by Felipe Alou
I know that Willie Mays, who pulled into second base with a double, was disappointed. But he knows, too, that Matty would not have scored. Whenever we talk about that World Series, Willie tells me, “Chico, if you had been on first base, you would’ve scored.” I believe that, too. I was faster than Matty, and I was taller, with longer strides. And if need be, there was going to be some damage at home plate.
Besides, holding Matty made sense because the next two batters were Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda. I can only imagine the uproar if Matty had been thrown out at the plate to end the World Series—with McCovey on deck and Cepeda in the hole.
I mention Cepeda being in the hole because we were convinced that the Yankees, with first base open, were going to intentionally walk McCovey. We couldn’t believe it when we saw they were going to pitch to him. On top of that, even though Terry was in trouble, Yankees manager Ralph Houk didn’t bring in a reliever. We were looking at each other in the dugout, saying out loud, “Can you believe they are going to pitch to McCovey?” We were that surprised.
Years later, when I played for the Yankees, I talked to both Ralph Terry and Ralph Houk. I saw Terry at an old-timers’ game, and he told me he felt great all nine innings, that he was really on. He reminded me that the wind was blowing in from center field, which most pitchers like.
Houk brought up the topic of pitching to McCovey unsolicited, telling me how nervous he was. “I knew if he got a hit, I was going to be crucified,” he said. “I was begging God that he would make an out.” Houk reminded me that Cepeda banged three hits in Game Six, including a double off Whitey Ford. So walking McCovey and pitching to Cepeda with the bases loaded in a 1–0 game wasn’t exactly an enviable alternative. I never even thought to ask if he considered bringing in a reliever, given that it was only two years removed from when Terry infamously served up that World Series walk-off home run ball to Bill Mazeroski.
Terry fired an inside fastball to McCovey, and he turned on it like a whip. When we heard the sound of the ball coming off the bat, all of us leaped to our feet. I believe it was the hardest-hit ball I’ve ever seen. A bullet. Richardson was playing deep at second base, right on the fringe of the outfield grass. I think the ball caught Bobby instead of the other way around. They say baseball is a game of inches, and it was certainly true on that hit. A few inches one way or another, and that ball was going for a hit, and maybe the way it was elevating, it could’ve been a home run. It was hit that hard.
I later thought about how throughout the Series, whenever one of us got on second base, Bobby Richardson would talk to us about Jesus Christ. He even came over to me once when I was on second and acknowledged that I was a believer, all while thumping his glove and readying himself for the next pitch.
After the game Alvin Dark addressed the team, but my mind was elsewhere. I remember hearing the word “proud” a couple of times. It was a hard loss. I still believe that had we won, the celebration and the sensation would not have topped what we felt from beating the Dodgers. But I sure would have liked the opportunity to compare.
The next day I was on a flight home to the Dominican Republic. Again, I wondered how this kid who grew up hitting lemons, limes, and coconuts, who never dreamed of playing baseball professionally, just played in the World Series. I started all seven games, made some solid fielding plays, and got seven hits in twenty-six at-bats. But it’s that ninth-inning Game Seven strikeout that still shadows my thoughts.
It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I realized later that I became the first man from the Dominican Republic to play in the World Series and the first to get a hit. My brother Matty Alou became the second Dominican to play in the World Series. And Juan Marichal was the third.
It was the twentieth world championship for the Yankees, but it would be another fifteen years before they would win another. For me, I never got back to the World Series—not as a player, coach, or manager.
14
The Alous Said Hello; the Giants Said Goodbye
The message arrived via telegram to my home in the Dominican Republic. I read it, feeling my face flush with anger before I crumpled it in a tight ball and threw it in the trash. Baseball commissioner Ford Frick fined me $250 for having the gall to play baseball games in my home country. I was livid, but not surprised.
There was a lot of post-Trujillo unrest in my country. And with Fidel Castro now in control in Cuba—the roots of communism sinking deeper into its lush soil—the Major League players from there were not only unsettled but exiled from their country, unable to play in Cuba’s Winter League. The Dominican Players Association organized a series, pitting a Dominican Republic team against a team of Cuban players who were now living in the United States. It was a demonstration of goodwill and also an opportunity to put a few offseason dollars in our pockets. Frick warned us not to play, intimating that there would be consequences.
My country’s leader, Rafael Bonnelly, was probably more outraged than I was, for he stated, “I am the president of the Dominican Republic, and I say it is all right to play.” Not that I needed anyone’s permission to play baseball, but it was good to know that our president had our backs. Ford Frick did not, and his complete lack of understanding of the situation—both economic and political—was astounding.
I felt for the Cuban players. With Castro in power, not only was access to their home country cut off, but there was no more Cuban Winter League, and there were no more opportunities for them to earn offseason money and—especially for the younger Minor League players—improve their skills. It showed solidarity with them to play the series in Santo Domingo, something I strongly believed in doing. In fact, to this day I’ve continued to show my solidarity to my Cuban compadres. Through the years there have been opportunities to go to Cuba—for both baseball and other reasons. But because of the Castro brothers and their communist regime, I have resolutely refused to set foot on Cuban soil. I believe that if Cuban players cannot freely go to their country, then I shouldn’t either.
