Like Morgan, May said the winter of 1960-61 and subsequent winter workouts with Stargell and other professional players who came back to the Bay Area had a major impact on his life and his decision to pursue baseball as a career. “Just the fact that I had a chance to play or work out with players like Stargell—players who had Major League ability and were in fact in the big leagues—influenced me,” he said. “I remember seeing Jesse Gonder, the Pointer brothers, Stargell, Motton, Harper—all those guys from Alameda. And Ernie Fazio. I didn’t always have the opportunity to play on those ballclubs when I was younger. But when I got in the 11th grade, I finally got my chance to play. At that time, Willie had a reputation in the Bay Area like you wouldn’t believe. And to watch him swing the bat and run and throw, it was awesome.”
Following Stargell’s third spring training in Florida—a third straight spring in which he and the Pirates’ other black players were required to live separately from their white teammates—he was assigned to the Asheville Tourists of the South Atlantic League. At the time, the Sally League affiliate was just a rung below the Pirates’ top farm club in Columbus, Ohio. It was there, in Asheville, North Carolina, that Stargell truly began to elbow his way into the Pirates’ major-league plans.
“He began hitting with a lot more power,” said Priddy, one of his Tourist teammates during that 1961 season. “You could see something special then.” Alley recalls that season as “the year that Willie made his move. You could see the change. He made a lot of improvements—he started pulling the ball and hitting with power.”
Doepker, a teammate of Stargell’s at San Angelo/Roswell and then again in Asheville, said he noticed a difference in Stargell the hitter. And the difference had less to do with the actual swing than Stargell’s approach to hitting. “As far as the mechanics of the swing, I don’t know that they changed much at all,” he said. “By that time, he was playing the outfield and I don’t know if that took a little pressure off him. Maybe it was just having seen so many different kinds of pitches and pitchers, he became more selective. He always struck out a lot, but you could tell there was an increment of improvement. He didn’t lose his free-wheeling swing, but he made more contact because he became more selective and disciplined.”
Johnston, another Asheville teammate, said Stargell was evolving into a truly dangerous weapon by that time. “You made a mistake with Willie, man, and it was gone. He just had a beautiful swing.”
The power, combined with the unique orientation of Asheville’s home ballpark, made for a rather memorable connection between Stargell and the local fans—despite the fact that the club’s home was in the heart of the South at a time when racial tensions were on the rise. Black players still had to stay in separate quarters, but racial epithets hurled from those in the stands were not an everyday occurrence, as they had been in the Sophomore League two years earlier. “The people in Asheville pretty much accepted everybody,” Johnston said. “Asheville seemed like it was more of a tourist town, where you had a lot of outside influence. The black players were pretty well accepted there. And the fans loved Willie there.”
Still, it wasn’t outright enlightenment. In most of the ballparks, black fans sat segregated from white fans. Doepker remembers making two trips to Savannah, Georgia, home of the Chicago White Sox affiliate, and for the first trip in, the club drew a solid crowd. “The next road trip,” Doepker recalled, “there wasn’t anybody in the stands.” It seems that the wife of Deacon Jones, a black White Sox farmhand from San Diego, “had the audacity to sit near the dugout with the other white spouses and so the word got out and the fans boycotted it,” Doepker said. “We’re talking 1961 now. There was an entrenched culture. It was just historical and part of their upbringing—and part of their existence.”
Asheville fans displayed no such animosity toward Stargell. In fact, they had taken to calling Stargell “On the Hill Will” because a major hill rose beyond the right-field fence of Asheville’s McCormick Field. And many of Stargell’s 22 home runs that year landed on the side of that hill.
