by Felipe Alou
Clemente and I shared some of the same frustrations with Major League Baseball and the media. Because Latinos either didn’t speak English or didn’t speak the language very well, we were often made fun of. They would quote us verbatim, but they didn’t do that with the American players. They cleaned up their quotes. I saw it as a lack of respect. It wasn’t as if the media were trying to learn Spanish. Still, we tried to be helpful. We tried to communicate. We thought the media wanted information, not to make fun of us. Clemente and I often had discussions about the disparity, the double standard.
Like his personality, Clemente was exuberant and flamboyant on the field. You noticed him immediately, and you didn’t want to take your eyes off him. It was a joy watching him play, even if you were watching from the other dugout. This was especially true if he was roaming that vast right-field patch of real estate at Forbes Field, which stretched from 376 feet down the line to 462 in center field. Clemente knew every crook, corner, and cranny, every bounce and ricochet, and he commanded whatever was hit into his domain like a maestro directing an orchestra. He would field a ball and without looking turn and throw to a bag, putting it right there for the fielder. Perfect. He could play blindfolded, and he had a gun for an arm. Even watching him run was mesmerizing—long strides that looked disorganized, yet so fast. Clemente ran as if a pack of dogs were chasing him, all arms and legs. And his slide was spectacular. It wasn’t a slide to hurt anyone, but it was aggressive. Nobody ever accused Roberto Clemente of not hustling. He was always overhustling.
What they did accuse him of was being a hypochondriac, of not playing hurt. I’ve learned through the years that as hard as it is to put yourself in another man’s shoes, it’s impossible to put yourself in another man’s body. People don’t know the kind of injuries and pain Clemente played through. He was in a serious auto accident in 1954 that left him with chronic back problems. He also suffered from bone chips, once had a deep thigh bruise that led to hemorrhaging, the lingering effects of malaria and insomnia—the list of physical ailments and setbacks was long. Yet he played. Whenever I hear it said that Clemente didn’t play hurt, my response is, how did he accumulate 3,000 hits by the age of thirty-eight?
Not only was Clemente the first Latino—and the eleventh player all time—to log 3,000 hits, but he was also the first Latino inducted into the Hall of Fame. For all of us Latin American players, Roberto Clemente was our Jackie Robinson.
I never understood the media’s criticism of Clemente, although in a way I did. He was a vocal defender of Latinos and militant about it. That got him a lot of criticism and even some enemies. But what I didn’t understand is why the American media ask Spanish-speaking players to speak English and then make fun of them for attempting to do so. The media would routinely quote Clemente in his broken English, in his pidgin English, and do so literally. It infuriated him. As an example let’s say Clemente said, “I got a hit.” They would quote him phonetically and spell hit h-e-e-t in the newspaper to accentuate that his pronunciation of English words was off. For whatever reason there was always a jealousy of Clemente, from the media and even from some Latino ballplayers. And he was hypersensitive and a very proud man. It was not a good combination.
Today, Major League Baseball has the Roberto Clemente Award, voted by the fans and media, given annually to the player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement and the individual’s contribution to his team.” But Clemente’s work in Latin America, much less in North America, wasn’t heralded much when he was a player. I remember going into communities in Pittsburgh with him, listening to him counsel young men and women against premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and drug use. He did that and countless other things in America. Yet the media focused on his injuries, his broken English, and his flamboyant play, which they wrongly interpreted as Clemente being a hot dog and a showboat.
Like us Alou brothers, Clemente was aggressive at the plate, attacking pitches. I asked him once why he checked his swing so much, which he always managed to stop, and he told me, “I’m always swinging at the pitch.”
As big as Clemente’s talent was, the biggest thing about him was his heart. Roberto was not political. He was better than that. He was social. He inspired me on the social side of life, with his care for Latin America. This guy was incredible.
