But it wasn’t the numbers that were the sum of the Pirate parts. Rather, it was the atmosphere and the spirit that separated the Bucs from their division rivals. Reminiscent of the Pirate teams from the early ’70s, with players getting on one another with abandon night after night, the ’79 squad had its own brand of no-holds-barred clubhouse camaraderie that was a sight—and a sound—to behold. Bartirome, the longtime trainer, had been present for both eras and said that while the teams of the early ’70s were close, they couldn’t compare to the ’79 club in that respect. “I have a World Series ring from 1979 and on one side of it, it says, ‘We Are Family.’ And that’s just exactly the way it happened. There was no dissension. The ’79 team was like they were put together in heaven because they got along so well. The early ’70s teams got along well, but there wasn’t the cohesion that the ’79 team had.”4
And the ringmaster of it all was Stargell. “Anything that happened in the clubhouse that was funny, he was in the middle of it,” Bartirome said. “But he gave more than he received. That whole club was crazy. I was the trainer but I really wasn’t the trainer—I was the psychiatrist. I was the zookeeper. They were all crazy—the craziest bunch of guys I ever met in my life. Ed Ott, Candelaria, Jim Rooker, Enrique Romo—every one of them was nuts. But they’d all go along. And it’s tough to have 25 guys live together all summer and work together and not have a fight. But there was nothing. Everything that happened was some kind of a joke.” Bartirome believed that attitude definitely showed up in the standings. “They never thought they were gonna lose. It didn’t matter who was hurt—when they walked out on the field, they knew they were going to win that game. Lots of people don’t remember this, but when Foli was hurt the last month of the year, Dale Berra had to play and he played the hell out of the game. He really stepped up because we didn’t have anybody else to play shortstop and we needed him. And he did it. Omar Moreno had the best year of his life. Bill Robinson had the year of his life. Mike Easler, John Milner—those guys were crazy, but all they thought about was winning.”
The outstanding talent, mixed with the fun-loving and confident nature, made the Bucs fan favorites. But when one other ingredient—an iconic disco-based anthem—was added to the recipe, the ’79 Pirates became an unforgettable creation. Greg Brown, now a Pirates broadcaster and then an intern in the team’s promotions department while studying at what was then Point Park College in Pittsburgh, was responsible for running any number of errands in the clubhouse as well as taking care of in-game entertainment and the sound system at Three Rivers Stadium. In between organist Vince Lascheid’s offerings, Brown would spin records designed to go along with a particular development. For example, when the reed-thin and rubber-armed Tekulve would come on in relief, Brown would play “Rubber Band Man” by the Spinners. When the Pirates beat the Cubs, he would put on “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. A win over the Braves? “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence. “It was kind of scripted,” Brown said. Occasionally, Brown’s duties would take him inside the Pirates’ clubhouse and he noticed one song in particular would often be playing there—a song by the group Sister Sledge titled “We Are Family.” Brown mentioned to his boss that perhaps he should play the song during one of the in-game breaks, but his boss, Steve Schanwald, said it wouldn’t be a good idea. “He said, ‘It sounds like a disco song and we’re not into disco here,’” Brown recalled of Schanwald, who went on to become a front-office executive with the Chicago Bulls of the National Basketball Association. But Brown’s instincts said otherwise. One day, he asked his older brother, who was going shopping, to pick up a copy of the Sister Sledge album. And then one night, following a dramatic comeback victory, Brown threw caution to the wind and cranked it up over the stadium sound system. The place went crazy. Virtually overnight, the fans adopted the song. And it became the soundtrack to the ’79 championship season.
“It was Willie (Stargell) who made it the theme song in the clubhouse, but it never went public until we started playing it in the stadium,” Brown recalled. “And from that point on, about mid-summer, we just blared it on the sound system. We’d put that record on and blast it. Almost everyone would stay in the stadium to dance to the sounds of it. It all happened at once—it was playing in the clubhouse, it was playing in the stadium.”5 Lanny Frattare, the longtime Pirates broadcaster who was in his fourth season with the team that year, said the family atmosphere that Stargell cultivated certainly helped in the clubhouse, and that might have aided several key platoon situations on the field as well—most notably with Milner and Robinson in left field and Ott and Nicosia behind the plate. Frattare heard plenty of ribbing that went on in the clubhouse “and there’s probably a lot of stories about that clubhouse that we don’t know about,” he said. “They were smart enough to know what they wanted to show to the media and not show to the media. Even the ‘We Are Family’—I think some players were disappointed that what had become the clubhouse song found its way out into the stadium. It was their clubhouse song. But there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that because that was shared with the public, it gave the public a chance to share a lot of the atmosphere about what went on with ‘The Family.’”6
