“There were just certain things you understood. We all came from different places, but we all understood the game. Not the game of baseball. We all understood the game. The white guys didn’t have to deal with that. They came out to play ball. But we were dealing with a host of things you knew you were going to deal with. You knew you would deal with a limited number of spots on the team; you knew you would deal with a limited number of places you could break in. It didn’t matter how hard you could throw. You knew that not only were you competing for a roster spot, but you were also competing with your black ballplayers because only a few of you could be on that same team. We were dealing with a whole lot of mess. And also trying to be competitive and learn the game and do all the other things you had to deal with that the other guys didn’t. You wanted to make it to The Show. And you were willing to do that and more.”
Among the things black players had to contend with was the unofficial Sophomore League “quota” that Bruce claims existed and to which Stargell referred in his autobiography. “Looking back, even in the major leagues at that time, you did not typically find three or four black ballplayers playing at any one time during that period on the field,” Bruce said. “You understood that. And you did not find them up the middle—pitcher, catcher, shortstop, second base, centerfield. That was the brain trust. That was the game. And you understood that. And you knew that’s what you had to work with, so that’s what you worked with. You would battle it any way you had to make it. You would walk through crap to be there. And you did.”
Stargell boarded with a black family in Roswell and the accommodations were acceptable, but the same couldn’t be said for his living quarters on the road. For example, on one road trip to Artesia, New Mexico, the four minority players were scheduled to stay with a woman who used her home as a base for her fishing bait business. The conditions were deplorable. It was a lonely existence for Stargell, who missed his friends and the freedom that came with living in the Bay Area. In particular, the road trips were most difficult; that’s when he felt most isolated, as half of the minority players on the team did not speak English. “The only time I saw the rest of the team,” he said, “was at the ballpark.”8
Brand recalled the team bus leaving the black players off in a different part of town from where the white players stayed. “I can’t even describe some of the places we dropped them off,” he said. “They were just dumps. It was sickening. They never made a big stink about it, though; that was the way it was. But it makes me sick to think about it. I didn’t think much about it then, but I knew it was wrong.”
Roznovsky, who hailed from Shiner, Texas, didn’t think much about it either. “Anyone who grew up in the South, they thought that was the natural thing,” he said. “But guys like Willie grew up in Oakland, and it wasn’t that way there. He was a pretty verbal guy, but he didn’t complain.” Roznovsky said Stargell and the rest of the minority players went along with the program but they didn’t like it. “It was degrading,” he said. “Looking back, I didn’t realize how much the guys hurt. They just weren’t used to that.”
Meals, particularly on the road, also were a challenge, since the minority players could not join their white teammates in restaurants. Again, they had to either eat in the kitchens or stay on the bus and rely on teammates to bring them food. Priddy doesn’t remember the minority players ever openly complaining about it. “But you could see it in their faces,” he said.
Roznovsky recalled Bruce “had it bad” over the treatment he received. “He couldn’t take it—he didn’t think that type of thing should happen in the United States. He complained to the manager about it,” Roznovsky said of Bruce, who doesn’t remember that happening.
Bruce also doesn’t recall the racial discrimination ever getting to Stargell, nor does he remember specifically talking about it with his one-time roommate. “If you sat around to discuss it or go through all of it, you probably wouldn’t have stayed,” Bruce said. “You were focused on wanting to get to the Big Show. That was your goal. Your dream. That’s all Willie talked about—getting to The Show. In the apartment, he always had a bat in his hand. He would wake up swinging the bat. That swing—that same swing that you saw later—that was not something he concocted at some later date. That was him, period. He was a lot of fun. He was very serious about the game, but he was a lot of fun. He was not rebellious. You would not have made it if you were rebellious. That’s how it worked.”
