Alou

by Felipe Alou

  Trying to save money, especially since I was regularly sending checks home to my family, I bought an inexpensive pair of shoes, Thom McAn’s. They felt like two boards on my feet that wouldn’t give—stiff, heavy, and perilously slippery. McCovey, on the other hand, was buying nice shoes, Stacy Adams and Florsheims—stylish and expensive stuff for a Minor Leaguer.

  “Willie Mac,” I said to him one day, “you shouldn’t be spending so much money on shoes.”

  He looked at me and smiled. “You should quit buying cheap shoes, Felipe,” he said. “You and I are going to make money in the big leagues.” Hearing those words from a player whose skills eventually took him to the Hall of Fame . . . it was as if he were stamping my passport, too.

  I loved living in the same house with McCovey. Before the season we went half in on an $80 used car, $40 each, even though I had not yet learned how to drive. It was a big old car, but cheap, not just in cost but in quality as well. The radiator was like a colander, leaking water. It was a twenty-minute drive to Phoenix Municipal Stadium, but it took us longer because we had to stop three or four times at filling stations to refill the radiator, and even then it was smoking when we got to the stadium. Everything shook in that car, including us. Willie Mac, just a twenty-year-old kid, spent the entire season in Phoenix, mainly because Orlando Cepeda, who also played first base, was with the big club, putting up numbers that would win him the National League Rookie of the Year Award. Afterward, he sold the car for the same $80 he paid for it and sent me a check for $40. That was Willie Mac. A sweetheart of a man.

  That offseason in ’58 and again in ’59, I talked McCovey into playing winter ball for my Santo Domingo Escogido Lions team in the Dominican. Willie Mac won a lot of games for us, homesick the whole time. As for me, I was home, which always felt comfortable and translated onto the field. Those two seasons I won the Winter League batting titles.

  After my call-up I was rushed to the airport so quickly I didn’t have time to tell McCovey goodbye. I met the Giants in San Francisco, and although I knew I was in the big leagues it still felt like the Minor Leagues. The Giants were playing their first season in the old Seals Stadium in the city’s Mission District. It had been a Minor League ballpark—the Seals also being the only pro team Joe DiMaggio played for other than the New York Yankees—with its seating capacity bolstered to 22,900 to accommodate the Giants’ first two seasons before Candlestick Park would be finished. It didn’t look much different from the Pacific Coast League stadiums I had played in.

  Maybe it was because I wasn’t overwhelmed with my surroundings that I started off so well. Batting leadoff in my first Major League game, I turned on a slider and lined a single to left field on the first pitch in my first at-bat. In my second at-bat I hit a double to left field. In my third at-bat I knocked in a run with a sacrifice fly to right field. In my final at-bat I popped out to shortstop Roy McMillan in shallow left field. I finished my MLB debut 2 for 3 with an RBI in a 6–3 loss against Cincinnati and pitcher Brooks Ulysses Lawrence. A right-hander, Lawrence was a former Negro League player who was pitching for what was renamed the Cincinnati Redlegs from 1953 to 1958 because of the McCarthyism communism hysteria that swept through the country.

  I got two hits again the next day, a hit in my third day, and another in my fourth day—this one my first big-league home run, which came off of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Vern Law, the man credited with coining the phrases Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward and A winner never quits and a quitter never wins. Of course, I wasn’t about to quit. With six hits and a home run in my first four Major League games, I was just getting started.

  I didn’t think much about being a part of history, part of that inaugural Giants team in their first year in San Francisco after the franchise moved from New York. I do remember thinking the Giants should have built their new stadium right where Seals Stadium sat. It was a perfect location in the city, and for whatever reason it wasn’t that cold or windy there at night.

  Almost immediately, I fell in with some Japanese fishermen, and we used to fish along this patch of land south of the city. One day someone said, “You know this is where they are putting the new ballpark.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “Here?”