We used to talk quickly here and there during the season, and sometimes he drew me into social events. In the offseason, when he was in Puerto Rico and I was in the Dominican Republic, he was always involving me in charity events. During the 1972 offseason Clemente wanted me to play in charity games to benefit children that pitted Dominican Republic all-stars against Puerto Rican all-stars. He scheduled one game in the Dominican and another in Puerto Rico. I told him, “Roberto, I’ll play in the game here in the Dominican, but I’m not going to Puerto Rico to play. I have a fishing trip planned. I cannot go.” He pressured me to also play in Puerto Rico, but, if anything, I was about as stubborn as he was.
After we played the game in Santo Domingo, Roberto asked me if I could bring some of the other Dominican players to the airport for the trip to San Juan. It was the least I could do. Earlier that year, when I was playing for the New York Yankees, the great catcher Thurman Munson heard I was looking for a new car. Thurman knew people who could get him cars at Detroit’s factory prices. He bought me a ’72 Oldsmobile Toronado, paying $4,000 for it, and I paid him back and shipped the car home to the Dominican Republic. I loaded up a bunch of players in that Oldsmobile Toronado that Munson, a man who died seven years later in an airplane accident, had gotten me. When we arrived at the airport Roberto was waiting.
“Well,” he said, “you’re here at the airport, and we have a charter flight. You are going to San Juan with us.”
“Roberto,” I said, “I told you I have a fishing trip planned.”
“Felipe, you have to come. You are the biggest attraction on the Dominican team. This is for charity.”
Thinking that I could wriggle out of this by another means, I said, “I don’t even have my papers with me. I can’t go without documentation.”
Roberto took me around the customs area, past security, and said to some people at the airport, “This is Felipe Alou.” Somehow he bypassed customs and immigration and got me on that flight. Without even having a change of clothes, I stayed in Puerto Rico for two days and played in the game.
That was Roberto Clemente. He overwhelmed me with his character. His personality. His leadership. He was the man.
About a month later, on December 23, 1972, a catastrophic earthquake struck outside Managua, the capital city in Nicaragua, killing about ten thousand people and leaving an estimated quarter of a million people homeless. Clemente played in Managua in 1964, in the International Series, and developed a connection with the people. In fact, he was in Managua just a few weeks before the earthquake struck. He organized three flights with relief supplies—food, clothing, and medicine—but soon learned that corrupt officials were selling the supplies and profiting from them rather than giving them to the people in desperate need. So he decided to personally go on the fourth flight. Knowing Clemente, I know what he was thinking—that nobody would try to pull a fast one with the supplies if he was shepherding it to the people.
Eight days after the earthquake, on New Year’s Eve, I was pulling my aluminum boat toward a fishing trip, listening to the radio. Through the crackle of static an announcer interrupted the program with the news that a plane carrying both relief supplies and Roberto Clemente crashed after takeoff into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico. Only thirty-eight, Roberto Clemente was dead.
I pulled off to the side of the road and cried.
8
Beginning of the End
My second year with the San Francisco Giants was the beginning of the end, a year that reverberated with problems and controversies, the aftereffects of which rippled through the years. That’s not what I see now, with the benefit o
f twenty-twenty hindsight; it’s what I saw then.
Freshly married in the offseason, I arrived in Phoenix for spring training in 1959 with Maria, which was immediately met with resistance from the Giants’ traveling secretary. Since Maria had no phone where she lived in the Dominican Republic, we spent the previous season writing letters. I didn’t want to go through that again or go through the hassle and expense of international phone calls. Mostly, I simply wanted my wife with me, and I thought it was the right thing to do. The thought that it would get me in trouble had not crossed my mind.
