by Felipe Alou
I got up to Feeney’s office so quickly that he was still talking to Rigney on the phone when I walked in. He cut the conversation short and hung up the phone.
“Are you going to the Dominican?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m playing well,” I said. “I’m hitting close to .280. There are a bunch of guys hitting about .240. Send one of them down. My wife is pregnant. It’s 115 degrees in Phoenix. I’m not going to Phoenix now. I’ll go next season. I’ll spend all of next season there if you want me to. But I’m not going now.”
“Can’t you send her home and you go to Phoenix?” Feeney asked.
“No, sir.”
“What are you going to do in the Dominican?”
“I really don’t know, but what I do know for sure is that I’m going.”
Laughing, Feeney said, “What are you going to do, cut sugarcane?”
“I don’t know,” I snapped back. “But if I do, I’m going to be the best sugarcane cutter on the island.”
I reiterated to him that my wife was pregnant and I didn’t want her in 115-degree weather. If they wanted me in Phoenix, I would spend all of next season there. Just not now. Not under these circumstances. Feeney wouldn’t budge and neither would I, so I left.
I had no money to pay the clubhouse guy, which is customary for ballplayers to do, so I went to the United California Bank on Montgomery Street, where I had an account. I withdrew all my money, about $300, and closed my account. All the while I kept asking myself, Felipe, what have you done? Felipe, what have you done? I took a bus back to the stadium, paid the clubbie, and went to our apartment. Maria was obviously shocked to see me. The game was on, with Willie McCovey on his way to going 4 for 4 with two triples in his Major League debut. I paid the landlord and told her I was leaving, explaining to her that the Giants wanted me to go to the Minor Leagues and I wasn’t going. That’s when Maria heard what was going on, that we were going home, and I could see she was happy. The landlord called a cab for us, and it arrived at our apartment complex at the same time as our clubbie, Eddie Logan, did. The Giants sent him to see if this crazy kid was really going to leave. He was sitting in a truck, parked behind the cab, I guess spying on me.
“Hey, Eddie, tell them I’m leaving,” I shouted, before pointing to the car in front of him. “And by the way, that is my cab.”
Anybody who knows me knows that when I say something, I’m going to do it. In my mind I was going back to school and become a doctor.
Our flight was at 10:20 p.m., and Maria and I got to the airport at 3 p.m. We already had tickets because it was mandatory then, if you came to the United States from another country, to have a return ticket. We took an American Airlines flight, a propeller plane, to Denver and then headed to New York, arriving the next morning. During a four-hour layover in New York before catching our Pan Am flight, a man came looking around and then looking at me. I was the only black person at the gate.
“Are you Felipe Alou?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’m a scout for the Giants,” he said, “and they want you to go back today.”
“Tell them I’m going home,” I said.
He tried to talk me out of it, but he could see from my determination that it was a waste of time.
The Giants must have called Rabbit Martínez, my old university coach who was their scout, because he was waiting for me at the airport in Santo Domingo. He took me to my parents. Just as Maria was the day before at our apartment, my parents were shocked to see me, especially my dad. Only two years earlier, after hitting .380 in Cocoa, Florida, and also being named the Winter League Rookie of the Year in the Dominican Republic, I proudly announced to him, “I am going to be in this business for a long time.”
There were some long conversations with Martínez, at times heated. He finally convinced me to go back. He told me the Giants were going to retire Hank Sauer and make him a hitting coach, opening a spot for me on the roster.
I know that might sound cold, that because of me, Hank Sauer, the 1952 National League Most Valuable Player (MVP), saw his playing career come to an end. But Hank Sauer was forty-two years old, occupying the bench on a regular basis. Into August he had all of fifteen at-bats that season, with only one hit—a home run. Hank, to his credit, was good about it. Until the day he died in 2001, whenever Hank would see me he would always kiddingly say, “You retired me and made me a coach.”
