by Lou Piniella
Along that North Howard strip, which is mostly boarded up and abandoned today, was the West Tampa Bank, a clothing store, a library, a coffee shop, a linoleum tile store, a movie house, a hardware store, a barber shop, a meat and poultry store, and a social club—which was really a kind of smoke-filled gambling hall where the men of the neighborhood would play cards and dominos for money. Around the corner was the local fish market, owned by Sam Castellano, one of our American Legion baseball coaches. This was a very strange fish market. It would open at nine o’clock every morning but by nine fifteen Sam would say he was out of fish! We always found that rather curious, but whenever we’d ask our parents why Sam always ran out of fish so quickly, they’d just smile and shrug.
In the middle of the neighborhood was Rey Park, where we spent our days playing on the swings and playing basketball. The park was too small for baseball, so we invented our own “minibaseball” game: cork ball, in which we’d wrap up a cork with tape and use a broomstick for a bat. On weekends there’d be cockfights in West Tampa, and all the old men with their Panama hats and cigars would be waving fistfuls of dollars, betting on the little gamecock roosters in their fight for survival. And on more than one occasion I remember sitting in the barber chair only to have the barber interrupted from cutting my hair by the butcher next door running into the shop chasing a chicken with a cleaver.
We spoke only Spanish at home, and it wasn’t until I started at Saint Joseph’s Catholic grade school that the Salesian sisters taught me English. Saint Joseph’s was a dilapidated old wooden building—so dilapidated there were places you could stick your foot right through the floor. When I was in the fifth grade, Saint Joseph’s moved to a new building a mile away, but that didn’t make the Salesian sisters any less easy when it came to discipline. I felt the wrath of their rulers on my knuckles many times, all the way up to eighth grade, when I graduated and went on to Jesuit, the all-boys Catholic high school about a mile north of Saint Joseph’s and a block away from where the Tampa Bay Bucs stadium is now. My mom insisted that I go to Catholic school because that’s where she’d gone and she liked both the education and the discipline. Me? I missed not having girls in my class.
Jesuit was about the toughest academic school in Tampa. My freshman year, they gave you an exam to determine what “college prep” group you’d be in. I wound up in the “B” group, but two of my closest boyhood friends, the Iavarone twins, Malio and Carmine, didn’t do so well on the entrance exams and bolted to the public Memorial Junior High (and later Hillsborough High in Seminole Heights) after just one week! Not that it hurt either one. Their father had a pizza restaurant on Buffalo Avenue, and after graduating from Hillsborough, they, along with their brother Gene, went into the restaurant business, operating three of the most popular and successful eateries in all of Tampa. It was while he was working for the Tampa recreation department one summer that Malio met Mike Ilitch, a student at the University of Tampa who was the recreation supervisor, and took him to his father’s restaurant one night. After the meal, Ilitch marveled to Malio: “Your future is in pizza!” He meant it too. Malio listened, and his steak house on Dale Mabry Boulevard, with its legendary pizza, was the “in” meeting place of Tampa for over thirty years, where the Tampa cognoscenti from all walks of life, sports figures like George Steinbrenner and John McKay, generals from MacDill Air Force Base, politicians, and even gangsters held court regularly. As for Ilitch? He did even better with pizza, founding the Little Caesars franchise and becoming the billionaire owner of the Detroit Tigers and the NHL Detroit Red Wings.
Jesuit was about a half mile away from Al Lopez Field (named for the Tampa legend and baseball Hall of Famer who managed the 1954 Cleveland Indians and the 1959 Chicago White Sox to the World Series), where the Cincinnati Reds played their spring training games, so when spring rolled around I was one young man whose fancy turned to baseball. My buddies and I made a habit of skipping school, alternating writing “sick notes” to our teachers, and standing behind the left field fence at Al Lopez Field during batting practice, running down baseballs, which we would then sell for twenty-five cents until we had enough money to buy a ticket. This was where I got to see so many of the heroes of my youth—Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle—close up when they’d come to Tampa to play the Reds. Unfortunately, my truancy capers came to an abrupt and embarrassing end one day when I was sitting in the stands and was confronted by Father Lashley, the prefect of discipline at Jesuit, who happened to be taking in the game himself.