Like Frattare, Brown had plenty of opportunities to see the ’79 Pirates in action—not just on the field, but in the clubhouse before games. With a roster that included players from Panama, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the Netherlands in addition to the United States, the club featured a veritable racial potpourri that—in the wrong hands, under the wrong leaders—could have been explosive in all the wrong ways. Instead, the pre-game gatherings might have been even more impressive than what took place between the white lines—and that was mighty memorable in its own right. It was an act that played nowhere else in baseball, according to those who were lucky enough to be a part of it. Not only were there verbal hijinks, but Stargell had taken to awarding what he called “Stargell Stars”—small gold stars that players could affix to their black pillbox caps. Essentially, the stars were handed out in appreciation for a positive contribution of any kind. The players did not take them lightly. “We fought for those stars,” Bill Robinson said. “Those were precious. If he forgot to give you one, we’d be at his locker saying, ‘Willie, I did this’ or ‘Willie, I did that.’ To get those stars from your leader and captain, that was special.”7
The stars also caught the public’s imagination—who couldn’t relate to getting a gold star for a job well done?—and along with “We Are Family” only added to the club’s growing mystique. Stargell said the idea for the “Stargell Stars” germinated after he had dinner with a friend and his wife who had taken to giving out stickers that looked like roses whenever someone did something that impressed him. Stargell liked the idea and mentioned that he might like to do something like that for his teammates. The friend had a catalog with numerous stickers, and when they came upon the page with a “star” sticker on it, all three of them said, “’That’s it!’” Stargell recalled nearly 20 years later. “With my name being Stargell, the star was a natural fit.” Stargell said he didn’t want to decide who would receive the stars, so—after getting Tanner’s permission—he chose to have a different player decide who should get the stars each week. “That way, it wouldn’t be that people were getting them just because they were close to me,” Stargell said. “The idea just kind of took off, especially when we made it to the World Series.”8
It wasn’t just the fans who got caught up with it; the players were having just as good a time with the ’79 club. “Ask anyone who went through the Pirate clubhouse and then played on another club—you never had the fun that you had in the Pirate clubhouse,” Kison said. “The clubhouse presence was a form of entertainment in itself.” Ott, who started 103 games behind the plate that year, spent seven of his eight big-league seasons in the Pirate clubhouse and said he didn’t realize what he had until he finished his career in Anaheim with the California Angels. That was a strong club—in fac
t, with players like Rod Carew, Freddie Lynn, Don Baylor, Brian Downing, Rick Burleson and Butch Hobson, the Angels might have had more raw ability than the ’79 Pirates. “But we went nowhere,” Ott said of the ’81 Angels, who finished fourth in the first half and sixth in the second half of that strike-truncated season. “Why? We didn’t have the unity of saying this is a team effort and we’re gonna do things we have to do in order to be successful. That’s the difference between the ’79 Pirates and the ’81 Angels. In ’79, we knew what we had to do in order to perform for the best of the team. The California Angels, they wanted to perform the best they could for themselves.
“In ’79, the chemistry we had was the most important element. Did we have a good ballclub? Yes. Did we have the best? No. If you matched our starting rotation against Baltimore’s, we shouldn’t have won a game. And we ended up winning the World Series. And we did it because everyone stayed within himself. Me hitting seventh, I knew what I had to do. Garner at number 8 knew what he had to do. And Stargell at number 4, and so on. We all stayed within ourselves. That came from the camaraderie of the ballclub. I never played with any club that was so close-knit. We respected each other, monitored each other, took care of each other. If Parker made a mistake, someone would go to him at the end of the game and say, ‘You gotta do better.’ If I had a passed ball that cost us a game, someone would come to me and say, ‘You gotta do better.’ Today, no one wants to monitor themselves. If one player goes up and says something to someone else, the other guy will want to fight. That’s not what it’s all about.”9
Ott said the ’79 Pirates had the best of two leadership worlds in Stargell and Parker. “Willie led by example,” Ott said. “He very rarely raised his voice or got into confrontations. The other was Parker and they had two very different styles of leading. Willie was a very confident individual. David, in my opinion, was a very insecure person, so he had to be boastful in order for him to perform at the highest level. We had two leaders. When we got into brawls, we took on Parker’s attitude. When we really got serious about winning and trying to get the little things done, we took on Willie’s personality.” Parker certainly appreciated Stargell’s example. “He only spoke out when he had to,” Parker said. “He was a practical joker—he made the clubhouse fun. I led in a different manner. I was more of a guy who would get ’em up. I was the sergeant at arms. That was my role. I got ’em up by verbalizing, yelling, screaming. Willie held on his own accord. He was a silent leader and when he said something, everybody listened. But we both got the job done.”10
The two different leadership styles didn’t run counter to one another, but rather they seemed to mesh nicely in the clubhouse, particularly in the latter part of the ’70s. “People have different personalities and sometimes those personalities fit together,” Parker said. “One thing we had jointly—we cared about each other as teammates and people. The ’79 team was just that—a family. I don’t think you could ever duplicate that feeling, that camaraderie, again. Garner was the clubhouse lawyer—that was his role. He tried to keep stuff going, playing one player off against another. He tried to verbalize—he was one who would challenge me, but I would chop him up every day. And he liked it. He was a masochist. He couldn’t verbalize. That was something everyone looked forward to.”