In the 1962 offseason those expatriated Cuban players—guys like Camilo Pascual, Pedro Ramos, Joe Azcue, and Aurelio Monteagudo—wanted to come to my country to play baseball, and I saw no harm in that. Besides, none of us who played in that series were big-money players. All of us needed offseason income.
When I got to spring training in 1963, I complained to Alvin Dark, Chub Feeney, and Horace Stoneham. They all sympathized with me. But the Giants never offered to pay the fine for me, and I wasn’t about to ask them. I refused to pay the fine. Maybe they knew who they were dealing with—a guy who flew back to the Dominican Republic with his pregnant wife rather than be sent to the Minor Leagues. So they must have known I wasn’t going to pay an unfair fine for playing baseball in my home country. No, no, no. That wasn’t going to happen. I later told Sport magazine that I paid the fine, just to avoid any further aggravation. I’m pretty sure, though, that the Giants paid it.
One of the things I would have liked is at least an opportunity to discuss the matter with Ford Frick. But to the day he died in 1978 he never once talked to me. You would have thought that perhaps during the season, Frick would have dropped in on me and my brothers—plural—for it was in 1963 that Jesús joined the Giants, and together he, Matty, and I wrote a page or two into the annals of baseball history. Never before or since have three brothers patrolled a Major League outfield together. Not that we thought it was a big deal.
Through the years my brothers and I occasionally discussed the magnitude of it and how improbable such a conflation of events would ever occur again. First of all, you would have to have a large-enough family, which is less the norm these days, to have three boys. All three would have to like baseball and be good enough to make it to the big leagues. They would then have to end up on the same team. They would all have to be outfielders without at least one outfielder standing in their way. It took my brothers and me years to fully appreciate the enormity of what we did, and as more years go by, to me it gets bigger and bigger.
I doubt we’ll ever see again what we saw a lifetime ago.
But I wonder now if we did it for the wrong team. Not that there was anything wrong with the San Francisco Giants. Certainly not. The organization has meant a lot to my brothers and me. But if we had arrived in the big leagues with an organization without outfielders—and certainly without Mr. Mays—we might’ve played together in the same outfield for many years instead of a handful of games. After all, it’s not like we were bench players. Oh, no. The Alou brothers were everyday players.
Baseball history documents that the Alou brothers first appeared in a game together on September 10, 1963—the day Jesús was called up to the big leagues after hitting .324 for the Tacoma Giants in the Pacific Coast League. Playing the New York Mets in the old Polo Grounds, we batted consecutively in the eighth inning, with Jesús and Matty stepping to the plate before me as pinch hitters. We went 0 for 3 against Mets pitcher Carl Willey—Jesús led off with a groundout to the shortstop, Matty struck out, and I grounded out back to the pitcher. We were the only three Giants batters that inning. Three Alous up, three Alous down. It is the only time in baseball history that three siblings hit in the same half-inning.
It was five days later, on September 15, 1963, at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, when the three of us first manned an outfield together. Again, my brothers entered as replacements—this time defensively. We started the game with Willie Mays in center field, Willie McCovey in left field, and me in right field.
After we scored five runs in the top of the seventh inning to take an 8–3 lead, Jesús replaced McCovey, with Dark moving him to right field and me to left field. After we scored four more runs in the top of the eighth inning to take a 12–3 lead, Dark replaced Mays with Matty and moved me to center field. Mays recalls that he told Dark to take him out and put Matty in center field. “It was history,” Mays says. “I told him to put Matty in center field because this was history being made by three brothers.”
After all the juggling was done, I stood in center field, flanked by Matty Alou in left field and Jesús Alou in right field. That was one athletic outfield. Throughout our careers the Alou brothers collectively averaged only 3.6 errors per season. But that was secondary. What people focused on, and rightfully so, is that this was one outfield manned by three brothers who emerged from a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot shack on a Caribbean island.
People have asked me through the years what I felt. Pride, to some degree. But mostly what I felt was an overwhelming sense of responsibility to look out for my younger brothers. I was more concerned for them than anything. Seeing each other patrolling an outfield together was not a new experience for us. I know everybody else thought it was, but we had been doing it in the Dominican Republic Winter League for the Escogido Lions—including playing for an up-and-coming young manager named Tommy Lasorda. But Winter League baseball is not Major League Baseball. I knew that messing up in the big leagues carried greater consequences than messing up in the Winter League. So I felt a strong sense of duty as the older brother, as the one who had been around longer, to look after them.
Not one ball was hit to my brothers in those final two innings. There was only a ninth-inning single to me in center field. I exhaled with smile.
It wasn’t until the media descended on us that we began to realize we had done something special. But even then we were surprised at the reaction and all the fuss.
