by Lou Piniella
Midway through my freshman year at the U. of Tampa I made the decision to quit school and pursue my baseball career. My ankle had really bothered me all through the basketball season and I could see I needed to concentrate on one sport. The only problem was going to be the scouts’ ability to convince my mother that I had major-league promise and needed to turn pro now, not in three years. What it took was a provision in the contract I signed with the Cleveland Indians in which $7,500 was held back to pay for the rest of my college. And I did try to complete my degree after turning pro, taking night courses at the U. of Tampa in the off-season while working in the National Shirt Shop during the day. I did this for four years until something else far more meaningful for my life than a college degree happened: I met and married Anita Garcia.
I didn’t know Anita when I was in high school or when I was first taking classes in college. I only knew of her. In her freshman year of high school she and my friend Malio Iavarone were elected homecoming king and queen of their class. Later on, after she graduated from Hillsborough High School, she was elected Miss Tampa and went on to compete in the Miss Florida pageant. I actually didn’t meet her until a few years later, after I’d started playing pro ball—the first time at Ponce De Leon Park in Ybor City, where she was the park director, and later at a semipro football game in Tampa in which one of my former baseball teammates at the U. of Tampa, Ronnie Perez, was playing. At the time, Anita was dating Ronnie, and I sat in the stands with her and Ronnie’s parents. After the game, Anita and Ronnie went on a date and I came home with Ronnie’s family.
But then a few months later, she and Ronnie quit dating, and I asked him if it was all right with him if I called her. He gave me his blessing and I gave her a call, only to be told by her that she was busy. The same thing happened when I gave her a second call. I was basically shy and after two turndowns, I was getting very discouraged. Nevertheless, I decided to give it one more try, only this time I prefaced my question by saying, “I’m gonna make this very simple. I’m a baseball player and in baseball it’s three strikes and you’re out and you already have two.”
She would later say that the problem with the first two times I called her was that it was last minute. But when I laid it on the line, she knew the pressure was on her. As she later told me, “If I turned you down one more time, that would have been it. You wouldn’t ever call again.” And she would have been right.
I was a Latin kid from Tampa and I always had wanted to marry a Latin girl from Tampa. I knew almost from the very beginning Anita was the one. For that first date I know I must have made quite an impression on her when I took her to a Pizza Hut.
“Here he was, telling me how he was this professional baseball player, but instead of taking me to Bern’s Steak House, he takes me to Pizza Hut,” said Anita. “He then explained that if I stuck with him, we’d be regularly dining on steaks. The fact was, I was making more money as a schoolteacher than he was.”
Afterward, we went to a little club for drinks and dancing. This was November 1966 and we dated steadily all that winter and got engaged. The following April, I flew home from the Indians’ spring training camp in Tucson to get married at the Temple Terrace Country Club. Because my grandmother had just died, my mother didn’t want any music at the wedding—which I know didn’t go over too well with Anita’s family. They were a large Italian-Spanish family who loved dancing but were also very strict with their three daughters. But if that wasn’t disconcerting enough for her, our honeymoon was spent not in Bermuda, the Bahamas, Aruba, or Hawaii but in Portland, Oregon, the home of my new team, the Indians’ Triple-A affiliate in the Pacific Coast League.
I know those first couple of years being married to a minor-league ballplayer couldn’t have been easy for her. She had hardly ever been out of Tampa, and now here she was, on the other side of the continent, alone with no friends while I was on these long Pacific Coast League road trips. But we both grew to really like Portland and, in retrospect, the Pacific Northwest became a very big part of our lives.