Stargell might not have displayed much of a rebellious attitude, but one incident sticks out in Doepker’s mind. On one of the many long road trips, this one from Hobbs, New Mexico, to Midland, Texas, the Roswell team bus stopped at a restaurant outside the Texas town and, in customary fashion, the black and Latin players were led around the back to the kitchen. Stargell, though, would not go. Instead, he sat on the bus, crying. “Willie had his pride,” Doepker said. “He just would not go along with being ushered back into the kitchen. So he sat on the bus and we brought him back his food. Generally speaking, you did not see any overt reaction on his part. But that one time showed me, well, he does hurt inside—but he doesn’t show it on the outside. He never became angry and he had every reason to, for heaven’s sake. That’s the way things were then. It’s unbelievable that he didn’t have more resentment or more overt anger. That’s one of the things I admired the most about him. He was always such an ‘up’ person. He never became bitter.”
Lois Beard Booker, Stargell’s first wife, said the racism definitely bothered Stargell. “But he was a person who was definitely focused—he was not going to let outside situations affect what his goal was. And his goal was to play in the major leagues.”9
To that end, Stargell chose to focus his energy on improving his game. It’s no wonder; there was little else to do in San Angelo, Roswell and the other Sophomore League towns. “What I remember most is a lot of dust,” Priddy said. “And, boy, when it hailed ... I never saw hail like that. It was the size of baseballs. And they had these tarantulas—they’d come right out on the field.”
The schedule featured mostly night games, so daylight hours were filled with killing time until the players could head to the ballpark. It was on one of his walks to the ballpark in Plainview, Texas, that Stargell’s life was forever changed—and not surprisingly, race was at the center of it. Walking across town, Stargell saw two men wearing trench coats and standing at the gate, near the clubhouse. As Stargell approached, he began to feel uneasy, but tried to remain calm. As soon as he reached them, one of the men opened his trench coat, pulled out a rifle and put the barrel to the middle of his forehead. “And his exact words were, ‘Nigger, if you play tonight I’m gonna blow your brains out,’” Stargell said in a New York Times interview in 1988. The man then walked away. Stargell gathered himself and continued into the clubhouse. He faced a major decision—give in to the demands of an armed bigot and save himself, or put his life on the line by playing the game he loved—the game for which he lived. “My kidneys were weak and I was frightened, real scared,” he said. “But by the time the rest of the team got there, I decided that if I was gonna die, I was gonna die doing exactly what I wanted to do. I had to play ball.”10
Although shaken for hours, he didn’t say anything to anyone at the time and ultimately he did play. And rather than let the incident serve as a distraction, Stargell said it helped sharpen his competitive urge and essentially served as a touchstone of sorts for the rest of his life—no situation would ever be tougher. Nothing could be insurmountable. “When your life is threatened ... it forces you to take a stand,” Stargell said years later. “I had only one alternative—to keep playing.”11
Stargell concluded his first professional season with a .274 batting average to go with seven home runs, 28 doubles, six triples and 87 RBIs. He totaled 118 hits—an average of exactly one hit per game—and finished with a .415 slugging percentage. When the season ended, Stargell—some 20 pounds lighter—returned to his family home in East Oakland. He resumed his job at the
auto assembly line and—starving for social contact—reconnected with friends on the local dance circuit. He also resumed seeing Lois. But after a few weeks, he began itching to play baseball again, and he found several outlets, including one at his old stomping grounds at Encinal High School, where his old coach, George Read, was sending his latest Jets’ club through some winter workouts.
With a steady diet of Gladys’s home-cooked meals, Stargell regained some of his lost weight. And by the time he showed up at Encinal one day early in 1960, he looked like a new man. “He wasn’t the same person,” Read said. “He had hit his growth and his weight. We were out there practicing one day and he wanted to hit. Naturally, I wasn’t going to say no, but our running track at Encinal was right by the baseball field. And if they were running in a race, they’d be facing home plate—and there was no fence. I prayed that Stargell would not pull the ball because I could just see him ripping one and some track guy trotting along would get beaned—and that would be it. I was so glad when he was through hitting that day.”12
Plenty of changes were in store for Stargell when he returned to Jacksonville Beach for his second spring training early in 1960. The Pirates’ front office, enamored with Stargell’s throwing arm and knowing that another solid first-base prospect already was in the fold in Donn Clendenon, decided to convert the erstwhile first baseman into an outfielder. The news came as a shock to some, including Priddy, the pitcher who played with Stargell at San Angelo/Roswell.