It was in Asheville that Pirates general manager Joe L. Brown got his first in-depth look at Stargell in game competition. Although ultimately Stargell is remembered as a large man with plenty of muscle and girth, he grew up reed-thin and did not begin gaining weight until well after he signed with the Pirates. Brown remembered Stargell as a big man, but not nearly as big as he became. “He came from the projects,” Brown said in a 2010 interview, “and I don’t think he ate very well. But he could run and he was a fine outfielder—and he had a great arm. And in Asheville, he hit so many home runs onto that hill—when he hit them, there wasn’t any doubt. He didn’t hit any cheap home runs.”17
Stargell’s individual success—he batted .289 and drove in 89 runs to go along with 21 doubles, eight triples and the 22 home runs in 130 games—was mirrored by the Tourists, as they rolled to an 87–50 record and left the nearest contender 13 games behind in the chase for the Sally League title. The performance in Asheville prompted the Pirates to send Stargell to their fall Instructional League camp in Chandler, Arizona. Stargell was among a bevy of high-end prospects in that camp. Among them was a young pitcher out of Canaan, Connecticut, named Steve Blass. Two things struck Blass immediately about Stargell: he could hit the ball out of sight and he could throw it like few others could.
“In terms of arm strength, he had a purely stronger arm than Clemente,” Blass said. “Later on when he played left at Forbes Field, where it was 365, he’d go down into the corner and make it very interesting at second base. He just had a rocket. Clemente was more accurate and more visible and had the reputation. But a lot of people don’t remember that when Willie came up, he had an absolute gun.” Stargell also made an impression with his bat. That fall in Chandler, the Pirates’ Instructional League team played in what amounted to a community park. It had a baseball configuration, but no fences. “Willie would hit the ball eight miles and because there wasn’t any fence, he’d have to run it out,” Blass recalled.18
The Instructional League gave way to another winter home with Gladys, Percy and Sandrus in East Oakland. Stargell continued to date Lois, whom he would marry early the next season, and—determined to make the big-league club in the spring of 1962—he stepped up his workout regimen, fueled by regular communication from Pirates GM Brown. He was invited to the major league spring training camp in Fort Myers, Florida, and—despite the segregated living conditions—he remained focused on his goal. While many players complained, Stargell did not, and in fact he enjoyed staying in the black section of Fort Myers because the players did not get the scrutiny that the white players received after hours in town. In addition, the system was more of a family-type atmosphere, where players were served home-cooked meals by the host families.
Bob Veale, the strapping left-handed flamethrower who would spend the 1962 season in Columbus, Ohio, with Stargell and then make the jump to the Pirates with him later that season, recalled his stay at the Evans household. “Boy, you had some of the finest cooks you’d ever want to meet,” he said. “We ate way better than the white ballplayers at the Bradford Hotel. We’d get breakfast and we’d get dinner. And twice a week, we’d have big ol’ sirloin T-bone steaks. We’d have fried chicken smothered in kale, tomato and cucumber. We’d have squash casserole. For breakfast, you’d have whatever you wanted. I couldn’t wait to leave the ballpark and get home and eat dinner.”19
Like Stargell, Veale—who was born and raised in Alabama, where segregation was a way of life—didn’t complain about the separate living conditions. And he said the racist comments that he heard while coming up through the Pirates’ system never got to him either. “You’d hear lots of things,” said Veale, who made minor-league stops at San Jose, California; Las Vegas; and Wilson, North Carolina, before finishing his minor-league climb at Columbus. He recalled playing at Raleigh when he was with the Wilson Tobs (short for Tobacconists) and they had a devout fan who would sit in the same seat for every game and s
ay the same thing every time Veale’s club would arrive—“Here come the Tobs with all that black magic.”
Veale said a few minority players were offended by some of the remarks but none of them bothered him. “To me it was just funny,” Veale said. “I grew up in Alabama and I got used to hearing stuff like that. It was just another stepping stone to success, I guess. All of the black players then had to have thick skin. Sometimes a player on your own team would have something to say about you. Or maybe there would be some joking—some black joke or something would come up. If you didn’t know the individual saying it, you might get hurt. But things like that were easy for me to turn into a positive stroke. I would just turn a frown into a smile. Once you smile, the joke is all over.” Still, Veale said it was sometimes difficult to brush aside the remarks. “A man is the worst animal of all that God created. But whatever it took to stay there, that’s what you did. Those remarks just made you work harder to achieve the goals that you had in sight.”
