The Dandy Dominican

(See Cover) SCENE ONE THE TIME: 1948. THE PLACE: A typical, two-room bohio, or farmhouse, on the outskirts of Laguna Verde, Dominican Republic. The name Laguna Verde, meaning Green Lagoon, is hyperbole. A ragged hamlet located about 15 miles from the Haitian border, it is the home of 500-odd campesinos who scratch out a living by growing maize and rice in sun-baked clay that scarcely tolerates thorny scrub and cactus. Inside the Marichal bohio (palm-bark walls, thatched roof, oddments of homemade furniture), a nine-year-old boy sprawls shirtless on the concrete floor, unraveling the thread from an old silk stocking. With infinite care, he winds the thread round and round a scrap of rubber until he has a ball about 9 in. in circumference. The boy's mother enters the room unnoticed and watches, frowning, while he wraps the ball tightly with adhesive tape, tests his handiwork with a couple of bounces off the floor. Crude, maybe even a little lopsided--but a fair facsimile of a baseball. The mother speaks sharply.

Widow Marichal: Juanito! What do you want with this ball business? SCENE TWO

THE TIME: 18 years later. THE PLACE: Crosley Field, Cincinnati. Juan Antonio Marichal Sanchez, 27, star pitcher of the National League-leading San Francisco Giants, is feeling lousy. His neck is stiff, his shoulder aches, his elbow hurts. He is dosed with vitamins, painkillers and anti-allergens. Caramba! But never fear. He stands there on the mound with a big grin on his face, firing baseballs at the Reds as if he didn't have a care in the world. In the fourth inning, with the bases loaded, he strikes out Cincinnati's Johnny Edwards on five pitches. In the eighth, with Cincinnati runners on first and third, and a count of three balls and two strikes on Batter Art Shamsky, he cuts loose a back-breaking curve. Strike three! Meanwhile, he has scored one Giant run himself, driven in two others with a 385-ft. double. The Giants win, 5-3, and Juan Marichal (pronounced Mah-ree-chal) marches off to the clubhouse with what he wants--his tenth straight victory of the year. He is earning $70,000 a year, is the No. 1 pitcher in baseball at this point in the season, and is a hero to thousands of fans.

Does that answer your question, Mother Marichal?

Figuring in the Argument. Baseball fans, being chronic dyspeptics (too much warm beer, too many cold hot dogs), doubtless will debate forever who is the best pitcher of the 1966 season, the decade, the century, and All Time. There is a strong possibility that Juan Marichal will figure in the grander argument.

"The thing I hate about that s.o.b.," said ex-Philadelphia Phillies Catcher Gus Triandos two weeks ago, after watching Juan shut out the Phillies, 1-0, on six hits in 14 innings, "is that it all seems so easy for him. It's one thing to go hitless against a pitcher like Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale or Jim Maloney; at least you can look out there and see the cords standing out on his neck. He looks like he's working, and he looks like he's worried. Marichal--he just stands there laughing at you."

Now in his seventh big-league season, Righthander Marichal already has posted 115 victories. He has lost only 53 games, and his winning average of .684 is the third highest in baseball history.*Thirty of his victories have been shutouts. He has struck out 1,098 batters, walked 338--a ratio of better than 3 to 1--and his lifetime earned-run aver age is 2.64, which is pretty spectacular considering that an average big-league team scores at least four runs per game.

This season, even spectacular may be too tame a word for Marichal. Up until the end of last week, he had started eleven games and finished all but two of them. In 101 innings of pitching, he had struck out 69 batters, walked only eleven, allowed just 58 hits and nine earned runs--for an earned-run average of 0.80.

Then boom. Any pitcher can have a bad night (and they all do), but Marichal had a pip: in four horrendous innings he gave up six runs to the same Philadelphia Phillies he had blanked for 14 innings nine days before. Juan himself could not understand it. "I'm fine," he had assured Manager Herman

Franks before the game. "I'm ready." Eight hits, two walks and two hit batsmen later (he only hit four all last year), he was on his way to the shower, quivering with embarrassment. For half an hour afterward, he sat on a clubhouse bench, head between his knees, face buried in a handkerchief. Then, dressing hastily, he ducked reporters and disappeared into the night.

He'll get over it. With a record any other pitcher would trade his shirt for --ten victories, one loss--and more than two-thirds of the 1966 schedule still to play, Marichal is an odds-on bet to post his fourth 20-victory season in a row. He could, with a bit of luck, win 30. Only one National League pitcher (Dizzy Dean in 1934) has accomplished that feat in the past 48 years.

