Alou

by Felipe Alou

  All the normal questions followed. It quickly became apparent to the officer, which was confirmed by my driver’s license, who I was and why I was heading to New York with a car full of belongings.

  “I’m going to give you a break,” he said as his eyes scanned the backseat of my car. “But can you spare one of those bats?”

  “Sure,” I said, grabbing a bat and handing it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “No, no. Thank you.”

  I slept one night at a Holiday Inn in Memphis, but only for a few hours. The sounds of people having sex in the room both to the right and to the left prevented me from getting any rest. So I got back on the road and kept driving hour after hour. At 2 p.m. on April 14, I rolled into the parking lot at Yankee Stadium. It must have seemed to the parking attendants like Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies television show had arrived. I met Yankees manager Ralph Houk, who was happy to see me.

  “Are you able to play tonight?” he asked.

  The Yankees were facing the Detroit Tigers and their tough left-handed pitcher Mickey Lolich that night.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  In my second at-bat, leading off the bottom of the fourth inning, I hit a fly ball that smacked the foul pole for a home run. It helped us and our starting pitcher, Fritz Peterson, get an 8–4 victory. The next day I hit another home run. In doing so I became the first New York Yankee in history to hit a home run in each of his first two games. Since then only five other Yankees have accomplished that feat—Graig Nettles (1973), Dave Kingman (1977), Joe Lefebvre (1980), Aaron Judge (2016), and Ji-Man Choi (2017).

  I could see the makings of why the Yankees were back on the rise and also the remnants of why they had so many down years. I batted second in the lineup, between Horace Clark and Thurman Munson. Roy White, a real gentleman, batted cleanup. Danny Cater batted in the five hole, followed by John Ellis, Bobby Murcer (who would bat .331 that season), and our smart shortstop, Gene “Stick” Michael.

  The other thing I immediately saw with this team is they partied more than any team I had ever been on. That became apparent a couple of days after I arrived, when we were in Baltimore for a three-game series. I knew there had been some partying going on at the hotel that Saturday night—you couldn’t help but hear it—but I still wasn’t prepared for what I saw the following morning. The door to the hotel room Murcer and Cater roomed in together was off the hinges and leaning against the wall inside the room, and their TV set had been thrown out the window onto the street below.

  I fell in with a young third baseman named Jerry Kenney, and he quickly told me who was who and what was what. All the guys were great teammates, but when you were with a bunch of wild partyers, you needed to be cautious with whom you hung around.

  “Be careful of going out with John Ellis,” Kenney said. “He likes to fight.”

  I filed that bit of information away.

  The following spring training in Florida, on our first road trip, we bused to St. Petersburg from Fort Lauderdale. After we checked into our hotel, Kenney and I went to a sports bar. John Ellis was already there with a couple of other teammates. All of a sudden I heard guys yelling and a boom! boom! Ellis had knocked two guys to the floor with a couple of punches. It was that quick. I looked at Kenney, and he gave me an I-told-you-so nod.

  This was also relief pitcher Sparky Lyle’s first season with the Yankees, having come over from the Boston Red Sox in a 1972 spring training trade for Danny Cater and Mario Guerrero, a fellow Dominican who was a Minor League middle infielder. The craziness really ratcheted up with Sparky in the mix. Once, when we left Yankee Stadium on a bus, heading to the airport, a car full of young women followed us. Sparky went to the back of the bus and, bending over, pulled down his pants, exposing his bare ass and more. The first opportunity those women had to get off the road, they did.

  Without a doubt, though, the craziest thing that happened occurred during spring training in 1973. Two of our starting pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, announced that several months earlier they swapped wives and kids. They even traded their pet dogs. It made national news. To say we were shocked was an understatement. That team had a lot of sin, but two players trading wives and kids? Unbelievable. It became a distraction, not only for the team, but I’m sure for Peterson and Kekich.

  Kekich’s roommate was Celerino Sánchez, a third baseman from Mexico. Celerino would tell me how at night Kekich was inconsolable, crying and yelling that he wanted his wife and family back. Instead, Kekich was traded on June 12 to the Cleveland Indians, who released him the following spring. He was never the same pitcher again. He and the former Marilyn Peterson didn’t last. Fritz Peterson was traded the next season, also to Cleveland, in a trade that brought the Yankees two key players who helped them win championships—Chris Chambliss and Dick Tidrow. Fritz and the former Susanne Kekich ended up marrying and are still married to this day.

  That unconventional family story overshadowed a more conventional family story. Two of the Alou brothers were reunited—Matty and me. On November 24, 1972, the Yankees swung another trade with the Oakland A’s, with whom Matty had just won a World Series, bringing him to New York for the 1973 season. It was wonderful to be reunited with Matty, especially now, at the end of our careers. Matty and I roomed together, and it struck me that I could finally fraternize with my brother without worrying that we would be fined. Matty became buddies with Munson, who used to kiddingly call him “Topo Gigio” after the children’s puppet character.