“You’re sick, huh?” he said.
“Uh, well,” I stammered.
“Come see me in my office first thing tomorrow morning.”
The next day I reported to Father Lashley’s office and he presented me with a pile of about fifty to sixty sheets of paper and instructed me to draw donkeys on each sheet, cut them out, and write “I am a jackass” on them. Looking back now, for a Catholic school that was always conducting fundraisers, Jesuit sure didn’t seem to care about the price of paper.
My mom worked in the Morgan Cigar Co. as an assistant comptroller. My father worked for the Curtiss Candy Co. as a regional sales supervisor—his territory was from Clearwater across the bay from Tampa all the way out to Orlando in the middle of the state. Both of my parents were athletes—my dad was a pitcher in the Tampa semipro Intersocial League on Sundays, and my mom, who was 5′9″, had been an all-state center on her high school basketball team, Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Ybor City, in the 1930s and also hit cleanup and played first base on the boys’ softball team. This may come as a bit of a surprise, but both of them also had tempers. I would go every Sunday to watch my father’s games at Cuscaden Park in Ybor City, just east of West Tampa, and serve as the bat boy—these were big social events, with the park regularly packed with 1,000 to 1,200 people, although later when my Jesuit high school team played our archrival, Jefferson, there, the crowds were even larger. Quite a few times, however, I’d watch my father get kicked out of games for arguing calls with the home plate umpire. I guess that was where I first learned the magic words with the umpires that could guarantee you an ejection.
With my father traveling so much during the week, it was up to my mom to really raise me, and she was my coach, my mentor, and my protector, who both encouraged and disciplined me. At my basketball games in the winter and my baseball games in the summer, she was my most vocal fan—sometimes too vocal for the referees and umpires. There’s a story—which I swear I never saw and has never been documented—about my mom hitting a basketball referee over the head with an umbrella. But because she gained such notoriety with high school refs and umpires, the tale endured and became part of West Tampa lore. My mom was very opinionated and she knew the game, and years later, when I was managing, she wouldn’t hesitate to call me up and question some of the moves I made in games.
So I guess you could say I am a product of my environment.
When I was six and my younger brother, Joe, was born, my mom quit the cigar company and went to work for my father. But we needed to get our own house. So in 1953 we moved to West Tampa Heights—which was considered to be “upscale” compared with West Tampa—to a larger three-bedroom house on Cordelia Street, and I remember in 1954 we also got our first TV set, an old DuMont with the rabbit ear antennae, just in time for the World Series between Al Lopez’s Indians and the New York Giants. Our new house was right across the street from a playground called Capaz Park, where my mother was later the director and which now has been rechristened as the Lou Piniella softball field.
When I reached my teens I gravitated to Macfarlane Park, less than a half mile away, where everyone would spend most every day in the summers playing pickup baseball games from eight o’clock in the morning till ten at night, when the park closed. That’s the way it was in Tampa—we went from the playground leagues, to the Pony League and American Legion ball, playing nonstop baseball. It’s why Tampa was, and still is, a baseball hotbed, as evidenced by so many players—myself,
Tony La Russa, and Ken Suarez in the ’60s, and later Fred McGriff, Luis Gonzalez, Wade Boggs, Dwight Gooden, Lance McCullers, Tino Martinez, Gary Sheffield, Rich Monteleone, and my cousin, Dave Magadan—all making it from the Tampa sandlots to the big leagues.
Macfarlane was a huge swath of land that stretched across a few acres and had a golf course running through it. La Russa grew up in a house right across the street from Macfarlane Park, and on a few occasions when I’d be playing golf there, I hit some balls into Tony’s backyard.
We played most of our high school and American Legion games in Macfarlane, which had no fences, and when I went to the University of Tampa we held our workouts there. But on Tuesday and Thursday nights and for the doubleheaders on weekends, the games were played in Cuscaden Park in Ybor City, which had lights, a large grandstand that could seat well over one thousand fans, and a short left field fence—kind of like Fenway Park—with no fence in either center or right. It also had, adjacent to it, the best swimming pool in the city, and after our games I particularly enjoyed cooling off at the pool and checking out all the girls from the public schools.