  I was incredulous. It was almost impossible to fish there, so I couldn’t imagine trying to play baseball there. One minute it could be calm, and the next minute the wind would blow so strongly you would have to pack up and go home. The temperature could—and would—plummet, getting downright icy, even in the summer, with the water slashing angrily about. I couldn’t believe the difference several miles made between where Seals Stadium sat and where Candlestick Park would inhabit. We started playing there in 1960, and the Giants called Candlestick Park home—much to the chagrin of many ballplayers—for the next fifty-four years.

  Along with not really grasping being a part of history, I didn’t think of myself as a pioneer, either, and if I did, it was because of the environment from where I emerged. In barely two years and a month, I had gone from a rural speck of land on a Caribbean island, where athletically I was mostly known for being a javelin thrower, to Major League Baseball. I believe there was a divine dictate involved, because there is no logical way to explain how someone could come from someplace where there were no baseball fields and no role models to playing in the big leagues. To realize now that I’m the first player to go from Dominican Republic soil to Major League Baseball humbles me.

  It was later when I became aware of Ozzie Virgil Sr., who was born in the Dominican Republic three years before me and made it to the big leagues two years before me. The reason I wasn’t aware of him is because Ozzie left our country when he was thirteen, moving to 169th Street and 3rd Avenue in the Bronx, New York, where he graduated from high school and then joined the U.S. Marines. He also played his early winter-ball seasons in Puerto Rico, where I heard his father was from and where his son Ozzie Virgil Jr. was born, rather than in the Dominican Republic.

  I finally met Ozzie in 1956, when he returned to the Dominican Republic to play in the Winter League. I learned a lot about baseball from him. I also learned that he was from the island’s Monte Cristi province. I feel a special kinship with Ozzie. He is the first Dominican native to play in Major League Baseball, and I’m the first to have gone from the Dominican Republic to Major League Baseball. He is also kind enough to refer to me as the first everyday player from the Dominican Republic. Ozzie, who batted .231 with 14 home runs and 73 RBI in his nine journeyman seasons, is one of the classiest, most dignified men I know, a real gentleman. He also owns the distinction of being the first black player for the Detroit Tigers, breaking their color barrier in 1958.

  In San Francisco I reconnected with my old pal Cepeda. He got me to move in where he was living, with Rubén Gómez, the Puerto Rican pitcher who had a house with his wife, Teresa, and their two children on De Long Street in Daly City. Teresa was like a mother to Cepeda and me, cooking for us and making our beds, and Rubén was like a father.

  From the first day I arrived with the team, Al Worthington, a big right-handed pitcher, started talking to me about Jesus Christ, and I started listening. I was also reading more and more from the Bible. And then there was Orlando Cepeda, who introduced me to the vibrant and eclectic San Francisco nightlife. While Worthington was telling me in one ear about Jesus, Orlando was telling me in my other ear, “Felipe, you won’t believe how beautiful the women are here.”

  San Francisco was a great city—very integrated, populated with people from all over the world. Chinatown. Japantown. Mexican. Ethnic foods. People on the streets all night long. Beatniks at North Beach. Columbus Avenue. Fisherman’s Wharf. It was alive, breathing an air all its own. I went a few times to Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, but once they found out I was a ballplayer for the Giants, they wouldn’t let me pay. So I stopped going. I didn’t want anyone to have the impression that I was trying to get free food.


  One of Cepeda’s favorite hangouts was this Mexican joint called Sinaloa that had everything—food, drink, live music, dancing, and the beautiful women Cepeda told me about. He would take me there and to other places that played live jazz—especially Latin jazz. We would listen to, and sometimes hang out with, guys who became legends of the genre—musicians like Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaría.

  Cepeda especially loved bongo music . . . to a fault. We roomed together on the road, and it was common for players to bring a phonograph player and a radio with them. Cepeda would play that bongo music all night in our hotel room, the turntable playing a record over and over again in a loop. I couldn’t sleep. Finally, when I could hear Orlando snoring, I would lift the needle, only to hear him bark, “Hey, whaddaya doing? Leave my music alone.” He would say it in a friendly way, a brotherly way, but still serious. So back the needle would go on those records. I learned every one of those songs, every beat of the drum, by heart.