  Even with all that news going on, without a doubt the biggest news to hit the Yankees in 1973—even bigger than two players trading families—was George Steinbrenner becoming the franchise’s principal owner. His presence was felt immediately. I had gotten close to our manager, Ralph Houk. Or maybe I should say that Houk had gotten close to me. He saw in me my future, telling me I had the makings of a field manager. During two offseasons the Yankees even asked me to join our third base coach, Dick Howser, and work with young players in the Instructional League, which I was happy to do.

  One day during the 1973 season Houk called me into his office. “Felipe,” he said, “I’m going to be leaving. I want you to know that wherever I go, I’m going to try to get you there with me.”

  I didn’t know what he meant at first, but then he explained how Steinbrenner was driving him crazy, calling him at 4 a.m. and asking him stupid questions, meddling with the way he managed the team. Houk wasn’t going to be badgered or pushed around. This was a former player who had won two World Series titles managing the Yankees—one of them the 1962 team that beat the San Francisco Giants team I played on. Houk also fought in the army during World War II and was one of the soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy a few days after D-Day. He was greeted with a bullet that pierced his helmet and almost penetrated his skull. He later fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war ended he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart and earned the rank of major, which became his nickname—the Major. And now some shipbuilder who put enough money together to buy a baseball team was going to tell him how to manage men? No way.

  “I don’t need that,” Houk groused as I sat with him in his office. “I’m not getting any younger.”

  True to his word, Houk resigned as the Yankees’ manager on the final day of the 1973 season, after we finished in fourth place with an 80-82 record. Two weeks later he was introduced as the new manager of the Detroit Tigers.

  I wasn’t with the Yankees at the end of the 1973 season. On September 6 the club put me on waivers, and the Montreal Expos claimed me. On the same day the Yankees sold my brother Matty to the St. Louis Cardinals. I could see that I was following the natural progression of a long baseball career. You go from being traded for frontline players to being traded for journeymen to being claimed off the waiver wire.

  I finished the season in Montreal and waited to see what would happen in the offseason. On December 7, 1973, the new Major League f
ranchise in Milwaukee, the Brewers, purchased my contract. Their general manager, Jim Wilson, called and told me they had a team with some up-and-coming talent—young guys like Robin Yount, Darrell Porter, Gorman Thomas, and Sixto Lezcano. He said I wouldn’t play much but that he wanted me as a veteran leadership presence. He told me that not only would the Brewers match my 1973 salary of $58,500, but that I also was guaranteed to make the team.

  That spring training I played mostly in B-squad games, but I recall playing well, hitting six home runs in thirteen games. On the last day of spring training I was summoned into an organizational meeting. As I entered the room I heard a little bit of a commotion, and then it got quiet.

  “Felipe, we want you to know you made the team,” said the manager, Del Crandall.

  I didn’t know what to say. Before I even came to spring training I was told not to worry, that I had made the team. But after that comment from Crandall, and hearing that little bit of commotion, I didn’t feel comfortable. True to the general manager’s words, I didn’t get much playing time. I got three pinch-hit appearances in the team’s first sixteen games, which resulted in a strikeout looking against Boston’s Diego Segui on April 5, a fly out to center field against Baltimore’s Bob Reynolds on April 12, and a strikeout swinging against Chicago’s Terry Forster on April 24.

  We had an off day in Milwaukee on April 29, which I learned later was a deadline a team didn’t want to pass if they didn’t want to pay a player his full salary. A lot of players and coaches still hadn’t secured a place to live yet, so many of us were staying at the Schroeder Hotel, which is where we had a team rate. I was at the hotel restaurant, eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. We were supposed to have a team workout that day, but it was one of those tough Milwaukee days, cold, with a threat of snow, so the workout was called off. Del Crandall came into the restaurant and saw me sitting there.

  “Hey, Felipe, where did you get the newspaper?” he asked.

  I told him the restaurant was out but that there was a rack on the street corner. Crandall went and got a newspaper, and when he came back he sat down with me.

  “Oh, Felipe,” he said. “I forgot to tell you. We’re going to release you today. We wouldn’t be able to use you much.”

  Just like that my playing career was over.

  Seventeen years, 2,101 base hits, 206 home runs, and a .286 career batting average—and it all ended with a few flip words, as if it was an afterthought.

  I soon found myself back in the Dominican Republic, contemplating my future, knowing that I was going to have to get used to the life of a man who can’t play baseball. Or maybe not.

  Ralph Houk called to see if I was interested in coming to Detroit and playing for him there. The Philadelphia Phillies, who needed a first baseman after Greg Luzinski went down with a knee injury, also inquired. I looked at the mountain of suitcases and duffel bags stacked in my home, emblazoned with a hodgepodge of logos from the different teams I had played with. I was tired. Tired especially of the travel. I also turned forty, and too many parts of my body ached. I thanked Ralph Houk and told him I wasn’t interested. Same with the Philadelphia Phillies.

  I was done.

  5

  1975–Today

  21

  The Transition

  When your baseball career ends, so does your income. And my income when I was playing wasn’t like today’s salaries. The most I ever made was $58,500. Although that was a good income for the early 1970s, it wasn’t quite as good as it might seem. When I paid taxes during most of my career, I couldn’t claim my Dominican-born wife and children as dependents. It was as if they didn’t exist. I often had to pay city, state, and federal taxes, too. I was also helping family and relatives to financially survive in the Dominican Republic. Divide my baseball salary in half, and that usually was what my take-home pay was.

