didn’t see any black or Latin players,” Brand recalled. “I said, ‘Geez, we don’t have any.’ And then someone told me they were around back. I went out there and they were in a tin shed—it must have been 100 degrees in there. They were sweating. Most of them were sitting outside on the ground eating their food.”1
The conditions were appalling to all the players, but especially to the handful of minority players in camp. One of them was Preston Bruce Jr., a black pitching prospect who had signed with the Pirates in 1958 after graduating from Lyndon State Teachers College in Lyndon, Vermont. Bruce, who grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked as a doorman at the White House for several presidents, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, called the living quarters at Jacksonville Beach “ridiculous.” Although Bruce had experienced segregation in Washington—he could not attend school in his own neighborhood, for example, and also wasn’t allowed to play at the local playground—nothing had prepared him for the experience at his first stop in the Pirates’ system at Salem, Virginia, or his first spring training in Jacksonville Beach.
“We slept over top of ... it wasn’t even a nightclub,” he said of the living quarters in spring training in 1959. “You couldn’t even call it that. But underneath us was a bar and that’s where we stayed. And until midnight or 1 o’clock in the morning every night, you had juke box noise and everything else. Many times you’d go out on the field the next day with hardly any sleep. And the white guys were living in a very different atmosphere. But you didn’t have a choice—you had to go out there every day and compete. The coaches were always there to tell you, ‘Look, every kid growing up wants your job.’ And not only that, but every person you were there with in camp, you had to compete with.”
The noise wasn’t the only issue with the living arrangements. Bruce remembers them being roach-infested. “And the place where we ate—most of the guys would tell you it was almost like a chicken coop,” he said. “And the food was.... But you did it because you loved the game.”2
The hellish conditions didn’t seem to embitter Stargell, at least outwardly. Gene Alley, a young white infield prospect, recalled getting to know Stargell in the clubhouse, largely by making small talk. It was a new experience for Alley—as a native of Richmond, Virginia, he had never played with or against black players before. But he found it easy to befriend Stargell. “Every day we’d sit there and talk—‘Man, another day of this’ and things like that,” he said. “He was big and I was a little runt—I weighed 145 pounds. We kind of hit it off, just like that. He was such a nice guy—to me, he was like a big ol’ teddy bear.”3
Alley may have treated Stargell with respect, but he was in the minority. The treatment that Stargell and all the black and Latin players received did not improve when teams broke camp and headed off to play in their respective leagues. Stargell, tutored at first base in camp by minor-league veteran Tony Bartirome—who later became the big league club’s trainer and a close friend of Stargell’s—was assigned to San Angelo, Texas, Pittsburgh’s affiliate in the Class D Sophomore League. The eight-team circuit featured three teams in New Mexico (Carlsbad, Hobbs and Artesia) and five in Texas (Alpine, Plainview, Midland, Odessa and San Angelo). The Pirates’ club, which moved to Roswell, New Mexico, midway through the season due to fan disinterest in San Angelo, struggled to a last-place finish with a 48–77 record, 41½ games behind league champion Alpine. Just three of Stargell’s teammates would go on to reach the major leagues—Brand, catcher Vic Roznovsky and pitcher Bob Priddy.
The left-handed hitting Stargell compiled solid offensive numbers playing for manager Al Kubski’s club, hitting .274 and driving in 87 runs. But the long-ball power that would make him one of the game’s most feared sluggers mostly lay dormant amid the dusty, dirty, southwest towns, as he finished with just seven home runs. “And I think he only hit two of those to right field,” Roznovsky said. “He couldn’t pull the ball.”4
Priddy also recalled the swings and misses, which came in great frequency that season. “I remember talking to Kubski one time about Stargell and I asked him, ‘What is it you see in him?’ He said, ‘Look, every once in a while he’ll hit a ball and it’s what you call major league power.’ He only hit seven home runs, but, boy, when he hit one, he hit it. The ball went a long way down there, but when he hit one, you just knew from the sound of the bat. It was just like an explosion.”6
Brand recalled that Stargell “struck out a ton that first year. I’m one of the few guys who played with him a full season and hit more home runs than he did—I hit 11 and he hit seven. I think he led every team he played for after that. But that first year, three or four of us hit more home runs than he did. But that was because he wasn’t fully developed.”
Brand said when he first saw Stargell in spring training that year, he was hardly bowled over, as Stargell couldn’t have weighed more than 160 pounds. “He was really skinny and really awkward,” Brand said. “I remember thinking that everyone was talking about what a prospect he was, but, man, I didn’t think that guy could play.”
While Stargell held his own at the plate—save for the strikeouts—he had plenty of adventures in the field. His primary problem? He couldn’t solve the mystery of the pop-up. Stargell and John Mason, a utility infielder, simply couldn’t catch them, so Kubski told Brand—then a shortstop—and another infielder, Sandy Johnson, to essentially catch any ball in the air that came down in the infield. “It wasn’t like, ‘Teach ’em how to do it,’” Brand said. “It was more like, ‘Get ’em out of the way.’ So anything we could get to, we’d run Willie off. The problem was, he’d get too far underneath the ball, then go back, then he’d have too much weight going back and fall down.”
“We used to kiddingly tell him to wear a helmet out there,” Doepker said.
Stargell did possess one defensive weapon that later would serve him well: his left arm. Some who played in the Pirate system at the time say Stargell’s arm strength rivaled that of fellow Bucco Roberto Clemente—considered the owner of perhaps the greatest throwing arm in major league history. Brand said Stargell’s arm was even better. “You could hear it go by—it was like a rope,” he said. “He would throw the ball so hard that it would go 70 or 80 feet off one bounce. He would bounce it off the grass close to third base and it would bounce all the way in on one hop.”