La Russa and I were high school rivals (he went to Jefferson) but in the summer we were teammates—he played shortstop, I pitched and played left field—on the same Post 248 American Legion team and the West Tampa Pony League team. Tony just looked like a major-league player. His uniform was always perfectly creased and bloused and fit him to a T; he was always the captain of the infield, directing cutoffs and throws to the right base, and he could do everything with the bat. I still remember, a couple of years later in June 1962, when the Kansas City A’s owner, Charlie Finley, came to town and signed Tony for $100,000, a brand-new Pontiac, and money for college. It was the first big bonus anyone from Tampa ever got. I said to myself, “Damn! I’m a better player than he is. What am I gonna get?”
For his part, La Russa apparently agreed with me. As he told me years later, “There was never any doubt in my mind that you were our best player. I was just a little more composed.”
Our Post 248 American Legion team, which had a third future major leaguer in our catcher, Ken Suarez, went all the way to the state finals in 1960 before losing to Miami. I’ve tried to forget the crushing way we lost. With two outs in the ninth inning, we were winning by a run and Miami had a couple of runners on base when the batter hit a fly to left center that should have ended the game. Both myself and our center fielder, Paul Aldridge, called for the ball but then held up at the last second as it dropped between us and both runners scored.
Years later, this play still stings—not just me, but my teammate Tony La Russa as well, who saw it this way: “I remember watching from shortstop and saying to myself, ‘That’s it, Paul’s got it.’ But Lou was ‘the guy’ on our team and he wanted to catch the last out. We were shattered. We’d all had the same dream. I remember back at the hotel after the game, Lou barricaded himself in his room. He was so devastated.”
About the only consolation we had was when we got home to Tampa, we found out our West Tampa Pony League All-Star team, which had lost its first game in the double elimination tournament, had gone 4–0 in our absence, and could go to the finals in California if we could win a doubleheader against two other teams that had only one loss. And that’s what we did. Two days later, we were on a plane to Ontario, California, for the Pony League World Series.
It was the first plane trip for any of us, and we were all really pumped. But on one of the off-days before the first game, our coaches arranged to take us on a hiking trip to nearby Mount Baldy. I remember not being particularly too enthused about the trip and staying back when all the other kids began walking down this hill to a waterfall. When I finally decided to join them, I was running really hard to catch up and tripped on some rocks and began tumbling down the hill toward a cliff that had a hundred-foot drop. If it hadn’t been for a giant boulder, which stopped my momentum, I would probably have been killed. As it was, I was hurt really badly, my left ankle chipped, with a mild concussion and cuts and bruises all over. The doctors in the hospital did a good job of patching me up, enough so that I could play in the game the next day. But my ankle was really messed up—I could hardly put any weight on it—and I had to play left field instead of pitch, which La Russa and I agreed was probably the difference in the game since I was the best pitcher on the team. It was also the last time we would all play together.
The ankle bothered me the rest of the time I was at Jesuit, although I actually had a better senior season—statisticswise—in basketball than the year before, when I set a single-game scoring record with 57 points against Brandon High School. I had a really good jump shot and averaged about 32 points per game my senior year and was named to the Catholic school all-American team. I might have liked to have played football as well in high school—I had a good arm and the coaches said I could’ve been a good quarterback—except my mom prohibited me on account that her brother, Joe, had gotten seriously hurt in college, nearly losing a kidney, playing football for Loyola of New Orleans.
While I ultimately made my mark in baseball, the most influential person in my young life was my basketball coach at Jesuit, Paul Straub. What a wonderful man was Coach Straub. He’d lost both his legs and had a permanently disabled right hand from injuries he suffered at Guadalcanal in World War II, but you’d have never known it. Despite having two wooden prosthetic limbs from the knees down, he could travel the court almost as fast as we could. Years before at the University of Tampa, the football coach there, “Chelo” Huerta, teamed up with Coach Straub on a trick in front of the freshman recruits to demonstrate how tough they were going to have to be to play football at Tampa. As Huerta launched into his “toughness” dissertation, Coach Straub sat on a bench nearby in long pants and a T-shirt, reading a magazine, when this other guy, who was playing darts, suddenly wheeled around and fired a dart into Coach Straub’s leg. The looks of terror on the faces of the recruits satisfied Huerta that he’d made his point.