  After my second season I had to get another roommate. In his autobiography, Baby Bull, Orlando writes candidly about his drug use during his playing career and later his conviction for drug trafficking and the prison time he served. I never saw Orlando using drugs when we were together, but I knew something was up, something that was heading in the wrong direction for him. One night during the 1959 season we were staying on the twenty-fourth floor at Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel, and Cepeda was either hallucinating, having a bad dream . . . I’m not sure what. But he was trying to jump out of the hotel window. It took all of my strength to stop him. He wasn’t called Baby Bull for nothing. It scared the hell out of me. I still shudder when I think about it today. Even though we were like brothers, the team eventually roomed us with different people.

  The only player who didn’t have a roommate on road trips was Willie Mays, for the obvious reason that he was Willie Mays. Willie took a liking to me right away. He would make rookies bring him stuff and carry his gear, his luggage, things like that—the normal, innocuous initiation rites. But he never did that to me. He started calling me Chico that first season and still calls me Chico to this day. Whenever I hear someone call out, “Hey Chico,” I know Willie Mays is in the room.

  From the first time I saw him play, it was evident to me that Mays was a superior player, as was Cepeda. Their talents rose above everyone else’s. I knew that no matter how hard I worked at it, I would never be as good as they were. Those were just the facts. I remember looking at those guys and some of the other National League players—Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Duke Snider, Frank Robinson, Eddie Mathews, Stan Musial, Ernie Banks, Richie Ashburn, and others—and thinking to myself, You’ve got to be kidding me! What incredible talent. I knew, though, that I could still be a player. Yes, they were better than me, but I was better than other guys in the big leagues. I believe it’s important to know where you fit, and I felt like there was a place for me in the organization. You have to understand that, and then you have to go to work and be the player you can be, finding where you can contribute.

  That year my contribution began as an everyday starter in the outfield. Thanks to my speed I batted leadoff and hit over .300 my first month before tailing off and becoming a platoon player. I recorded 182 at-bats, hit 4 home runs, knocked in 16 runs, and batted .253. It was a beginning, but there were signs I was having problems, and it wasn’t only with left-handed hurlers. Pitchers started figuring me out after my fast start, which was not only the six hits in my first four games. It also was a game, one week after I was called up, where I went 3 for 4, stroking a single, double, and triple, scoring twice and knocking in a run. What pitchers deciphered is that I was a better breaking-ball hitter than a fastball hitter—especially fastballs inside, which I started seeing a steady diet of. I was suddenly getting jammed inside, inside, inside. Pitchers would feed me fastballs inside and then fool me with a breaking ball away. It was merciless. They were determined to run me out of the big leagues with that inside fastball. My batting average nose-dived, and I went from starting to platooning to hearing rumors that I was going to be shipped back to the Minor Leagues.

  Meanwhile, Willie Mays’s greatness didn’t surprise me. He merely lived up to everything I heard about him and what little I witnessed of him before my call-up in 1958. A year earlier, I played against Mays when he was barnstorming in the Dominican Republic with an all-black team. I hit a ball into the gap in left-center field that I didn’t think a man could get to. But Willie made this spectacular diving catch, leaving me slack-jawed.

  Since I was moving up the Giants’ farm system as a center fielder, a sportswriter before one of those barnstorming games asked Willie, “Do you think Felipe Alou will replace you in center field?”

  “I hear he’s pretty good,” Willie replied in that high-pitched voice. “How old is he? I hear he’s going to be a good player.”

  That was Willie Mays, ever gracious, never controversial, basically ignoring the question. There were times when he would tell us black and Latino players, while rubbing his own black skin on his forearm, “You have to be careful with this.” He didn’t go any further than that, and the message was obvious. Instead of going forward and being a militant, Willie was a pacifist.