But the Giants had scheduled me to room with other players, so they had to do some shuffling and didn’t like that. They were also annoyed that I didn’t given them any notice that I was bringing my wife. This all was compounded when Maria had the gall to cook in our room with an electric stove. Evidently, the smell of Caribbean food bothered some people—though not the Latinos. Juan Marichal was in camp that spring, still a year away from his Major League debut, and he would stop by to eat, enjoying the type of food he was used to eating back home in the Dominican Republic. Soon, though, the Giants moved Maria and me to a Mexican neighborhood in Phoenix. While Maria’s cooking was a welcome visit to my taste buds, the way we were treated as a newly married couple left a bad taste. It was probably during that spring when Maria became pregnant, which also set the stage for another butting of heads with me and the Giants’ management.
Baseball-wise, things were getting better. I was still a platoon player, but I was starting to put the puzzle pieces together that are necessary if you want to have a meaningful Major League career. It still amazes me that everything I did as a hitter, even early in my pro career, was self-taught. No wonder I had some holes in my swing. I was getting better with left-handed pitchers, given that I was seeing more of them than I had ever seen before. In fact, I got so proficient hitting against left-handers that over the course of my career, the best success I had happened to come against a left-handed pitcher. I think you’ve heard of him—Sandy Koufax.
I punished Koufax. And I don’t mean that boastfully. I mean it with the utmost respect. Koufax, in addition to being one of the greatest ever, was also one of the nicest guys. At Candlestick Park the visiting team had to pass by the home-field dugout. Even when he was pitching Koufax would talk to us as he passed. He was a real gentleman. And then he would go out on the pitcher’s mound and break your bats. So I have a lot of respect and reverence for Koufax. But I did punish him.
It’s one of those beautiful baseball oddities that as a hitter, you can have enormous success against one of the greatest of all time and then struggle against a journeyman pitcher—and vice versa. I used to see the ball well off Koufax’s hand, yet to me he had the best fastball and curveball in the game. How do you square that? The most home runs anyone ever hit off Koufax is seven, and only four players accomplished that feat—Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, and me, Felipe Alou, the only non–Hall of Famer in the group. Once, I even hit two home runs in one game off Koufax. And here’s the irony: after struggling early in my career with left-handers and fastballs, I guarantee you all seven of those home runs I hit off Koufax came on fastballs.
It took me a while, though, to figure out the inside fastball. Getting a steady diet of them combined with curveballs away almost ended my Major League career before it had a chance to even get going. Baseball is ruthless that way. Once your opponents decipher your weakness, they keep attacking it again and again, and I was getting eaten up by those inside fastballs. Coaches know strategy. But it’s up to pitchers to execute that strategy. My best chance was when pitchers didn’t execute.
Everything begins and ends with the fastball, so as a hitter you try to determine the quality of a pitcher’s fastball early in his career and early in a game. You look for it on the on-deck circle, not only from the pitcher himself but also from how the hitter in the batter’s box is handling it. We had to go by our eyes. Back in the 1960s we didn’t have radar guns measuring the speed of pitches and posting it on scoreboards.
I remember when I was with the Atlanta Braves, I struggled in an at-bat against a young New York Mets pitcher. Hank Aaron, a student of the game, noticed.
“Felipe,” he asked, “is this guy throwing hard, or were you late?”
“He’s throwing hard!”
The pitcher was Nolan Ryan.
Orlando Cepeda was the first guy who helped me with adjusting to the inside fastball, and he helped me a lot. “Felipe, you’re opening up too soon,” he told me. “The way you’re attacking a fastball gives you no juice.”
Cepeda broke it down for me. “When a catcher has a 100 mph fastball coming at him, he receives it. Then the pitcher throws an 80 mph changeup, and he receives it the same way. Catchers wait for the pitch to get there, and their hands don’t change. You need to be the same way as a hitter. Wait. Don’t jump ahead. Good hitters, instead of going forward, go backward to wait for the ball. The hand is quicker than the eye. Trust your hands. If someone shoots a bullet for you to hit, you don’t move forward to hit it, you stay back, and you have a better chance to hit it. You have to stay back to hit a baseball. Even if you don’t have enough time, you’ll still have enough time to dink it for a hit.” It was invaluable advice.