The verbal brawling that took place in the clubhouse before games is the stuff of legend. Perhaps the two biggest players, at least in terms of the clubhouse shenanigans, were Parker and Garner. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Parker was a giant, a heavily muscled African American man generously listed at 6-foot-5, 230 pounds, who played high school baseball in Cincinnati. The 5-foot-10, 175-pound Garner, who referred to himself as “a poor white boy,” was born in Jefferson City, Tennessee. But when the two verbally squared off in the clubhouse before games, it was sheer magic. Their verbal sparring actually began within minutes of Garner’s arrival in spring training in 1977, just after the Pirates acquired him from Oakland in exchange for Giusti, Medich and several prospects. “When I walked into the clubhouse in Bradenton, the first guy I see is Jim Bibby. Then Stargell walks in a little later. Bibby’s 6–6, 250 and Stargell’s 6–3, 250. Then Parker comes walking in at 6–5. These guys were massive. Parker looks at me and his comment was, ‘How could we trade four black guys for one little itty bitty gray boy?’ That was the first thing he ever said to me.” It wasn’t the last time he said it, either. Parker kept harping on Garner about the trade until finally Garner had enough. “I finally turned around and said, “There’s a good reason why they needed a white boy here—we have to have someone to tell you what to do.’ Stargell started laughing at that one.”
As it turned out, Parker and Garner became good friends, and their needling became part of the routine on the way to a championship two years later. Garner would insist on verbally sparring with Parker, even though he knew he was no match. “Not only was he bigger and stronger physically, but he’s very smart and very articulate and you couldn’t get the best of him in a verbal battle either,” Garner said. “He’s just quicker.” Parker would often bring up what he believed to be mistreatment that he felt he and other black players were receiving. Garner and others knew that Stargell and other black players of his generation had suffered just as much if not more abuse and racial discrimination, but many of them—Stargell included—opted to internalize those difficulties. “They had to sit in the back of the bus and couldn’t go in the same restaurants,” Garner said. “Willie couldn’t stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants in the minor leagues. He grew up in baseball with that, but he suppressed it. Guys like Stargell and Bibby internalized some of the ugly things that happened.”
Parker did not, but the back-and-forth agitation in the clubhouse didn’t seem to bother Stargell, and in fact Garner said Stargell encouraged that type of banter. “But he had a way of not letting it escalate into hatred or fighting,” Garner said. “That was the real key. That’s what happened with that team and why we ended up being so good. The majority of the credit goes to Stargell, and Tanner deserves some, too. It became like group therapy. In any other situation without a guy like Stargell, there would have been a racial tension deal. Black vs. white. That’s where it would have gone. Black vs. white. It couldn’t have been anything other than that. But Stargell was somehow able to monitor everything. If it went one way or the other too much, he had a great way of bringing it back to the center and putting a little levity in it. He had a great way of diffusing potentially difficult situations with a bit of sly humor. And he included everyone in the deal. He allowed the black guys to get off their chest the anger for the wrongful treatment they had received. But it was also an environment where a white guy could say, ‘You’ve gone too far—I understand, but you’ve gone too far.’ Stargell monitored that group therapy and he was brilliant with it. That’s why we called him ‘Pops.’”11
While Stargell was a presence, not many players targeted him for ribbing. “The only guys who ever said anything to Willie were Parker or Sanguillen,” said Don Robinson, a young right-handed pitcher. “Nobody ever got on Willie. And it was never Willie giving it to someone. He’d do it in a different way. He would not yell and scream. He would talk to you in a low manner and make you feel good. Even if you were going bad, he’d try to make you feel good.”12 Garner said Parker would throw a jab or two in Willie’s direction. “And now and then we’d try to do it,” he said. “But he was held in such high esteem, people didn’t go after him very often.”
Garner said he considered Stargell a renaissance man; his love of fine wine was just one way that manifested itself. “He was really marvelous. For a young guy like me, relatively new to the big leagues, he had what I would call great elegance. He knew fine restaurants. He had figured out how to live. He put a lot of the ugliness from earlier in his life behind him; he chose to go forward and not look back. If you wanted to talk about ugly things, he could. But he wouldn’t do it out of anger—he’d do it in a way that people didn�
��t know any better. It elevated him in my eyes and I think other people might have looked at it that way, too.” Garner said that rather than “fire” on the people who mistreated him, Stargell chalked it up to his persecutors not knowing any better. “That elevated him to a higher status,” Garner said. “At a time when civil rights was in its infancy and you had the Black Panthers and other groups in the early ’70s, with all the anger coming out, Stargell was one of the cooler heads on the planet.”
If Stargell had chosen to go the other way and let his anger guide him, Garner said, he could have been just as influential in a negative fashion. Instead, he sang a different tune, one to which Garner could relate despite their obvious racial differences. The reason? Garner felt he, too, had been discriminated against while growing up poor in rural Tennessee—and he claimed that discrimination didn’t end, even after he made it to the big leagues. “I couldn’t get into some of the more prestigious academic schools because I was a poor white boy from east Tennessee,” he said. “Plenty of doors were not open to me, either.” Garner also claimed he was “blackballed” from a Pittsburgh country club because of his background. “Who do I blame? It can’t be because I’m black. I was a poor white baseball player. I wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer.”
Willie Stargell Page 17