  I saw Mays battle Philadelphia’s Richie Ashburn for the batting title that season. Both were line-drive hitters, though Mays had much more muscle. Willie went 5 for 10 in our last two games of the season against St. Louis. One problem: Ashburn went 8 for 13 in his last three games against Pittsburgh, edging Willie for the batting title—.350 to .347. Not to be overlooked that season is that Stan Musial trailed them with a .337 batting and Hank Aaron at .326. Incredible. I feel very fortunate to have played during the era that I did.

  And then there were the pitchers. As with the hitters, these were men. No boys here. And no dilution of talent, either—not with only eight teams in the league. I was with real baseball players, grown men with families, with children to feed. Don Drysdale threw at me. Warren Spahn once hit me in the neck. It’s a game, but this was no game.

  Soon, I would be one of those men with a family and children to feed. Maria and I were regularly writing letters to each other. It was the only way to communicate, since her family, like most Dominican families, had no telephone. That offseason another turning point in my life arrived. Maria and I got married in Santo Domingo, setting the stage for what would become my most tumultuous season in the Major Leagues, which I also believe set the stage for my eventual trade from the Giants.

  7

  Roberto Clemente

  Orlando Cepeda did two monumental things for me: he was instrumental in turning me around as a Major League hitter, which affected the rest of my playing career, and he introduced me to Roberto Clemente, which affected the rest of my life.

  Even in a cosmopolitan city like San Francisco, there was still a division between being black and being black Latino. It was slight, but it was there. The black players had places to go, and we had different places where we would gather.

  One of those places for us was an apartment on Lombard Street where two older Puerto Rican women lived. They would have the Latino players over, like family, and Orlando Cepeda and José Pagán used to go there often. A few days after I arrived in San Francisco, the Pittsburgh Pirates were in town, and Cepeda wanted me to meet Clemente at a little gathering these older Latino women were having. I wasn’t expecting much. Cepeda was my friend, and I could sense a strain between him and Clemente. The two of them had an intense rivalry—both being from Puerto Rico and both having competed against each in the Puerto Rican Winter League. Clemente played for the San Juan Senators and Cepeda for the Santurce Crabbers, which was a fierce rivalry not unlike the Giants and Dodgers—only in the same city. While there was a mutual respect, there was always that palpable tension between the two, born from their competitive fires.

  The tiny apartment was filled with the scent of Latin food, rice and cod, as well as with Hispanic players from the Giants and Pirates. Among us all one
player stood out—Clemente. His presence commanded the room. We started to talk, and before long that’s all I was doing—talking to Clemente. Or maybe I should say—listening. Everything about Clemente radiated passion—his voice, his words, even his gestures. The way he was on the field was exactly the same way he was off the field. The early evening morphed into late evening, and still we were talking. I was so absorbed in what Clemente was saying that I didn’t notice it was midnight and we were the only two guys left. Everyone else had gone either home or back to their hotel. There wasn’t much talk about baseball. Instead, it was about race, culture, language, social issues, the disadvantaged, how the Latino ballplayers were treated by the American media, how Puerto Ricans were treated like second-class citizens in America. I was taken aback. I had no idea Clemente was so involved with the poor, the oppressed. It was incredible. That’s when I became aware of Roberto Clemente the man.

  A week later, we were in Pittsburgh. I just had that 3-for-4 game in Philadelphia, where I hit a single, double, and triple in my last three at-bats. In my first at-bat at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, I homered over the scoreboard in left field, which meant that over two days and four consecutive at-bats, I hit for the cycle. In my next plate appearance, feeling good, feeling en fuego, I hit a screaming line drive to right field that had base hit plastered all over it. Out of nowhere the right fielder flashed into the scene, diving, outstretched, spearing the ball for an out. That’s when I became aware of Roberto Clemente the ballplayer.