The Brawl We Can’t Forget, Even Forty Years Later

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The New York Sun

Surf your sports channels tonight, and you’ll probably see a choice excerpt from what was probably the ugliest and certainly the most famous on-field clash in baseball history. Forty years ago today, San Francisco Giants ace right-hander Juan Marichal clubbed Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro with a bat. No one who saw it live – NBC televised the game, which was on a Sunday afternoon, and the evening news on Sunday and Monday carried the highlights – will ever forget it.


What most people remember is the shock of the violence and the blood. They did not know then, and they probably do not know now, the racial tensions and tumultuous politics of the mid-1960s that boiled over on that Sunday afternoon.


On August 22, 1965, the Dodgers were playing the Giants in a crucial game at Candlestick Park during one of the most bitterly contested pennant races in National League history. No other incentive would have been needed to pack the ballpark in a game between the NL’s two oldest rivals, but this one had the added allure of a marquee matchup between the game’s two best pitchers: the Giants’ Juan Marichal and the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax.


Neither ace was at his best that day, and by the third inning the score was 2-1 in favor of Los Angeles. Marichal, who was not averse to throwing inside – hardly anyone was back in the 1960s, which was one of the primary reasons it was a pitcher’s decade – knocked down Ron Fairly and Maury Wills. Koufax, who disliked brush-back pitches he was afraid might kill someone – was pressured by his catcher, John Roseboro, to retaliate with a high-and-inside fastball when Marichal came to bat.


On the next pitch, low and inside, Roseboro dropped the ball and picked it up behind Marichal. When he threw it back to Koufax, the ball barely missed Marichal’s head. Marichal thought it was closer than that; he would forever claim that the ball nicked his ear.


“Roseboro was sending him a message,” says Charles Einstein, the best biographer of Willie Mays (“Willie’s Time”) and a beat writer covering the Giants. Marichal didn’t like the message. He spun around, bat in hand, and began screaming: “Why you do that? Why you do that?” Einstein says some choice Spanish terms were sprinkled in as well.


Roseboro’s chin music has somehow been excised from everyone’s collective memory. What is also forgotten is that it was Roseboro who charged Marichal, not the other way around. For most of the 42,000-plus crowd, the first indication that something was wrong came when they saw Marichal smash Roseboro’s head with his bat. Blood immediately began to flow from a deep scalp wound.


Players and coaches on both teams rushed toward home plate. Mays, a close friend of Roseboro’s, was the first Giant to get there. He immediately grabbed the Dodger catcher, partly to protect him and partly, as he later revealed, to prevent him from attacking Marichal. As Mays led Roseboro off the field, he cradled his bleeding head and moaned, “Johnny, Johnny, I’m so sorry.”


When order was finally restored, a shaken Koufax walked the next two hitters and then gave up a three-run homer to Mays, giving the Giants a 4-2 victory. They may not have realized it that night, but the Giants’ season was over. Marichal, 19-9 before the game, lost three of his last four decisions after returning from an eight-day suspension, which was seen as remarkably light. Marichal was also fined $1,750 by the league – a bigger bite, it’s true, in a time when top stars made $100,000 a year at most – but almost nothing compared to what fans and much of the press were screaming for. The Giants lost the pennant to the Dodgers by two games, largely because of Marichal’s suspension.


Why did Marichal get off so light? Possibly because when Commissioner Ford Frick’s office asked a few questions and watched a replay of Roseboro’s throw, they found that the matter was more complex than anyone had thought, and decided that the fewer details that emerged the better. Einstein speculates that because of the controversy surrounding U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Dominican Republic, baseball didn’t want to touch any political nerves by publicizing the cause of emotional stress for one of the game’s biggest stars.


As today, most brawls in the 1960s were caused by batters retaliating against pitchers, who were permitted a great deal of leeway in moving hitters off the plate. But no one could recall a fight in which a player attacked another player with a bat. The Marichal-Roseboro clash was all the more shocking because the men’s behavior was entirely uncharacteristic. Roseboro, 32, was a solid, levelheaded player, and Marichal, 27, whose nickname was the Dominican Dandy, had a reputation as an amiable practical-joker off the field.


The sports press characterized the clash as an example of the racial strife that was occurring in the rest of the country – in the news of the period, there were nearly as many reports of conflicts between black and Hispanics in ghetto areas from Newark to Los Angeles as between black and white or Hispanic and white. But in fact, it was the first such confrontation between Hispanic and American black players that anyone could remember.


Indeed, the confrontation was not the result of racial antagonism between the participants, but of off-the-field pressures catching two ordinary men in an extraordinary situation. Roseboro, who later admitted to goading Marichal, was distraught, as were many other black players, over the mass disturbances that had been sweeping through Watts in his home city of Los Angeles.


“It was really the year I came of age,” he told me in 2000, when I was preparing a chapter on Marichal for a book. “It was the first time I began to pick up a paper and skip the sports section altogether. Much of the time I was on the field I had to keep reminding myself that baseball was important. I’d wake up in the morning and say to myself, ‘Why are they playing games? Why can’t we do something about Watts and the people who live there?’ “


Roseboro was back in action within a week with no discernible effect on his performance. He played five more years, retiring in 1970.


Meanwhile, Marichal’s native Dominican Republic was locked in a bloody civil war, and Marichal found himself rushing to the phone every day to check the fortunes of friends and family, particularly those of another Juan Marichal, his cousin, a politician who would become vice president the following year.


“Thinking back on it,” Mays told Einstein, “I really don’t think Juan should have been playing at all. He was pretty strung out, full of fear and anger, and holding it inside. How can you tell a city and a team that they have to lose a pennant because of problems they don’t know about happening thousands of miles away?”


Summing up the incident, Roseboro told me, “For millions of Americans the pennant race was a diversion from the problems that were sweeping over the country. For some of us, it was just one more huge burden.”


For Marichal, it was a burden that continued long after his playing days. Though he won more games than any other pitcher in the 1960s, he was snubbed for the Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility. Bob Gibson, who was no better a pitcher, strolled into Cooperstown on the first vote. Marichal placed sixth; Don Drysdale and Hoyt Wilhelm – neither of whom were in Marichal’s class – finished ahead of him in the voting. So did Gil Hodges, who still hasn’t been elected to the Hall.


The following year, Marichal was still short by six votes. He finally made it in 1983 on the basis of his three 25-win seasons, six 20-win seasons, and 2.89 lifetime ERA. Still, he might not have made it at all if not for a public campaign by Roseboro. A grateful Marichal thanked him.


Even today, photographs stir instant recognition with fans who never saw it happen. Though no one spoke about it at the time, several of their teammates knew the added pressures that Marichal and Roseboro were playing under. Maury Wills, who had been brushed back by Marichal in the game, still refers to him as “a nice guy, a great individual. What happened that day was ridiculously uncharacteristic of the man.”


Whenever anyone asks him to think back on that day, says Wills, “I tell them that the next time they see a ballplayer go a little nuts on the field, consider that his life might be just a little bit more complicated than you can tell by looking at a box score.”


The New York Sun

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