In the winters, Anita, who majored in art and education at the University of Florida and South Florida, taught first grade at Broward Elementary while I was selling clothes and continuing to take classes at U. of Tampa. She had forty-five students but always said that I was her forty-sixth after putting up with me that whole first summer in Portland. The fact is, I was never much of a student and gradually became less and less interested in getting my degree. In the winter of 1968 I had two courses, zoology and square dancing, the latter being one of those gimme courses that everybody took just to be assured of getting an A or a B. But while zoology was just a matter of studying, square dancing was a much bigger challenge for me because I had two left feet. Leading up to the final exam, Anita helped me practice every night. But after cramming all night for the zoology exam, I was just too tired to do any square dancing so I blew off the final exam. Nevertheless, I was surprised a few days later when they posted an F for the course next to my name. It turned out, after I inquired (too late), that the final exam had been a written exam! All I had to do, they told me, was to basically just show up. That was it for me! And the record will forever show the final course I took in college was square dancing—which I managed to fail.
It was all right, though. I had already met and married the girl of my dreams. Now it was time to fulfill my baseball dream.
CHAPTER 3
Have Bat, Will Travel
Anybody who ever cared to check out the long, nomadic road I took through the minor leagues before eventually reaching the majors after seven years and four different organizations could only come to one conclusion: there must have been issues with this guy—and they would be right.
There were plenty of them, starting out with temperament and moving on to stubbornness, lack of discipline, and the inability to hit the breaking ball. As good an athlete as I had been in high school, I’m sure the baseball scouting reports on me were not particularly overwhelming. I didn’t have great speed. I didn’t possess raw power, and I didn’t have any certain position, other than somewhere in the outfield. What I did have was basic baseball instincts and intellect, which don’t usually show up in the scouting reports.
Even though I missed playing baseball my senior year, scouts told me they’d seen enough bat potential in my sophomore and junior seasons to warrant a bonus of around $50,000. Instead, because my parents wanted me to go to college, I wound up agreeing to sign for half that with the Cleveland Indians after taking my final exams of my freshman year at the University of Tampa. By going to Tampa, it kept me in front of a lot of the same scouts who’d seen me in high school and on the sandlots. But the Indians’ scout, Spud Chandler, who won an American League Most Valuable Player award as a pitcher for the Yankees in 1943, was the most persistent. The day after the baseball season ended, he was sitting in front of my parents’ house with a contract for $25,000 and instructions to report to the Selma (Alabama) Cloverleafs, the Indians’ farm team in the lowest-rung Class D Alabama-Florida League.
My uncle Mac drove me from Tampa to Selma and my introduction to the last segregated league in professional baseball. My manager at Selma, Pinky May, had been managing in the Cleveland system since 1952 after a brief five-year major-league career as a third baseman with the Phillies during the war years. He was a really good guy who lived in Saint Petersburg, just like Chandler, and made me feel at home, even if the environment in the Deep South was a bit unsettling. Selma had only three traffic lights in its downtown—that was it. At night, the boll weevils would invade the ballpark in droves from the river that ran alongside it, and they often stopped the games. On the way home from night games, we’d get so hot we used to pick up a couple of watermelons, spike ’em with vodka, and sneak into the town swimming pool with some of the southern belles.
The ballparks in the Alabama-Florida League were all tiny, most of them kind of run down, and one of them, in Andalusia, had no fences! It was there where, in one game, I hit an inside-
the-park home run—a line drive to left center that got between the outfielders and just kept rolling. I hit only one other inside-the-park homer in my career—against the Yankees, no less—a drive into the monuments in left center of the old Yankee Stadium off Fritz Peterson. The ball went over the head of my later great friend Bobby Murcer, who, uncharacteristically, didn’t get a good jump on the ball. Years later, every time I brought that up to Bobby, chiding him for having so little respect for me as a hitter, he swore he didn’t remember it.
As I said, there were other elements of my Selma experience that were a little unsettling for a kid who grew up in Tampa, which was kind of a melting pot of whites, Hispanic immigrants, Cubans, and blacks. We all played together in the high schools and sandlots and didn’t really know from race. So I wasn’t used to seeing “whites only” drinking fountains and public restrooms, and it didn’t really dawn on me until we were about a month into the season that the league was all white. It turned out that 1962 was the final season of the Alabama-Florida League. When the national association of minor leagues decreed it would have to integrate for 1963, Alabama governor George Wallace refused, and the league was disbanded.