The racist remarks might not have bothered Veale, but they certainly couldn’t be ignored. Even some of the white players were painfully aware of the conditions that prevailed in the South and what was transpiring in American society while they spent their hot summer evenings playing a child’s game. Brand, the catching prospect who broke in with Stargell in 1959 and who wound up being reunited with Stargell in Columbus in 1962, said he can remember in one ballpark, someone put up a poster of a monkey in a cage. “They had written something on it like ‘Richie Allen’s mother is here,’” Brand said, referring to the Phillies’ powerful black slugging prospect. “It was awful.” That summer, Brand said, he watched the Ku Klux Klan flood Peachtree Street in Atlanta, its members covered with sheets. “We were playing there at the time and we were staying at the old Peachtree Hotel,” Brand said. “Here they came, marching right down the street. All our black players were in some motel in shanty town.”
Stargell had a standout spring in 1962—he showed the second-best arm in the entire organization behind only Clemente, and he was hitting .357 late in camp. But some apparently weren’t impressed. “His hits are either infield bounders, bloops or misjudged fly balls,” wrote Les Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press.20 Stargell was given an opportunity to show what he could do along with three other young outfielders—Howie Goss, Larry Elliott and Johnston—but none of them won over Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh or the front office. Late in camp, Stargell received word that he would not be going north with the big club, but instead would be assigned to the Columbus Jets, Pittsburgh’s top farm club in the International League. Although disappointed, he brightened after arriving in the Ohio city, as he no longer had to battle the outright racism that was prevalent in much of the South at the time. That burden lifted, he was able to relax and put together an outstanding season for the Jets, hitting a solid .276 with 27 home runs and 82 RBIs in 138 games.
Brand, who hadn’t seen Stargell since their time together in the Sophomore League, said he hardly recognized Stargell in Columbus. “I’d been hearing about how great he was and when I saw him, he looked like a whole different player. He got better every single year. I peaked. I got a little better but physically I was as good as I was gonna get at 19 or 20. But he got a little bigger and stronger. He’d hit the ball and, geez, they’re still going.”
While in Columbus, Stargell began to forge a relationship with Veale, who became one of the major leagues’ top strikeout pitchers in the 1960s and in fact set an International League record that still stands when he struck out 22 batters in a nine-inning game on August 10, 1962. The two would exchange silly nicknames and spend time away from the ballpark together. Stargell had a few mishaps along the way. “One time we wanted to go skinny dipping in a swimming pool that a friend of ours owned,” Veale said. “It was at night, and Willie wanted to show me how to dive—and he dove right into the concrete. The front of his head looked like a unicorn. I had to pull him out of there. I don’t think we ever went swimming again.”
While Stargell’s numbers at Columbus were impressive, they came up a bit short in comparison to bonus baby Bob Bailey, who had struggled the previous year at Asheville but rebounded with the Jets to hit .299 with 28 home runs and 108 RBIs en route to winning the International League’s Most Valuable Player award. Still, something about Stargell stuck with his teammates. “When I came home that off-season, someone asked me, ‘Who did you like at Columbus?’” Priddy recalled. “They were thinking it’d be Bailey. But I said Willie Stargell will be the star. It was just ... you could just see the power.” Johnston, who also played at Columbus with Stargell, had an almost identical story. “I was asked a few times, ‘Who’s the best player at Columbus?’ I said, ‘Right now, this guy is, but Willie’s going to be better than all of them.”
Stargell’s standout season at Columbus came to an end late in the year when he got the word from Jets manager Larry Shepard while in the clubhouse following a game in mid–September. The Pirates wanted Stargell in Pittsburgh—and they wanted Veale, too. Earlier that season, Veale had scraped together enough money to buy a used Studebaker—“I used to fill it up with oil and check the gas,” he joked—and the two piled into the old car and set out for Pittsburgh. “Columbus wasn’t too far from Pittsburgh,” Veale said. “But I burned a case of oil before we got there.”
