John Rosengren - Classic Baseball: Timeless Tales, Immortal Moments

Like you, Id seen the photograph. Juan Marichal bringing his bat down on the head of John Roseboro. But I didnt know much more than that. When I heard that Marichal had spoken at Roseboros funeral, I wanted to know how that came about. I set out to find out what happened on August 22, 1965and before, that had triggered their famous brawland what led to their very unlikely friendship.

Juan Marichal had dreaded the phone call. Barbara Fouch-Roseboro told him her husband Johnny, the former Dodgers catcher, had died. She asked Marichal to deliver a eulogy and to be an honorary pallbearer. Johnny would have wanted it. Marichal caught the first flight he could from the Dominican Republic to Los Angeles.

It was a sad journey for the former San Francisco Giants pitcher, yet it was also a closing of the circle. The two men, joined forever in the public mind by a single moment of violence 37 years earlier, had been eternally bound by that act.

The bonding took place slowly, rescuing one mans glory and erasing the others guilt. And it did so out of public view, far from the old Dodgers-Giants rivalry that exploded that August afternoon in 1965 before 42,087 fans in San Franciscos Candlestick Park.

The rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giantsthe most intense in baseball history, perhaps in all sportshad lost little when it moved from New York to the West Coast in 1958.

We hated each other, writes Orlando Cepeda, a former Giants first baseman and outfielder, in his autobiography Baby Bull.

Those Dodger-Giant games werent baseball, says Andy Pafko, a left fielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the early 1950s, in Roger Kahns The Boys of Summer. They were civil war.

The rivalry always intensified when the teams were battling for the National League lead. Games were typically punctuated by insults, threats, and knockdown pitches. When the two teams met in a four-game series in late summer 1965, the Giants trailed the Dodgers by only a half-game.

Juan Marichal came to bat in the third inning on August 22, 1965, expecting to hit the dirt. Thats where he had put leadoff man Maury Wills and cleanup hitter Ron Fairly after they had combined for Los Angeles first run. Baseballs code called for retaliationa high, inside fastball that screamed: You cant get away with throwing at our guys.

On the mound stood the hardest thrower in baseball, Sandy Koufax. In the second inning, Koufax had fired a fastball over Willie Mayss headmore wild pitch than intentional warning. Koufax normally didnt throw at batters, but Marichal wondered if, under the circumstances, the Dodgers ace might go after him.

Johnny Roseboro doubted it. Hed called for Koufax to knock down Mays, but Koufax had sailed the ball to the backstop. Roseboro believed that Koufax was constitutionally incapable of throwing at batterstoo nice and too afraid of hurting them. Roseboro called for another inside pitch. He would set Marichal straight by himself. The stage was set for a scene of horrible violence never before witnessed on a major-league field.

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Juan Marichal was an intimidating pitcher. In his signature windup, the right-hander reared back, kicked his left leg highspikes nearly scraping the skydipped the knuckles of his right hand low to the dirt, and fired from his arsenal of pitches: curve, slider, screwball, and lightning fastball. The Dominican Dandy made his debut for the Giants in 1960 by one-hitting the Phillies, striking out 12. In 1963, his 25 winsone of them a no-hittertopped the National League. A workhorse who led the league in innings pitched in 1963 and in complete games in 1964, he threw a 16-inning shutout against the Braves in July 1963. By late August of 1965 he had posted a 199 record and had been selected as the MVP of that summers All-Star Game.

The Dominican Republic native laughed readily. He was a prankster who hid teammates car keys or startled them with firecrackers set off behind their backs. At the same time, he remained hypersensitive to any hint of mistreatment that violated his sense of justice. Marichal, 5-foot-11 and 185 pounds, could use his fists when necessary, like the New Years Eve in a Santo Domingo nightclub when a mob swarmed him and he punched his way out of the club.

Marichal was born October 20, 1937, in a palm-bark shack in Laguna Verde, a poor village near the Dominican-Haitian border. As a young boy, only three years old, he lost his fatherrum destroyed the mans liver. When Juan showed talent on the ball field, Ramfis Trujillo, son of dictator Rafael Trujillo, pressed the 17-year-old pitcher into service on the national team. Four years later, the Giants lured Marichal away, but Juans familyhis mother, brother, sister, 16 cousins, and nine nieces and nephewsremained in the Dominican Republic.

During the summer of 1965, he worried about them, as civil war shredded his homeland. In late April, shortly after the baseball season had started, President Lyndon Johnson sent 20,000 U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic to quash a revolt that he believed would transform the Dominican into a second Cuba. Throughout the summer, the conflict between the two heavily armed sides raged in the streets. The crossfire cut down countless innocent civilians.

The war weighed heavily on Marichal. Lying awake at night, kicking around his San Francisco home, driving to the ballpark, he wrestled with his worries. What if the bullets struck down someone he loved? The family home had no telephone, so he had to rely on slow-traveling international mail for word of his loved ones safetyknowing the reports could be outdated by the time they arrived. He tried to shove away those worries when he took the mound, but the anxiety gnawed at him. I really dont think Juan should have been playing at all, Willie Mays, his friend and teammate, told the New York Times. He was pretty strung out, full of fear and anger, and holding it inside.

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Johnny Roseboro had proven a solid replacement for Roy Campanella as the Dodgers backstop since 1958. He had played in three All-Star Games and won a Gold Glove. Teammates had playfully nicknamed the laconic Roseboro Gabby. Under his tough, quiet exterior beat a tender heart with a well-developed sense of justice, ready to right a wrong as necessary.

An African American born May 13, 1933, in Ashland, Ohio, Rose-boro had moved to Los Angeles, where he bought a house. Driving home on the freeway from Dodger Stadium, Roseboro passed through the heart of the Watts ghetto. He saw fellow African Americans living in squalor unable to find work. Inadequate schools sentenced their children to more of the same. Frustration ignited and exploded in the infamous Watts riots on August 11, 1965, which raged for six days. The violence resulted in nearly three dozen fatalities and more than 1,000 injured. President Johnson dispatched the armored division of the National Guard, which occupied the burned-out war zone of Watts. Martial law was declared in south-central Los Angeles.