One of the first things Pinky May did for me when I reported to Selma was give me a new pair of baseball spikes. The ones I had, he said, were too big, and he handed me a pair of Wilson kangaroo spikes. They were too tight when I first put them on, but then Pinky put them in a shoe stretcher and for the first time in my baseball career I had a comfortable shoe. Pinky did find out quickly I was a red-ass, but somehow he tolerated me. There was no running water in the dugout and instead they had a big rain bucket filled with ice water. But on too many occasions, I got pissed off after making an out and kicked it over—which didn’t endear me to my teammates—and was probably why they got immense amusement the time I flung the ladle in disgust into the bucket after striking out and then fell headfirst into the bucket trying to fish it out.
When I turned pro, I was strictly a pull hitter, and I was able to get away with that in Class D ball and all the way up to high A ball the following season, when I hit .310 with 16 homers and 77 RBI at Peninsula in the Carolina League. But after hitting a decent .270 with 44 RBI in 70 games in my first season as a pro, I was a little surprised when, that winter, the Indians left me unprotected in the minor-league draft and I was the first player selected by the Washington Senators. I was home in Tampa when I got a call from the Senators’ general manager, George Selkirk—another former Yankee who held the distinction of having replaced Babe Ruth in right field (inheriting his number 3 uniform as well) for them in 1935. Growing up in Tampa I hated the Yankees—I rooted for the Indians and the Red Sox—and yet all of a sudden early in my career I was getting intertwined with them. At Selma I’d been making $650 a month, but being as I was selected in the draft for the Senators’ forty-man roster, I expected major-league money. I didn’t know they could pay you less than that, and much to my dismay Selkirk sent me a contract for the same $650 a month. I wrote a letter back to him expressing my dissatisfaction and he sent me a letter back saying the Indians had been very generous to me. So much for that negotiation.
I reported to the Senators’ spring training camp in Pompano Beach in ’63, and it was there where I got a real indoctrination to the finer points of the game from two of their veteran players, Don Zimmer and Jimmy Piersall. Piersall, who had been a Gold Glove, All-Star outfielder with the Red Sox and Indians, was especially helpful to me with my outfield play, showing me how to go back on balls and to throw to the right base. The Senators sent me to Peninsula, which as I said was a few notches higher in the minor leagues, but as far as race conditions were concerned, the Carolina League was not that much different from Selma in the Deep South. I didn’t like that when we stopped for gas and food on road trips, the black players had to stay on the bus and wait for us to bring food back to them, and in most towns they had to stay in separate black hotels. It was a terrible situation that we had no control over.
Still, in spite of the cultural challenges, I was very satisfied with my season at Peninsula, hitting .300 and all, and in my mind, I was ready to show what I could do against Triple-A pitching or better. I bought a ’57 Chevy that summer and during the day I’d go to the tobacco auctions in North Carolina, which were a reminder of my childhood when both my parents worked in the Tampa cigar companies. But then, in the last week of the season, I had a party at my house in Newport News and somehow (my mind remains hazy to this day about this) I ran my left arm through a glass door—a gruesome cut that required about twenty-five stitches. Right before that, my manager, Archie Wilson, told me there was a possibility I might be called up to the big leagues. (Dare I mention that, in a very brief major-league career, Archie Wilson played seven games for the Yankees in 1951 and ’52?) Instead, I went home to Tampa and then was assigned by the Senators to a winter ball team they had there, presumably to make sure I had fully recovered—and not torn any tendons—from my party accident. It was bad enough I hadn’t regained any strength in my arm, but on top of that, against much more experienced pitchers in the winter league, the Senators found out I couldn’t hit the slider. As a result, I really struggled and really got the red-ass, crushing more watercoolers and bat racks than baseballs.
Then, just before I was supposed to report to spring training the following February, I got a notice that I was about to be drafted into the army. When I called Selkirk to inform him, he was furious.