Captain & Crew. Coming when it does, in the era of the rabbit ball, the lively bat, the narrowed strike zone, shortened fences, hardened infields and exploding scoreboards that make every home run sound like a Viet Cong ambush, Marichal's performance to date should automatically qualify him for a niche in the Hall of Fame--or the Smithsonian. But Baseball Is a Funny Game, as Sportscaster Joe Garagiola is forever pointing out. To purists, it is blasphemy to suggest that Juan Marichal is as good as Walter Johnson, say, or Ed Walsh, or Rube Waddell--even though Johnson was strictly a fastballer, Walsh doctored the ball freely with saliva, and Waddell was a drunkard who chased girls and fire engines with more gusto than he pitched. Marichal will probably never equal the National League record of 373 lifetime victories held jointly by Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander, and he certainly will never approach Cy Young's major-league mark of 511--but those records were set during the "dead ball" days prior to 1930, when the pitcher was king, the game was tailored to his taste, and a fearsome slugger named John Franklin Baker acquired the permanent nickname of "Home Run" by hitting twelve balls out of the park in one year.

Modern pitchers, by necessity, are a more complicated crew. A lively fastball is no longer a guarantee of success, or even of survival. Bob Feller may well have been the fastest fireballer of all time (his pitches were once clocked at 98.6 m.p.h.), but he struggled for years to perfect the sweeping curve that prolonged his career when the zip in his hummer was gone. Warren Spahn, who retired last fall as the winningest lefthander in history (363 victories), underwent a slow but drastic transition during his 21 big-league seasons: from fastballer to curveballer, from a high-and-tight pitcher to a low-and-away pitcher. Marichal's top contemporaries all rely on deception as well as speed. Cleveland's Sam McDowell, the American League's top strikeout artist last season (with 325), throws a sinker that breaks downward so sharply that opponents (perhaps correctly) assume it to be a spitball. Cincinnati's Jim Maloney (1966 record: 5-1) alternates fastballs with curves. Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers relies on a sidearm slider that comes at batters from the general direction of third base; righthanded hitters often dive right out of the box, only to see the ball change direction at the last instant, tail straight across the plate.

Juan v. Sandy. Then there is Sandy Koufax--the highest-paid player in baseball (at $130,000), holder of the modern record for strikeouts in a season (382), the only man ever to pitch four no-hitters, and the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1963. Last week the Los Angeles Dodger lefthander shut out the St. Louis Cardinals on seven hits, 1-0, for his ninth victory (against one loss) of the season, and the big question around the league naturally was: Who is better, Koufax or Marichal?

Statistics are inconclusive. Over the past four seasons, Juan has won 86 games; Sandy has won 84. They have pitched against each other three times in three years; Marichal has won two --but Koufax's victory was a no-hitter. Atlanta's Henry Aaron opts for Sandy: "We have hit Marichal hard a lot of times," he says. Houston's Joe Morgan plays it straight up the middle: "When you get a hit off either one, the umpire should stop the game and present you with the ball." Cincinnati Pitcher Milt Pappas calls Juan "the best I've ever seen"--and Dick Stuart of the New York Mets agrees. "The other day I was having pretty good luck against Marichal," he says. "I had batted three times and was 0-for-3. But then Ron Swoboda walked, and I had to come up for a fourth time." The box score tells the rest: Stuart, 0-for-4.

Better than Koufax or not, Juan Marichal without question 1) has the best right arm in baseball, and 2) is the most complete pitcher in the game today, or any other day. "No man has the assortment of pitches Juan has," says Giants Manager Herman Franks --and there is a consensus about that. "Koufax has two pitches--a fastball and a curve," says St. Louis Outfielder Mike Shannon. "They're the two best pitches in the league. But Marichal has more. He has four or five--and he can control them all." Shannon hasn't seen the half of it: Juan has 13 pitches (see diagram), and one of the keys to his success is that he exhibits no particular fondness for any of them. "You can't anticipate him," explains Outfielder Frank Robinson, late of Cincinnati and currently of the Baltimore Orioles, who freely admits that he is happy to be playing in the American League--where he is batting .322 and doesn't have to worry about Marichal any more. "Juan has no set pattern. He's got all that stuff, and he'll throw any of it in any situation."

Actually, there is one pitch that Marichal prefers not to throw: his best one, the fastball. For one thing, it is too much like work. ("Has major-league fastball," read a plaintive note in the first scouting report the Giants received on Juan's pitching, "but wants to throw curves all the time.") For another, the fastball is essentially a strikeout pitch. Sandy Koufax may get his kicks out of setting strikeout records, but Marichal would rather save his arm. "It takes at least three pitches to strike a man out," he says matter-of-factly. "It only takes one for a ground ball." In his first two games this year, against Chicago and Houston, Juan did not throw a single fastball. He gave the Cubs three hits and the Astros seven, won by scores of 9-1 and 7-1.

