Willie Stargell

by Frank Garland

Stargell would later say that he never considered striking out to be a failure because those experiences yielded crucial knowledge that essentially fueled his successes. The first of his 1,936 learning experiences came in Stargell’s very first big-league at bat, on September 16, 1962, at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, in a game against the San Francisco Giants. Wearing No. 8, Stargell was called upon to pinch-hit for Virdon with Bill Mazeroski on second base and one out in the bottom of the 10th inning of a 4–4 game. A wild pitch put Mazeroski at third, the winning run a mere 90 feet away. But Stu Miller, a diminutive relief pitcher who specialized in off-speed stuff, set Stargell down on strikes. The next hitter, the veteran catcher Burgess, sent the Pirates home a winner when he took Miller deep for a two-run homer.

  Stargell’s debut didn’t do much to rouse the interest of Biederman, the veteran Pittsburgh Press reporter. “During Miller’s strikeout of Willie Stargell, a pitch went a little wild and Maz ran to third. Burgess didn’t give Miller time to think of putting him on first base. He went after the first pitch and sent it on a line into the right field seats.”3 Two days later, against Cincinnati, Stargell made another plate appearance and was intentionally walked while pinch-hitting for starting left-fielder Howie Goss in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 4–4 game. In addition, Stargell appeared for the first time in the field, relieving Goss in left, where he registered one putout. The next night, again at Forbes, Stargell earned his first start—this one coming against the Reds’ fireballing right-hander Jim Maloney. Stargell, playing right field in place of Clemente, went hitless in four plate appearances, walking once and striking out once as the Pirates squeaked out a 1–0 victory behind Friend’s six-hit pitching.

  Like his teammates Skinner and Virdon, Friend knew the Pirates had a major keeper in Stargell, even at the age of 22. “He stood out,” Friend said. “He just seemed very comfortable in his own skin—where he came from and what he wanted to do. He was a very confident individual—he had a lot of talent and he was a good guy with it. The others players respected him and knew he was going to be a big help.”4

  Stargell’s first big-league hit finally came in the series finale against Cincinnati, on September 20, against Reds’ right-hander Bob Purkey—a Pittsburgh native who originally signed with the Pirates. With the Pirates trailing 1–0 in the fourth, Skinner doubled and Stargell sent a blast to Forbes’ spacious center field, scoring Skinner with the tying run. Stargell had third base made, but Pirates’ third-base coach Frank Oceak went for the kill and sent Stargell to try for an inside-the-park home run. He was cut down at the plate and the game remained tied until the sixth, when the Reds scored a pair of runs to go on top 3–1. With one out in the bottom of the eighth, Stargell was lifted for pinch-hitter Jim Marshall, who grounded out, and the Reds remained in front 3–1. But the Buccos rallied in the bottom of the ninth, scoring three times to take a 4–3 triumph, making a first-time winner out of Stargell’s former minor-league teammate Priddy, a local boy from nearby McKees Rocks who had come on to work the ninth in his major league debut.

  Stargell played in six more games that season, making 24 plate appearances. The young left-handed hitting slugger compiled a .290 batting average, going 9-for-31 with three doubles, a triple and four RBIs to go with 10 strikeouts and four walks. After the season ended, Stargell was sent to the Pirates’ Arizona Instructional League team for the second straight year with the rest of the club’s top prospects. After his stay there, he returned to the East Bay, where the young Stargell family—which now included his wife, Lois, and their daughter, Wendy—set up shop in an apartment in East Oakland, near Gladys, Percy and Sandrus as well as Lois’s family. Being a family man brought on new responsibilities for Stargell, and his usual off-season activities—pickup basketball games and dancing with his friends—gave way to more family time with Lois and Wendy.

  Stargell’s first winter as a true family man led to some major physical changes, as Lois’s home cooking went directly to Stargell’s waistline. And by the time he reported to spring training in Florida in February 1963, he had gained considerable weight. Brown, the Pirates’ general manager, was not pleased and let Stargell know about it. Despite his unhappiness over Stargell’s weight, Brown felt he had a good relationship with the budding slugger. “Early in his career we became close,” he said. In fact, Stargell did not hesitate, for example, to go to Brown when he was short on money during his first few seasons as a professional. Brown said that Stargell came to him at one point and told him he was in over his head with bills, and Brown showed him how to make a budget for the very first time. Brown said he never brought up Stargell’s money issues later on when it came to talking contract. “He was my friend and I was his friend,” Brown said. “And he knew it.”