Of course, he knew it was time to retire, and so did the Giants. Why that wasn’t the original decision was obvious to me. In 1959 America no team in Major League Baseball, including the San Francisco Giants, wanted to field too many black and Latino players. At least the Giants were ahead of the curve with the amount they did have on the roster. After all, it wasn’t until 1959, twelve full years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, that the Boston Red Sox had their first black player—Pumpsie Green.
Coincidentally, the day I left the team was the day before the Pittsburgh Pirates came into San Francisco for a three-game series. With the Pirates, of course, was Roberto Clemente, with whom I enjoyed such long and deep conversations concerning the unfair treatment of blacks and Latinos. I returned to San Francisco in time for the last game of the three-game series, already in progress. I hit a pinch-hit single to, of all people, Clemente in right field. It scored the tying run from third, and we ended up winning, 5–3.
Getting that hit was a brief respite from the tension that now existed between me and the front office and Bill Rigney, whose disdain for me was palpable. After that incident, I was relegated mostly to the bench, batting only seventy-one times in the last sixty games, typically as a pinch-hitter, which I wasn’t very good at. I never felt secure. I felt as if I was under a sentence.
We, just the Latinos, talked about it, what had happened and how it looked as though there was a quota system. The conversations didn’t linger, but my feelings did. I was convinced the Giants were going to do one of two things with me—send me to the Minor Leagues permanently or trade me. I knew they wouldn’t release me, but they could bury me. Somehow, some way, I was going to pay the price for having left the ball club and flying home to the Dominican Republic. I was black and Latino and I had played with fire, and I knew it.
9
Dawn of a Decade
Much has been said, written, and studied about the dawn of the decade that was the ’60s and the seismic changes it brought. Perhaps a prescient speech delivered during that summer’s 1960 Democratic National Convention best summed up the earthquake and subsequent tremors about to hit America. “Today, our concern must be with the future,” a young charismatic speaker said. “For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.”
More than a half century later, those words from John F. Kennedy ring louder and truer than they did then.
The world was changing, America was changing, my country was about to change in a big way, and change was coming to Major League Baseball. The Latino influx and its prevalent and pervasive influence were coming and coming on strong. Six Latinos landed on the Giants’ roster by 1960—me, Orlando Cepeda, José Pagán, Ramón Monzant, and two newcomers: Juan Marichal and my brother Matty Alou.
And more were coming, not only to the Giants but to other organizations as well. In 1960 one of my other brothers, Jesús Alou, was working his way up the Giants’ Minor League system. He played the year before for the Hastings Giants, a Class D team in Nebraska—as a pitcher. Then one day Jesús, perhaps with the type of defiance his older brother was already exhibiting, announced he was no longer a pitcher but would be a hitter. It was a smart move, and I doubt anybody resisted him. Jesús pitched five innings for the Hastings Giants that season and was torched for 8 hits to go with 12 walks and 11 earned runs. His earned run average (ERA) was an ugly and inauspicious 19.80. He did get 3 at-bats that season, banging 2 hits. So Jesús knew what he was doing, switching from the pitcher’s mound to the ba
tter’s box.
In 1960 a Latino also led an MLB team to the World Series title, hitting .314 with 94 RBI during the regular season and then .310 in the Fall Classic. That player was Roberto Clemente. Yet two of his white teammates finished one-two in the National League MVP voting—Dick Groat and Don Hoak. Clemente finished eighth. Groat, an average-fielding shortstop, did lead the league with a .325 batting average, but he hit only 2 home runs and recorded 50 RBI. Hoak batted .282 with 16 home runs and 79 RBI. Even Lindy McDaniel, with his 12-4 record pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals, finished ahead of Clemente in the MVP voting, coming in at the fifth spot, three higher than Roberto.
You could deny awards and accolades, but you could not deny that our influence and at times our dominance in baseball were coming, and it was going to change the game. One year later, in 1961, Clemente became the first Latino to lead the National League in hitting, batting .351. In 1964 Clemente led all of Major League Baseball with a .339 batting average, and a Dominican, Rico Carty, with whom I later became teammates on the Atlanta Braves, finished second at .330. Third was Hank Aaron (.328), and fourth was a Cuban, Tony Oliva (.323).