And then I heard it again. We were at old Busch Stadium during a series in 1959, and once again I wasn’t in the lineup. While I was walking across the field pregame, feeling dejected, the Cardinals’ hitting coach, Harry Walker, saw me.
“Hey, kid. Come over here,” he said. I was carrying my baseball bat, and Walker took it from my hands. “Kid, what a runner you are. You can really run. You have an arm. You have the ability to play the outfield . . .” He paused, looking down at my bat he was still holding in his hands. “Don’t let this piece of wood take you out of the game. With all the athletic tools you have, don’t let it take you out of the game. I wish I had the privilege to work with an athlete like you, to work with your hitting.”
Then he told me the same thing Cepeda told me—to wait on the pitch and not open up too soon on the inside fastball. Now I had two people telling me the same thing, and I made sure to tell Cepeda about the conversation.
If that wasn’t enough, there was one more person who reiterated the same message—Roberto Clemente. “Don’t be afraid to be jammed,” he told me, which I respected from Clemente because he didn’t have the same power as Cepeda.
That offseason in winter ball I purposely positioned myself closer to the plate to get used to seeing inside fastballs, forcing myself to employ the techniques and tips I was learning. I hit .359, which gave me a lot of confidence that I carried into the next season.
It was a process and it took a while. On the big-league level, it especially clicked for me on September 3, 1960, in a nationally televised Game of the Week showcase against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Once again, the pitcher was hammering me with fastballs, jamming me inside. I turned on one of them in the fourth inning and crushed a home run. As I rounded third base I glared into the dugout and at Dodger manager Walter Alston. “Keep pitching me inside!” I yelled.
We won that game, 1–0. And by the way, the pitcher I hit that home run off of was Sandy Koufax—the first of the seven I connected on him.
After that the Dodgers and other teams started pitching me as they would a real hitter—in and out, elevating, changing speeds. I knew then that I had earned respect.
Respect from the Giants was a different matter. I was playing well in 1959, starting and batting leadoff more and more. Maria was now about five months pregnant, and I had a doctor’s appointment with her on July 30. I told our manager, Bill Rigney, about it and that I would be a little late to pregame warm-ups. Since I didn’t have a car or know how to drive yet, I took Maria on municipal buses to her doctor’s appointment and then got to Candlestick Park just as the guys were coming in from taking infield. I went to my locker and saw the name of one of my old teammates from the Phoenix Giants there—José Pagán. I looked at And
re Rodgers’s locker, and the name of my old roommate from Phoenix was there—Willie McCovey. Several feet away Rodgers was sitting at an empty locker with his head hanging low.
Eddie Logan, the clubhouse man, was at my shoulder. “The manager wants to talk to you,” he said.
I still hadn’t put it all together. I walked into Bill Rigney’s office. He was sitting there, his hat still on, as I stood near his desk. “Philip,” he said. Rigney never called me by my name, Felipe. It was always Philip, which always annoyed me. “Philip, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’re sending you to Phoenix.”
The words were not even out of his mouth when I thundered back: “I am not going to Phoenix!”
I could see it set Rigney back for a few seconds. Finally, he recuperated. “You’re not going? What are you going to do?”
Though I was a little slow at first, it was all clear to me now. The Giants were bringing up two dark-skinned players in Pagán and McCovey, so two dark-skinned players had to be sent down—Rodgers, a Bahamian, and me. Was there a specific quota? I don’t know, but that was the suspicion with a lot of us Latino players. What I did know is that I was playing well and didn’t deserve to be sent down. And I wasn’t going to go.
“I’m going home to the Dominican Republic,” I said.
I could see in Rigney’s eyes that he knew I wasn’t bluffing. “Tell what you’re telling me to Horace Stoneham,” he said, referring to the team owner. A phone call revealed that Stoneham wasn’t around, but his nephew and team vice president and general manager Chub Feeney was. It didn’t matter who I talked to. I was hot.