From Coach Straub I learned values, the will to compete, and, most important, teamwork. He was extremely patient with me with my temper—I was constantly being fouled—impressing on me that, for the good of the team, I had to restrain myself and not get a technical. It wasn’t easy. One particular game against our archrival, Jefferson, there was nothing Coach Straub could do when, on a fast break, I went up for a layup and was flagrantly fouled by, of all people, Victor Noriega, the cousin of my future wife, Anita. I immediately came up off the floor throwing punches, and in a matter of seconds the stands emptied onto the court and a full-fledged riot broke out. My mother was right in the middle of it, and maybe that’s where the umbrella story got started. When I retired from playing with the Yankees in 1984, Coach Straub was one of the people, along with my family, who I brought to New York for the day the organization had in my honor. He was that important to me.
At the same time, the baseball coach at Jesuit, Jack O’Connell, and I did not get along, so much so it cost me my senior year in the spring of 1961. I joined the baseball team late that spring, right before the first game, because the basketball season had extended all the way to the regional finals. Nevertheless, O’Connell told me he wanted me to start that first game. My arm wasn’t nearly in shape and my mom told me not to risk an injury that could possibly derail my baseball career. The fact was, the year before, O’Connell would start me in one game, then bring me right back in relief the next game, and my mom thought he was abusing my arm. “If you ruin your arm, what are you gonna do?” she asked.
So I told O’Connell I wasn’t going to be able to pitch that first game and he said, “If you don’t want to pitch, then just quit”—which is what I did. One of the biggest regrets of my life is missing my high school senior year of baseball. It killed me sitting in the stands and watching my teammates that whole spring and not being a part of it because of my own stubborn pride. Who knows what kind of bonus money I might have been offered? As it was, my parents wanted me to go to college
anyway, and I wound up going to the University of Tampa—which in those days consisted of only one building—on a kind of dual scholarship for baseball and basketball, but because I was living at home, I got to keep the extra money for room and board. It wasn’t $100,000 and a new car, but I was, in effect, getting paid to play baseball after high school.
The baseball coach at Tampa, Sam Bailey, was quite a character. He’d gather us around before practice and scream, “None of you guys here is worth a damn! The only reason you win is because of good coaching!” Then he’d blow his whistle and order us to start running around Macfarlane Park, shouting, “I want to see nothing but asses and elbows!” One time, when a few of our players complained to him about having trouble with their footing because of all these sand spurs on the ground, ol’ Sam screamed, “Sand spurs! Sand spurs! I’ll show you sand spurs!” and then picked up a handful of them and stuffed them in his mouth! In a few seconds, he was bleeding all over his mouth as we just stood there dumbfounded. From that day on, we called him “Sand Spur Sam.”
Sam was really a football coach who assisted Huerta in the fall and coached the baseball team on the side. He didn’t know a whole lot about baseball, but I liked him and enjoyed playing for him that one year. We did, however, have one altercation. My grandfather came to most of my games and liked to park his car behind the left field fence so he could talk to me between innings. He also would bring me one of those big Cuban sandwiches to eat before the games. But this one day he was late and didn’t get to slip the sandwich through the fence to me until the start of the second inning. With no time to eat it, I stuck the sandwich in my glove and hoped no one would hit any balls to me. But as fate would have it, the first ball hit in the inning was a fly to left, and as I raced over to make the catch, the sandwich exploded in my glove, lettuce, cheese, pickles, tomatoes, and salami flying all over the place. Everybody was looking at me, laughing uproariously at my buffoonery, and Sam came running out of the dugout screaming, “What the hell is going on out there?” He promptly took me out of the game, and the next day I had to run a few extra laps around Macfarlane Field.