Then there was the real breakthrough season, 1966, when these three players finished first, second, and third in hitting, leading not only the National League but all of Major League Baseball: Matty Alou, .342; Felipe Alou, .327; and Rico Carty, .326.
Never before, or since, have three Dominicans finished first, second, and third in a batting race. And when you also consider that finishing fourth through seventh that year were Dick Allen (.317), Roberto Clemente (.317), Frank Robinson (.316), and Willie Stargell (.315), it meant that MLB’s top seven hitters that season were black.
The following year, in 1967, the NL’s top three hitters were from three different Latin American countries: Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rico, .357; Tony Gonzalez, Cuba, .339; and Matty Alou, Dominican Republic, .338.
It was Harry Walker and Clemente who helped make Matty the great hitter he became. When Matty joined the Pirates in a December 1, 1965, trade at the age of twenty-eight, Walker and Clemente took him under their wing. Walker was the Pirates’ manager, and he encouraged Clemente to be more of a leader. So he was, especially with Matty, who tried to be a home run hitter with the Giants. It never worked. Matty was small and light—about 160 pounds—with a short, compact swing. In his six seasons of attempting to hit home runs for the Giants, he had all of 12—total. Walker and Clemente worked with Matty day after day that first spring training, gradually transforming him into a line-drive hitter who sprayed the ball to all fields. Walker tirelessly pitched batting practice to Matty while making him swing with a heavier 38-ounce bat, forcing him to hit down on the ball instead of trying to elevate. All of it helped him become a great line-drive hitter.
The result was that .342 Major League–leading batting average, which was 111 points higher than what he had registered the previous year with the Giants. He also batted over .300 six more times during the next seven seasons. The only time he failed to hit better than .300 during that stretch, he registered a .297 batting average.
In typical aggressive Alou fashion, Matty attacked pitches. Critics called him a wild swinger. I was asked about that for an Ebony magazine article after the 1967 season, to which I said, “He’s the only wild hitter who hits .300 every year.” Seriously? They were going to criticize Matty for being a so-called wild swinger? Really? In those four seasons after Clemente and Walker straightened him out, Matty had a stretch where he hit as follows:
1966: .342 (led MLB)
1967: .338 (third in MLB)
1968: .332 (second in MLB behind Pete Rose; I was third at .317)
1969: .331 (fourth in the NL, fifth in MLB)
But, yeah, people were criticizing him for being a wild swinger. Incredible.
Meanwhile, in 1960 I was still mostly a platoon player, still feeling entrenched in Bill Rigney’s doghouse, still waiting for an opportunity to be an everyday contributor. As we approached the All-Star break, only two games over .500, a sportswriter asked Rigney about our struggling team. “Are you going to make any moves the second half?”
“I’m not making any moves,” Rigney replied. “I don’t have any players.”
That didn’t sit well for those of us who were sitting on the bench. For sure, it bothered me. Right after Rigney said that Jim Marshall, a first baseman, outfielder, and pinch hitter who was spending most of his time riding the bench, looked at me and a few other backups and asked, “Did you see what the skipper said in the paper?” It was a rhetorical question, no reply necessary.
Maybe our owner, Mr. Stoneham, heard, too. Because it wasn’t long afterward that he fired Rigney and named Tom Sheehan the interim manager. Sheehan, sixty-six, was the scouting director and a former Minor League manager who pitched six nondescript seasons in the Major Leagues—one of which was a 1-16 campaign for the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics. Mostly, he was a buddy of Stoneham’s.
A sportswriter asked Sheehan the same question. “Are you going to make any moves?”
“I’m going to find out what this kid Felipe Alou can do,” Sheehan replied. “I’m going to play him every day.”
And he did. McCovey was struggling, batting .247, so Sheehan benched him, moved Cepeda from left field to first base, and put me in left. In my first game under Sheehan, I got my first extra-base hit of the season, a double.