“When they said Willie Stargell was now a center fielder, I could not believe it,” he said. “They made this guy a center fielder? This guy could not catch a pop-up.” Rex Johnston, a Pirates farmhand who had excelled in football and baseball at the University of Southern California, had worked with Stargell in spring training and also recalled him having difficulty with pop flies. “The first thing I did was hit him a pop-up and the damn thing hit him on the head,” he said, “I asked him, ‘Are you OK?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I have a hard head.’ He just could not catch them.”13
But in other ways athletically, Stargell was blessed; even Johnston could see it at first glance. “He was a big, gangly kid but he had a helluva gifted body,” Johnston said. “He had all the talent—it was just raw talent. You knew he was gonna be great and he had everything he needed to make it.”
Stargell had one other key attribute for an outfielder. “He could throw the damn baseball,” Johnston said. Priddy agreed. “They always talked about Clemente, but Willie Stargell had an unbelievable arm,” he said. “He had the greatest arm I ever saw.” Johnston said Stargell took a while to unload the ball, which might have been one reason the Pirates moved him to the outfield. “He had to wind up and throw, and as an infielder, you have to get rid of the ball quickly. But when he threw from the outfield, the ball actually rose. You could just see the darn thing take off. He’d throw a line drive and if you watched it, it would take off and go an extra 20 or 30 yards. He and Clemente could have had a helluva throwing contest.”
It didn’t take long before Stargell made himself into a more than respectable outfielder. Priddy saw others hit their stride in their second year as professionals, and it made sense to him that Stargell would come into his own then, too. “Something happened,” he said. “But it happens to a lot of guys at that point. You start growing up; you start figuring things out. You get rid of the homesickness and you figure, ‘This is what I’m going to do the rest of my life.’”
Stargell was assigned to Grand Forks, North Dakota, in the Class C Northern League—a step up from the Sophomore League, but two more minor-league stops remained before the big leagues. The Northern League featured teams in cities such as St. Cloud and Duluth, Minnesota; Minot, North Dakota; Aberdeen, South Dakota; and even across the border in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The racial prejudice that Stargell experienced the previous season had dissipated to a degree; in some of the towns, for example, the black players were permitted to stay with their white teammates. Johnston said from his vantage point, Stargell and the other minority players were treated well, particularly in Winnipeg. “When we’d go to Canada, they loved him,” he said.
In Grand Forks, Stargell was reunited with his old spring-training pal Alley, who had spent the previous year in the Midwest League, in Dubuque, Iowa. Also assigned to Grand Forks was Stargell’s spring training tutor, Johnston. Life in Grand Forks was rather uneventful, to hear Alley tell it. “You’d wake up, eat breakfast, wait around and then go to the ballpark,” he said. “That’s life in the minor leagues.” Grand Forks did not exactly have a plethora of options to tempt the young players, as Alley recalled it. “The city was like four blocks square and not a whole lot there. Most of the black guys were staying at the YMCA, and that’s where I ended up staying for a while. Willie and I used to eat at the same little restaurant together—Don’s Café. And we used to make jokes about it. Then when we got to the majors, and we’d be eating someplace, Willie would say to me, ‘Hey, this is just like Don’s Café.’”14
Road trips meant long rides on buses—nearly 300 miles to Aberdeen and more than 400 miles to Eau Claire. Stargell earned $200 a month playing in the Northern League and aside from the Chinese cuisine at Don’s, Grand Forks didn’t have much in the way of memorable diversions. However, the town’s lack of nightlife had a positive impact on Stargell’s development as a player—essentially, there was nothing to do but work on his game. Statistically, Stargell showed more power—he banged out 11 home runs in 396 at-bats compared with seven in 431 at-bats the previous year and showed a greater propensity to pull the ball—despite the fact that the first few months of the season were played in what would not be considered quintessential baseball weather. Springtime in Winnipeg is a bit different than April in San Angelo, Texas, and it took some players a while to heat up—figuratively and literally.