And, despite still feeling the lingering effects of the broken pelvis he suffered the previous year, Stargell had more than adequate speed. “He could run like crazy,” Roznovsky said. “But he had a lope to it—it was like a limp. I don’t know if he was still favoring his injury or what.”
While Stargell was able to pass most of the on-field tests he faced, it was the off-field challenges that proved tougher than an inning full of mile-high pop-ups. Specifically, the communities of the Sophomore League did not accept minority players and, in fact, Bruce said the league did not allow more than four minority players on any team, in part to keep attendance from dropping and also to keep a lid on any potential racial unrest.
The prejudice manifested itself in numerous ways—and all of them were particularly galling for the black players, including Stargell, whose childhood neighborhood was a melting pot and not a monocultural ghetto. He had never experienced racial prejudice and he got it in megadoses in places like Roswell, Midland and Odessa.
On the outside, Stargell tried not to let the hurt show—and he was rather convincing, a couple of his teammates recalled. Brand remembered Stargell as a happy guy who laughed readily and enjoyed dancing. “He was a big California junkie—he had this felt-tip pen drawing of the state of California on his sweatshirts,” Brand said. “He was always having fun. I never saw him upset. He used to laugh at me because I was a high-energy player—I used to bust a helmet or punch a wall every now and then.”
Roznovsky had the same view. “He was always a very joyful guy. He didn’t seem like he ever had a bad day.” Doepker couldn’t understand how Stargell managed to keep his spirits up, given the treatment he received on a daily basis in the Sophomore League. “You have to remember that in 1959, there was still overt discrimination in Texas and the Deep South. When I look back, I say, ‘My Lord.’ But we’ve made some strides. We’re talking 50 years now. We’ve made some real good strides. But we’re not there yet.”
They were nowhere near it in 1959. San Angelo/Roswell’s four minority players—Emiliano Terreria, Julio Imbert, Mason and Stargell—lived and ate separately from the white players, both at home and on the road. Bruce, Stargell’s spring training mate, had been had been released before the club moved from San Angelo to Roswell; he had been unable to recover from a serious auto accident that occurred the previous off-season while he was teaching school in Vermont. But before Bruce left, he was subjected to the most horrific kinds of prejudicial treatment, not only from fans but also instructors in the Pirates’ system.
“I had come from an environment in Vermont where I was the only black and moved into an incredibly oppressive one,” Bruce said of life in the Sophomore League. “They’d call you the n-word. They’d call you ‘watermelon boy.’ They’d call you ‘8-ball.’ And you had no recourse. You would put yourself in danger and your teammates in danger if you said anything. And no one else was going to step up and do anything about it.”
Bruce said the prejudicial treatment was as common as “breathing.” And it wasn’t just on the road. Bruce said the black players heard it from the home crowd as well. “It was simply pervasive—you were ‘boy.’ You were ‘nigger.’ Anything that they wanted to call you, they called you—you just looked up and kept moving.”
White players certainly were aware of the verbal abuse. Brand said he can remember having to defend the black players to the white fans. “I would get in people’s faces,” he said. “People would be there in the stands with their kids, calling them those names, just because they were black. Jiminy Christmas—what kind of example were they setting? I would hear, ‘There are a lot of good niggers, but they’re still niggers.’ Several people said that to me. And these are well-dressed people with their families, sitting in box seats.”
While Bruce said most of the minor-league coaches, instructors and managers in the Pirates’ system were fair, he recalls one pitching instructor who had racial issues and also seemed to resent Bruce because of his background, having grown up in Washington, D.C., and graduated from college before signing with the Pirates—at Eisenhower’s recommendation. “He was from the old school,” Bruce said. “He had some major issues. There was a distinct difference in the way he would deal with you, just in terms of how he talked with you, the kind of instruction he gave you. He was very condescending.”
It was 1959, five years after the landmark legal case, Brown vs. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. But change did not occur overnight—indeed, substantive change was years away. So even though the law said school segregation was illegal, it took time for many schools to implement the new law.
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in public establishments that had a connection to interstate commerce or were supported by the state.7 That act and others that followed also struck blows against discrimination in public schools and higher education—but that was years after Stargell, Bruce and a handful of other black Pirate farmhands were trying to negotiate the sharp turns of life in the dusty Texas and New Mexico towns of the Sophomore League.
In the meantime, the minority players got on the best they could. “Did it affect you? Obviously it did,” Bruc
e said. “But guys just did what they had to do in order to move on. Some did better than others. And not only were you talking about the conditions there—you also had [white] teammates you had the sense weren’t that happy about it either. They were coming from conditions where they hadn’t played with black ballplayers that much.”
On the field, black and white ballplayers generally got along well. Bruce said teammates worked together and pulled for one another but didn’t socialize much. The black players typically would find a room in a black neighborhood—somebody with a home would take a player in. “And that’s where you stayed,” Bruce said. “Very few places had restaurants where you could go. If you didn’t get food from the family you were living with, there were a limited number of black establishments and those were pretty much the only places you could eat.”
Bruce said the black players talked about their situations from time to time but didn’t dwell on it. “It didn’t matter—that was the condition under which you had to play and that was the condition you had to deal with. Pure and simple. It wasn’t going to change. Nothing there by law or anything else could change it. This was the climate of that time. You were dealing with segregation.”
Bruce said he could not remember a single black player complaining about the racial discrimination, whether during the regular season or during spring training. And neither could he recall a coach or manager coming to a black player to console him about what was going on. “You would take virtually anything,” he said of the abuse. “You wanted to play. That was your dream. The dream was to play the game.
Willie Stargell Page 4