  Despite Brown’s genuine interest in Stargell, the young slugger resented Brown’s inference during the winter of 1962-63 that the additional weight Stargell had gained resulted from his laziness and said that no matter how much he had exercised or dieted, he had difficulty keeping off excess weight. While Stargell was enjoying his bride’s home cooking, Brown was busy remaking the Pirates, peddling key pieces from their ’60 world title team in shortstop Groat—traded to the St. Louis Cardinals for fellow shortstop Dick Schofield—and third baseman Don Hoak—dealt to the Philadelphia Phillies for Pancho Herrera and Ted Savage. Also sent packing was slugging first baseman Dick Stuart, traded along with pitcher Jack Lamabe to Boston for pitcher Don Schwall and catcher Jim Pagliaroni.

  Those moves freed a spot in the lineup for young Clendenon at first, while Schofield was tabbed to fill Groat’s position at short and Pagliaroni split time behind the plate with the veteran Burgess, still a force with the bat at the advanced age of 36. Stargell reported to Florida with an eye on a starting outfield spot, but when Opening Day arrived in 1963, the Pirates’ outfield featured the same three starters as it did the previous year—Clemente in right, Virdon in center and Skinner in left. Still, it was clear that the Pirates had a significant role in mind for Stargell at some point. “I never get enough of looking at that youngster,” Murtaugh said of the budding slugger a few weeks into the season.5

  Stargell, relegated to part-time play and pinch-hitting, did not make a plate appearance in the season’s first nine games and it wasn’t until game No. 11 that he earned a start—this one coming against Glenn Hobbie and the Chicago Cubs at Forbes Field. And it took him until May 8, in the Pirates’ 24th game of the season—and Stargell’s 21st career contest—to strike the first of his 475 major-league home runs. With Skinner and Schofield aboard in the eighth inning of a game the Pirates were trailing 5–1, Stargell took reliever Lindy McDaniel deep with two outs to pull Pittsburgh within a run in what proved to be a 9–5 loss. McDaniel, a 27-year-old right-hander out of Hollis, Oklahoma, would be joined by 243 other pitchers who were touched up for home runs by Stargell before his retirement in 1982. It would be the first of two occasions that Stargell deposited a McDaniel pitch in the seats, and although nearly a half-century later McDaniel didn’t remember what Stargell hit or where he hit it that May day in 1963, he clearly remembered the other time the left-handed slugger would homer off him. It was five years later, in his first relief appearance of the 1968 season for the San Francisco Giants. McDaniel came on in the sixth inning and gave up singles on the first two pitches he made to Gene Alley and Matty Alou. Clemente then lined a shot to center that bounced over Willie Mays’ head for an inside-the-park home run. McDaniel then tried to slip a curve, low and away, past Stargell, but the young slugger hit it over the scoreboard to the opposite field for a home run. “I’d thrown five pitches and given up four runs,” McDaniel said. “My earned run average was infinity because it could not be figured. The next game, I did get somebody out, so the next day in the newspaper, my ERA was 168.”6

  Homer number 2 for Stargell did not come until the Pirates’ 39th game of the season, on May 24—a day after the Pirates dealt starting left fielder Skinner to the Cincinnati Reds for fellow outfielder Lynch. It
was a Friday night game in Milwaukee’s County Stadium against the Braves, and with Pittsburgh leading 4–2 in the sixth, Murtaugh sent Stargell up to pinch-hit for Savage. He promptly launched a three-run homer off Tony Cloninger to give Friend all the cushion he needed in a 7–2 victory.