Two days later the same thing happened. Matty and Jesús entered the game late as replacements, this time in a blowout 11–3 victory against the Milwaukee Braves. Jesús came in as a seventh-inning pinch runner for Harvey Kuenn and then stayed in as a defensive replacement in left field. In the ninth inning Matty replaced Mays, with Dark shuffling us around to create the same outfield configuration—Matty in left, Jesús in right, and me in center. In the eighth inning Eddie Mathews and Joe Torre hit singles to Jesús in right field, and Roy McMillan singled to me in the ninth. Once again it was uneventful. I was more excited about going 3 for 5 with 3 RBI—hitting a home run off Warren Spahn and a double against Wade Blasingame. Jesús also touched Blasingame for a double.
On September 25, four days before the end of the season, we appeared in one last game together, though not simultaneously in the same outfield.
And that was it. For barely more than two weeks we played together eight times. However, contrary to a popular belief, we never started a game together. I was twenty-eight, Matty was twenty-four, and Jesús was twenty-one. You would have thought there would be many more years playing together, but I knew better. I sensed my end with the Giants. There was now a logjam in the outfield, with Willie Mays the only guarantee. Somebody had to go, and I anticipated it would be me.
I knew my fate was sealed when three separate things happened that strained my relationship with MLB and the Giants. You might say that it was strikes one, two, and three.
Strike one: After the season Alvin Dark had one-on-one meetings with the players. I was the last one called in. I guess because he knew I was a leader with the Latino players, he asked me about José Pagán and a female friend of his. “Is she white, black, or Latin?” Dark asked. I felt my anger rising. She was white. I knew it and he knew it. His question was a racist statement rather than an innocent inquiry. “Why do you want to know, and what difference does it make?” I said, my eyes locked on his, challenging him. The conversation didn’t go well, and I knew at some point there would be consequences.
Strike two: A few weeks later I was sent a contract for the 1964 season that sliced $3,000 off my salary. After hitting .316 with 25 home runs and 98 RBI in 1962, the Giants deemed that my 1963 campaign with a .281 batting average, 20 home runs, and 82 RBI warranted a pay cut. I knew that wasn’t a good sign, either.
Strike three: In November an article I did with Sport magazine exploded onto newsstands with a hard-hitting message to Major League Baseball. I knew I would be viewed as militant, though I didn’t care.
The genesis of the article came earlier that spring, when I was still seething from Ford Frick’s fine. A writer named Arnold Hano approached me about doing a first-person story for Sport. The proposal was to communicate the plight of Latino players in Major League Baseball. Sport was a national magazine with a stable of top-shelf writers, a monthly periodical that was a rival to the weekly Sports Illustrated.
“We can’t pay you for the piece,” Hano told me up front.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I would pay to have what I want to write published.”
We worked on the article over the course of a week during spring training, with Sport holding it until its November issue. It was my manifesto, and it was titled “Latin-American Ballplayers Need a Bill of Rights.” The subtitle read, “San Francisco’s Star Reveals Some of the Most Shocking, Disgraceful Facts in Sport. His Story Should Be Read Start to Finish. And Something Surely Must Be Done.”
And, thus, from start to finish this is exactly what I wrote:
The telegram arrived at my home in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, on a day in November of last year.
It made me so mad I balled it up and threw it away. It said something like:
“For playing against ineligible players and without permission of this office, you are fined $250, plus whatever money you received in the Cuban series. If you do not pay before the season opens on April 9, you will not be allowed to play baseball in the United States in 1963. Reply requested.”
It was signed: Ford Frick, Commissioner of Baseball.
The Commissioner’s telegram brought to a head the problems facing Latin-American ballplayers in this country. The Latin players need a spokesman to stand up for them. The fine I had to pay was unfair, but there was nobody to explain to the Commissioner, and to the press, and to the public why it was unfair. It was not the first hardship done to Latin players in the United States. Unless something is done, unless somebody steps forward and speaks up for these players, it will not be the last hardship.
Let me explain about this “crime�
�� I had committed.
My government, in the Dominican Republic, “asked” me to play in a seven-game series against a team of touring Cubans in November of 1962. In 1962 my country was ruled by a military junta. When the military junta “asked” you to do something, you did it. If I had not played, I would have been called a Communist.
I do not like being called a Communist.
If I had not played, it would have been a slap in the face of the people of my country, who looked forward to this series.
If I—and other major-leaguers, such as Juan Marichal and Julian Javier—had not played in that series, we would have deprived other, less fortunate Class C and Class D ballplayers of a chance to earn badly needed money.
If I had not played, I would have deprived my wife and my children of a few extra dollars.
I weigh all these reasons on one hand. On the other, there is the winter-league rule. The rule says that after a man has played two or more years of major-league baseball, he may not play winter-league ball any place without the Commissioner’s consent, except in his own country. Well, winter-league baseball has been suspended in the Dominican Republic for the past two years, because of political unrest. One would think that the Commissioner would grant us Dominicans the right to play in a series of seven games, in our own country. Had the regular winter-league been in operation, we would have been permitted to play close to 100 games. So why not seven? It does not make sense. It is not fair. I did right in playing against the touring Cubans. I would do it again.