The Studebaker eventually reached the greater Pittsburgh area, and the two wide-eyed rookies approached the city from the west through one of the city’s best-known landmarks, the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Stargell recalled emerging from the tunnel and getting his first look at what would become his professional home for the next 20 years:
Last night, coming in from the airport, we came through the tunnel and the city opened up its arms and I felt at home.
This quote would be preserved forever at the base of a statue that would be built nearly 40 years later to honor Stargell at the Pirates’ new home: PNC Park.
Chapter 3
The Show
UNLIKE TWO YEARS EARLIER, when the Pirates were in the midst of a pennant run that would culminate with the most unlikely of World Series championships, the 1962 version that Stargell joined was on its way to a fourth-place finish in the 10-team National League, albeit with a sparkling 93–68 record. It was a mostly veteran club filled with holdovers from the ’60 Series champs—fixtures such as second-baseman Bill Mazeroski, shortstop Dick Groat, pitchers Vernon Law and Bob Friend, catcher Smoky Burgess and outfielders Bob Skinner, Bill Virdon and Roberto Clemente.
Virdon, who later worked with Stargell as a hitting instructor and also managed Stargell and the Pirates in 1972-73, said that when he first saw Stargell as a minor-leaguer in spring training, Willie had as much natural talent as anyone he’d ever seen. “He could run, throw, hit and hit with power,” Virdon said. “As he grew older, he matured and got bigger and put on weight, and he didn’t have the speed he had earlier. He wasn’t necessarily out of shape—he was just a big person. And he had as good an arm as anybody until he got a little older and hurt it a little bit. When he was young, he could throw with Clemente. And that’s saying something.”1 At the plate, Virdon said, Stargell’s approach could be summed up in one word: aggressive. “He swung the bat—he had good power and he didn’t just pull it, he hit the ball all over. And he loved to hit.” Virdon said Stargell had virtually no weaknesses as a hitter. “The only problem he had was with real slow stuff. Because he had a tendency to be aggressive, they could fool him on some of the off-speed pitches, but I think he learned how to deal with that. I don’t know whether he needed to go up there looking for the curve ball or if he got to where he just recognized it. But he got to the point where he could hit just about everything.”
Skinner wasn’t surprised the Pirates summoned Stargell as the ’62 season wound down. He recalled seeing Stargell in spring training the previous couple of years “and you could see the type of player he was going to be. He had everything. But the best thing he had was the person he was. I’ve been around a lot of ballpla
yers in my life and he has to be right at the top as far as his attitude and being a gentleman.”2 On the field, though, the writing was on the wall for Skinner—both he and Stargell were left-handed hitters who played left field. No one was going to supplant the superstar Clemente in right field, and Virdon won a Gold Glove for his defense in center. “I was getting down near the end and he was just coming along,” said Skinner, who would be moved to Cincinnati for Jerry Lynch the following season to make room for Stargell in left. “It was very apparent.”
Skinner, who later became a successful hitting coach and in fact coached with Stargell under Chuck Tanner in Atlanta in the mid–1980s, said the thing that struck him about Stargell in the early days was his ability to hit with power to all fields—particularly his non-pull fields. “He would hit balls to left-center like nobody else could,” he said. Stargell utilized what became his calling card—a looping or windmilling of his bat while awaiting a pitcher in the batters box—to help him get ready. “That was his timing device,” Skinner said. “He’d get that bat going in a circle. But when the pitcher was ready to turn his back to him and throw, his bat was very still, in the cocked position. And his record shows what happened after that.”
Part of the record shows a whopping 1,936 strikeouts, which ranks him sixth on the all-time major-league list. But the strikeouts never seemed to faze Stargell, said Skinner, who was Stargell’s batting coach with the Pirates later in his career. “It was like if he struck out, the next time somebody’s going to pay. That was his attitude. Striking out was part of the game. For him to do the things he did, he had to strike out.”
Willie Stargell Page 6