  Roughly a quarter of the way through his rookie season, Stargell was hitting a robust .321 with a .371 on-base percentage and .482 slugging percentage. But during the next month, Stargell would see his average drop nearly a hundred points, enduring a 4-for-39 slide in the process. A few bright spots surfaced, with perhaps the brightest coming against the Braves in Milwaukee on June 17, when he had his first two-homer game and drove in six runs in a 9–3 Pirates win. The two bombs gave Stargell five on the season—three of which came against the Braves, much to the consternation of Milwaukee manager Bobby Bragan. Stargell, meanwhile, tried to explain what happened afterward. “I took my troubles to Hank Aaron before the game and he told me to relax and take it easy,” Stargell told Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press, referring to the man who in 1974 would surpass Babe Ruth as the game’s all-time home run leader. “He kept saying, ‘Easy does it’ and I guess that’s the way.”7

  Aside from the occasional highlight, though, Stargell’s slump would continue through the rest of June, all of July and into the final week of August, when his batting average slid below the .200 mark to .195. But from that point on, Stargell got hot, finishing the season on a 31-for-84 tear with five home runs and 18 RBIs. The late-season surge left him with a final batting average of .243, an on-base percentage of .290 and a .428 slugging percentage. He finished with 11 home runs, 11 doubles, six triples and 47 RBIs in 304 at-bats. He also struck out 85 times for the Pirates, who finished in eighth place, 25 games behind the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers. The Bucs’ 74–88 record was only better than the league’s two second-year franchises, the Houston Colt .45s and the New York Mets.

  Stargell did not set the baseball world on fire, but he became a known commodity in the game and began endearing himself to Pirates fans. Although his family and close friends back home in Alameda called him by his given name, Stargell became universally known in the baseball world as “Willie.” Bob Prince, the Pirates’ venerable play-by-play man during much of Stargell’s career in Pittsburgh, would occasionally call Stargell “Wilver,” and Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame broadcaster, made it a point to use “Wilver” throughout his career. Scully said Stargell once told him that his mother, Gladys Russell, considered Scully her favorite of all baseball broadcasters because he used Stargell’s given name.

  Stargell’s rookie numbers were good enough to convince a team in the Dominican Winter League—the Aguilas Cibaenas of Santiago—to offer him a contract following the conclusion of the Pirates regular season. There, he was reunited with his former Arizona Instructional League teammate Blass, who had spent the 1963 season with Class AAA Columbus in the International League, where he went 11–8 with a 4.44 ERA as a 21-year-old.

  At the time, the Dominican Winter League featured some established Latin stars from the major leagues, but it also was a place where U.S. prospects would go to work on parts of their games that needed development. Blass said it was also a chance to make a few extra bucks. “That’s the reason I went down there,” he said. “I was making about $800 a month in Triple-A and they said they’d give me $1,350 a month for two months, with no taxes. I said, ‘I’m getting married, but I could use the cash.’ So I got married and then went down there.” When he arrived, he and his new bride, Karen, were in for a rude awakening. “I got married on October 5 and two days later I walked into a country under siege,” he said. “My first day there, my wife and I walked down the street in Santiago and everyone started whistling at her and calling her the Spanish name for ‘prostitute’ because she was wearing Bermuda shorts.”8

  Blass recalled that Stargell had rented a room above a brothel and it was during that winter that he got to know Stargell. “We weren’t soul mates,” he said. “I didn’t know him intimately—just as a teammate who was a good guy, friendly. He liked to drink rum and coke. And he could play. We were both full of piss and vinegar. He was free and easy and it looked like he was having the time of his life. He was doing what he wanted to do. He had gotten out of the projects and made it to the big leagues. Even at that young age, in 1963, he had felt like he had beaten the system.”

  The Aguilas team had a bushelful of standout players. All three Alou brothers—Jesus, Matty and Felipe—suited up, as did Rico Carty and Juan Marichal—the latter of whom was among the top five pitchers in major league baseball throughout the 1960s and earned his induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame five years prior to Stargell. Stargell made the most of his opportunity, slugging eight home runs to lead the winter league. “Willie had a monster year,” Blass said. “He just killed it. And we dominated our league.”

  Aguilas reached the best-of-seven championship playoffs, where the club promptly won the first three games—and then somehow lost the last four in a row. The rowdy hometown fans, upset with the collapse, tipped the team bus over on its return. That wasn’t the only scary moment for Blass. In fact, the entire winter was a bit stressful, as the country was still reeling from the assassination of former dictator Rafael Trujillo two years earlier and the world was knocked wobbly by the killing of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Blass recalled that Dominican military police, armed with machine guns, stood watch at each end of the dugouts during winter league games. “One night we were playing and the lights went out,” he said. “We had to crawl back to the dugouts on our hands and knees, like we were out on maneuvers at Parris Island.”