As a team, the Pirates’ club did nothing to distinguish itself, finishing 61–62 under Bob Clear despite the presence of seven players who would reach the big leagues, including Alley, Johnston, Stargell, Gene Michael and Ramon Hernandez, who would later team with Stargell on the 1971 world champion Pittsburgh Pirates. Michael, meanwhile, would go on to achieve some level of fame as manager/general manager/sparring partner of New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
Although the team underperformed, Stargell individually showed enough to remain a prominent fixture on the Pirates’ radar, and he went home to the Bay Area following the 1960 season—a campaign in which he batted .260 with 19 doubles to go with his 11 homers and 61 RBIs in 107 games—in a positive frame of mind. Things only got better for Stargell after his return to East Oakland. He resumed his off-season job at the Chevy plant, and it was that winter that he made acquaintance with a young player who would become a very close friend, a fierce rival and one of Stargell’s biggest supporters—fellow Hall of Famer Joe Morgan. And it was also that winter that Stargell connected with a man whose last name he bore, but whom he had never met—his estranged father, William Stargell.
Willie Stargell met Morgan playing in a semipro winter league in the East Bay that was home to a number of outstanding amateur players as well as several area products who had signed pro contracts but needed a place to stay sharp during the off-season. Stargell also was introduced to another young player coming through the Bay Area amateur ranks—left-handed pitcher Rudy May, who would go to have a solid career in the major leagues. May, who was four years younger, recalled Stargell working out at several places around Oakland, including Washington Park and McConnell Field. “I knew he could hit the ball a long way,” said May, who threw batting practice to Stargell and some of the others—and who later would witness one of Stargell’s longest-ever home runs, a tape-measure job that would go down as the biggest big fly ever hit at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.15
Morgan, who went unsigned out of Oakland’s Castlemont High School, said Stargell pushed him to keep his spirits up when it looked like no one would ever offer him a professional contract. “I remember talking to him about w
hat possibilities I had,” he said. “He kept telling me I could make it, that I was as good as the other guys and I just needed to keep working hard. He wanted the Pirates to sign me and that never happened, they never offered. But he said it really didn’t matter who it was—the key was to get into professional baseball and prove you can play. He understood that even though I was small, that meant nothing. He recognized I was a good player. Sometimes scouts were looking for bigger players, especially in that era. But because Willie had worked out with me and seen me do things, he knew I could play. I don’t know if he knew I could make it to the major leagues at that point, but he knew I was a good player.”16
Although other players from the Oakland area had gone on to make major marks in the big leagues—Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson were just two of them—their presence was not as prominent during the off-season. “Willie was kind of ... I don’t know if ‘godfather’ is the right word, but he was always the guy,” Morgan said. “Not just for me, but other guys realized he was the guy to follow and listen to. He always made sense—a lot of sense—about whatever we were talking about. And it was not just about baseball. He talked to us about how to conduct ourselves and how not to.”
Although Stargell pushed for the Pirates to sign his young friend, Morgan ended up going on to Merritt College in Oakland before signing with the Houston Colt .45s in November 1962. He needed just two seasons in the minor leagues before reaching the big leagues, where he won Rookie of the Year honors in 1965. But it wasn’t until his trade to Cincinnati following the 1971 season that Morgan reached the upper echelon of major league players. His speed, power and leadership helped guide the Cincinnati Reds to a major run of success and in the process he pocketed back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards in 1975-76 en route to his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Willie Stargell Page 5