  Most every Major League player of my era had to get offseason jobs to make ends meet. A lot of guys worked in sporting goods stores, in insurance, at factories. I knew ballplayers who worked as postmen in the offseason—and not the kind of postmen who today drive from house to house in vehicles. They carried satchels and walked up and down streets. Imagine that today. Imagine Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Mike Trout, or Clayton Kershaw in the offseason, delivering mail by foot in order to make ends meet. But those are the things ballplayers from my era did to support ourselves. All those years that I and other guys played winter ball, it wasn’t because we didn’t get enough baseball during the Major League season. No, no, no. It was mainly to make ends meet.

  I struggled to make ends meet during my career and especially after my career ended. There was no income. Very little savings. Mouths to feed. What was I going to do?

  In 1975 I and some other ballplayers partnered with a group of investors and in the Dominican Republic started what we called the Summer League of Professional Baseball. Julián Javier was one of those other ballplayers involved, but Javier broke away and formed a rival summer league to the north. The league I was involved in was to the south, primarily in Santo Domingo.

  Our intent was to develop players—young guys about eighteen to twenty-one years old who had been released in the United States and now had nowhere to go. A lot of those guys were still growing, still improving, still had a future in baseball—if only someone gave them a second chance and some more instruction. That’s where we stepped in, and we had our share of success stories. Pascual Pérez and Nelson Norman both got their start in that summer league. Pérez pitched eleven years in Major League Baseball, and Norman, a shortstop, had a six-year MLB career.

  I was the president of our league, and I also played on one of our teams—the Capital Beasts. I led the league in hitting that inaugural season. I also lost $6,000. The former did little to assuage the latter. Losing that kind of money when I had very little money to begin with hurt. The league to the south lasted two years and the one to the north a little longer. But I don’t consider them failures because with the help and vision of a superscout named Rafael Avila, those leagues evolved into the highly respected baseball academies that now dot the Dominican Republic.

  Today, every Major League Baseball team has an academy in the Dominican, developing players and playing league-format games against each other. Japan and baseball leagues from countries other than the United States also have academies there. In fact, Alfonso Soriano, who hit 412 home runs in sixteen solid Major League seasons, came out of a Japanese academy and started his pro career in Japan before coming to the United States and the New York Yankees.

  It’s a nice legacy to know that all the academies in my country today grew out of those summer leagues. I’m proud of that. But in 1975 my immediate concern was that I had just lost $6,000 on top of not bringing in any income, which put me in a deeper financial hole.

  One of my other occupations after I retired was raising goats. At one point I must have had forty. I made the mistake one day of saying in front of my brother Matty that I had too many goats. Later that day—that same day—I’m sitting on my porch, and I see Matty walking by with a rope around a goat, leading it away. It wasn’t just any goat, either. It was my best goat. Matty didn’t waste any time. I said in the morning that I had too many goats, and that afternoon he had my best goat.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I shouted.

  “You have one less goat to worry about,” Matty shouted back, as he kept walking.

  I wanted to kill him.

  I tried my hand in broadcasting. I joined my old journalist friend Tomás Troncoso, a radio talk show host, and we broadcast a radio show together every weekday at noon. I also scraped enough money together to buy some expensive broadcasting equipment for television. I was my own cameraman, too. My equipment was cutting edge at the time, the first of its kind in the Dominican Republic that could broadcast remotely for sports. When the Miss Universe pageant broadcast from the Dominican Republic in 1977, they came to me and rented my equipment for $500. Together with another old journalist fri
end, Johnny Naranjo, we started a sports TV show that aired Monday through Friday. We discussed and covered all sports, not only baseball.

  When there was a tennis tournament in the Dominican Republic that featured a teen sensation from Sweden who won the French Open the year before in 1974, I secured an interview with him. They brought the young man to our studio so I could interview him through an interpreter. I didn’t know anything about tennis, but I still couldn’t believe this kid was a tennis phenom. He was nineteen, with a mop of blond hair, but he didn’t look more than twelve. His name was Björn Borg.

  I also flew to Puerto Rico in February 1976 and met with Muhammad Ali at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, where Ali was training to fight a Belgian boxer named Jean-Pierre Coopman. I was pleasantly pleased that Ali knew who I was.

  After that visit with Ali in Puerto Rico, I headed to the United States to work as a special spring training instructor for the Montreal Expos. It was while I was there when my firstborn son, Felipe, died in that horrible swimming pool accident. When I returned home I went into a hole that was deep and dark. The Expos called a few times, trying to get me to come back, but I turned them down. As the months passed I found myself sinking deeper into that hole, a hole that was both financial and emotional. Especially emotional. I couldn’t sleep, haunted by what had happened. Being out of money only compounded my feelings of despair. Here I was, a former Major League player, with no money, struggling to make a living, trying to cope with the death of a child. Those were dark days, the darkest I’ve ever been through.