  Stargell’s productivity carried over into spring training in 1964 and he was ready to take on a larger role in the Pirates’ outfield, now that Skinner was gone and Lynch was nearing the end of his line. Murtaugh said in the spring he planned to spot Stargell against right-handed pitching. “I think he has the potential to hit 25 or 30 home runs,” Murtaugh said. “He has a great arm. I thought he was a little lax in ’63, but he has to improve with all that talent.”9

  Stargell rewarded the franchise’s faith in him by getting out of the blocks quickly and remaining hot throughout the season’s first half. Through the month of June, Stargell batted an even .300, with 11 homers and 46 RBIs in 203 at-bats over 49 starts. Dodgers’ manager Walter Alston, who headed the National League All-Star team by virtue of his team’s title the previous season, took notice and named Stargell to the mid-season classic roster, where he joined fellow Bucs Clemente, Burgess and Mazeroski. Al Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, called Stargell “a future star of great promise” and wrote there were “stars” in Stargell’s eyes when he took the field for batting practice prior to the All-Star Game. “I’m excited,” the husky Pirate youngster admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about anything as I am today.”10 Although he did not start, Stargell did appear in the game, pinch-hitting in the bottom of the third for starting NL pitcher Don Drysdale of the Dodgers. Facing AL starter Dean Chance, a standout with the Minnesota Twins, with the Mets’ Ron Hunt at first, Stargell hit a ground ball back to Chance, who threw him out at first.

  Willie taking it easy during one of his early spring training trips with the Pittsburgh Pirates to Fort Myers, Florida (courtesy Sandrus Collier).

  The Pirates maintained their solid first-half start into the dog days of August, as they were 10 games over .500 at 63–53 on August 17, trailing the first-place Cardinals by only 1½ games. But they tailed off badly down the stretch, winning just 17 of their last 46—including only four of the final 16—to finish 80–82, good for a tie for sixth with the defending champion Dodgers, 13 games behind new champion St. Louis. With the end of the season came the resignation of manager Murtaugh, who cited health reasons for stepping down. Murtaugh’s decision came as a blow to Stargell, who regarded his first big-league manager with the utmost respect and admiration and appreciated the way Murtaugh brought him along at
the start of his career.

  In addition to having a losing record on the field, the Pirates brought up the rear at the gate, drawing only 759,496 people, good enough for just 15th among the major leagues’ 20 teams. It was the Pirates lowest home total since 1955, when they attracted only 572,957 fans to Forbes Field, and paled in comparison to the title season of 1960, when the club drew 1,705,828.

  Individually, Stargell continued to make strides. Despite missing time with several injuries, he clubbed 21 home runs, 19 doubles and seven triples in 421 at-bats over 117 games. He also drove in 78 runs, second on the team only to Clemente, who had 87 RBIs but played in 38 more games than Stargell. Stargell’s production tailed off as the season went along, however. On August 6, after going 1-for-4 against the Dodgers, he was batting .300. But over his final 40 games, Stargell hit just .216 with 5 home runs and 14 RBIs in 134 at-bats and finished with a .273 batting average.

  Still, the rising slugger had several stellar moments during the 1964 season. On April 17, he collected four hits and unloaded a rather memorable drive—the first home run struck in the New York Mets’ new home ballpark, Shea Stadium. The line drive, which landed in the lower right-field stands, just to the left of the 341-foot sign at the foul pole, came off Jack Fisher in the top of the second inning. Then, on May 11, he showed off his prodigious strength by clubbing a line drive toward Forbes Field’s right-field roof off Cincinnati’s Sammy Ellis. The ball hit a girder under the roof and at least one long-ball expert estimated the drive would have gone about 505 feet had it not struck the girder.11 Later that season, on July 22 against the Cardinals in St. Louis, Stargell would hit for the cycle—collecting a single, double, triple and home run—becoming only the 14th Pirate to do so. Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, observed a day later that Stargell, when healthy, can “take his place alongside the top power hitters in the majors. The big boy, whom I dubbed the ‘colored Babe Ruth’ the first time I saw him in Ft. Myers last year, can’t miss making it big with the Bucs.”12