Things were progressing. I was an everyday player, married, soon to be a father . . . and also learning how to drive. Taking the municipal buses around the city was getting old. It was time to get behind the wheel. My brother Jesús used part of his $1,500 bonus when he signed in 1958 (five times more than what Matty got and $1,300 more than I did) and bought a car in 1959—a used red and white Chevrolet Impala. He drove that car everywhere in the Dominican. Even if we were only going three blocks, he would say, “Hey, let’s drive.” Sometimes the family would all climb in just to go for a ride.
It triggered in me the need for my own car. I bought a black Pontiac Catalina in San Francisco and had it shipped home through the Panama Canal. I did this before I even had a driver’s license or knew how to drive. It was José Pagán who taught me, doing so on those hilly, narrow San Francisco streets. He would try to teach me on empty roadways, because I had a bad habit of slamming on the brakes whenever I saw a car coming in the other direction, even though the car would be in its proper lane with usually a divider between us. It always startled me nonetheless. Once when he was teaching me, Pagán’s two boys—nicknamed Tony and Monchi—were in the backseat. Neither one of them was any older than four. Sure enough, a car came from the other direction, properly in its lane, but I panicked anyway, slamming on the brakes. Poor Tony and Monchi flew from the backseat, one of them over me and the other over Pagán, and banged into the windshield. That was it for the driving lesson. “Get out and let me drive,” Pagán said.
I felt bad about it, but he was nice. “Felipe, you have to relax,” he kept telling me. “You have to trust the other driver. You can’t slam on the brakes every time you see another car.”
Pagán was a great teacher, and the streets of San Francisco were a great textbook. But it still took me the entire season to learn how to drive.
It took me longer to learn how to tie a necktie. We had to dress respectfully before and after games—gray slacks, black blazer, white shirt, necktie, and a handkerchief. It was expensive to be a big leaguer. Cepeda used to tie my necktie for me, and I would usually not untie it. Instead, I would loop it on and off from my neck. Because of doing that, and relying on Cepeda, it took me years before I could tie my own necktie.
With Matty being a late-season call-up, me finally establishing myself as an everyday player, and Jesús working his way through the Minor Leagues, it took financial pressure off our family. I had already moved my parents and younger siblings from our fifteen-by-fifteen-foot home to a bigger home in the San Juan Bosco neighborhood in Santo Domingo—a more comfortable three-bedroom house with a refri
gerator, running water, and electricity (more often than not). It got the family out of the darkness of the countryside into more light. Next door was the Caraval family, with some really pretty daughters. Our family introduced one of the girls, Alma, to Marichal. They eventually married and remain married to this day, with six beautiful children of their own—five daughters and a son.
Marichal was an integral part of the Latino movement in Major League Baseball. Of all the Latino players, it was Marichal whom Sports Illustrated chose to put on its August 9, 1965, cover, sporting that trademark high leg kick, with the headline “Latin Conquest of the Big Leagues.”
The Giants called up Marichal in July of that 1960 season, about the same time I became an everyday player, and he exploded onto the scene. I knew him and knew of him, and I knew what to expect. Still, he opened a lot of eyes when, in his July 19 Major League debut against the Philadelphia Phillies, he took a no-hitter into the eighth inning—retiring the first nineteen big-league batters he ever faced—before Clay Dalrymple hit a single to center. Marichal finished with a one-hit shutout, recording twelve strikeouts in a 2–0 win.
It was only the beginning. By the end of the decade he won more games than any other pitcher in the ’60s, notching 191 wins—27 more than Bob Gibson, 33 more than Don Drysdale, and 54 more than Sandy Koufax. While Clemente became the first Latino inducted into the Hall of Fame, Marichal became the first Latino pitcher—and the first Dominican—inducted.
I first became aware of Marichal when he was pitching for the Dominican Republic Air Force, by orders of the dictator Trujillo’s son Ramfis, and he was an eye-opener even then. We played Winter League ball together, too. His older brother Gonzalo taught him how to play baseball, but Juan had God-given abilities nobody can teach—intelligence, balance, control, and toughness.