“Why didn’t you tell us about your draft status sooner?” he bellowed. “We could have gotten you into the reserves.”
Fortunately, the Senators were able to get me into a National Guard outfit in Washington, but while I was away in basic training, they also got rid of me. On August 4, 1964, I became the “player to be named later” in a trade the Senators had made the previous March with the Baltimore Orioles for a major-league pitcher, Buster Narum.
As soon as I got out of the service, I got a call from the Orioles’ general manager, Lee MacPhail, welcoming me to the club and asking me to report to its Class C Aberdeen, North Dakota, team in the Northern League.
“Even though it’s a lower-class ball,” MacPhail said, “because you’re doing this for us, if you do well there we’ll call you up to the big club in September.”
I hit .270 with 12 RBI in Aberdeen’s last 20 games and, as promised, the Orioles called me to the big leagues. My manager at Aberdeen was Cal Ripken Sr., and Cal Jr. was the bat boy. Besides Cal Jr. there was another future Hall of Famer on that team: Jim Palmer, who jumped right to the majors in 1965. Unlike me, Palmer was in the majors to stay. My calling lasted just those last couple of weeks of the ’64 season, most of which were spent as a spectator on the bench. Hank Bauer—yet another former Yankee—was the Orioles’ manager, and it was very clear to me he had little time for an inexperienced kid called up from A ball.
On September 4, I got my one and only major-league at-bat when Bauer summoned me to pinch-hit for Robin Roberts against the Angels at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. I ran the count to 3-2 on Fred Newman, a right-hander, before grounding out to short. When I got back to the dugout, Roberts came up to me and said, “Hell, I could do that!” Years later, Roberts would live in Temple Terrace, Florida, where I lived, and every time I ran into him I never let him forget how he left me feeling thoroughly intimidated after my first major-league at-bat.
The following spring, I reported to the Orioles’ major-league camp in Miami, where Bauer and I became much more acquainted—although from my standpoint, not for the better. We were staying in the McAllister Hotel in downtown Miami, not far from the hot spots on Biscayne Boulevard. One night, my roommate, a pitcher named Steve Cosgrove, and I were in one of them throwing back a few Jack Daniels well past curfew when a little bit before two, the bartender came over and poured us a couple more shots.
“These are from a gentleman across the bar,” he said. We couldn’t make out who he was pointing to so we just waved “thanks,” finished our drinks,
and went back to the hotel. The next morning at the ballpark, Bauer called us over before the workout.
“Where were you last night?” he demanded.
“Oh, we went to bed early,” we replied.
“Early my ass!” Bauer said. “That guy who bought you the drinks last night was me! I hope you enjoyed ’em because today you’re gonna pay for them.”
With that, he ordered us to start taking laps in the outfield, back and forth, starting on the warning track, from right field to left field, all while the game was going on and he could watch us from the dugout. Thank god he called off the dogs in the fourth inning. A couple of days later, the Orioles had a game in Tampa against the Cincinnati Reds and I was part of the traveling squad—presumably, I thought, because it was my hometown and I’d be getting a chance to play before my family and friends. But for nine long innings, Bauer let me sit on the bench, and I never got into the game. It was something I never forgot—to the point where when I became a manager in the big leagues, whenever we had a road game in spring training, I checked with all my players to see if anyone had family or girlfriends in those towns, and I always made sure to get them into the games.
Not long after, Bauer sent me to the Triple-A camp in Daytona Beach, and from there I was sent to Bainbridge, Georgia, where the Orioles’ Double-A Eastern League Elmira team—which I’d been assigned to—was training. I had a couple of days to report and I used all of it, pulling into Bainbridge around 2:00 a.m. The team was lodged in an old army barracks, and after picking up my blanket, sheets, and pillow, I got into my cot and began to quickly doze off. Suddenly, a few minutes later there was this light in my face, being held by a little guy with a crew cut, screaming at me, “Who the hell do you think you are?”