As Fast as He Feels. Just how fast Marichal's fastball travels when he does throw it is a subject of mild controversy. "Slower than Koufax's" is a common comment, but the truth is: as fast as he feels like throwing it. One National League hitter claims to have counted ten different speeds, and few batters have ever seen Marichal really cut loose. Cincinnati's John Edwards is one of the privileged few. After Marichal struck him out with the bases loaded last week, Giants Coach Charlie Fox noted that "Edwards obviously knew those fastballs were coming. But they were the very best in the league, and they went right by him."

Ordinarily, though, Marichal is less concerned with pure speed than with delivery, direction and control. He throws the fastball with any one of three separate motions--straight overhand, three-quarters overhand and sidearm, making minute adjustments in his grip to control the direction of flight and produce a variety of optical illusions. The sidearm fastball may "tail" slightly away from a righthanded batter as it approaches home plate; the overhand and three-quarters only appear to. The idea, always, is to clip the corners of the plate--never to split the center. "Any batter can hit a ball over the middle of the plate," chuckles Juan. "Even me. A good pitcher tries for only that much"--holding his thumb and forefinger 2 in. apart. Says Giants Pitching Coach Larry Jansen: "If you put up a 6-in. target 60 ft. away, Juan would hit it nine out of ten times."

"Man, It Breaks." Marichal's curve ball can be pretty illusory too. When he pitches overhand, it does not curve at all. It sinks. To compound the confusion, Juan's sidearm curve does not sink. It curves away from a righthanded batter, in toward a lefthander--and that's no illusion. Back in 1959, Dr. Lyman Briggs, a scientist at the National Bureau of Standards, worked out a set of conditions for the maximum possible sideways "break" of a curve ball. Explained Dr. Briggs: if a ball spinning at 1,800 r.p.m. is thrown from the pitcher's mound to home plate (60 ft. 6 in.) at a speed of 100 ft. per second, the path of its flight will curve 17 inches. Marichal's sidearm curve may not depart from the straight and narrow quite that much--but, says Coach Fox: "It breaks, man, it breaks."

Juan's slider is a cross between a fastball and a curve--and fast is a key adjective, because a slow slider is the classic "hanging curve" that gives .200 hitters their moments of glory. The change-up is baseball's answer to the old shell game: lots of motion followed by a "slow" fastball or curve aimed at duping overeager batters into whiffing at empty air. When it comes to the screwball, it takes one to throw one. Basically a reverse curve, it is thrown regularly by only two pitchers in the National League besides Marichal--Cincinnati's Jack Baldschun and Atlanta's Chi-Chi Olivo. Reason: it is perfectly possible to dislocate an arm throwing a screwball. At the moment of release, the wrist, elbow and shoulder all must be rotated dramatically, in a direction opposite to nature's intention. To lefthanded hitters, Juan's screwball is dramatic indeed.

At work on the mound, Marichal is a study in contrasts. His chubby face and impish grin provide the perfect mask for his fierce concentration on the task at hand. His mental "book" on the weaknesses of National League batters is so detailed that Giants Catcher Tom Haller never even bothers to go over the opposing line-up before a game. His stockiness (5 ft. 11 in., 190 Ibs.) belies his agility and grace. Marichal's overhand pitching motion is wonderful to behold: rocking back, kicking his left foot high above his head--higher than any other pitcher in memory--he seems almost, for an instant, to be suspended on strings. Then, in one bewildering blur, he sweeps forward to release the ball, often so violently that he staggers sideways off the mound. That lone flaw in Juan's motion--the awkwardness of his follow-through--is forever giving batters bright ideas. "Why not just bunt him to death?" Houston's young Centerfielder Jimmy Wynn asked an Astro coach when he first saw Marichal three years ago. Replied the coach: "Go ahead and bunt--if you can." Wynn soon learned his lesson: "Juan doesn't give you pitches you can bunt."

Only How to Hide. "This is a guessing game," says Marichal. "The hitter is always trying to guess, and I'm always trying to guess what the hitter is guessing. I haven't gotten any better--only smarter." Strange as that may sound, it is the truth.

Every pitch Marichal throws today was already in his bag of tricks when he reported to San Francisco in July 1960. All but one (his screwball) were part of his repertory before he left the Dominican Republic in March 1958. In short, the Giants have not taught Juan a thing--except how to hide the ball in his glove during his windup. "I first saw Juan at the age of 19. And he looked like a ten-year pro even then," says Carl Hubbell, San Francisco's head scout and once a pretty fair pitcher himself. Giants Owner Horace Stoneham was so impressed when he first saw Marichal throw that all he could think of to say was: "Where did you learn all about pitching?"

He learned in the Dominican Republic--where baseball really is the national pastime. For as long as he can remember, Marichal has been enthralled by the game, and it still sticks out all over him--in the gleeful way he hogs the batting cage in practice ("Bases loaded, two outs," he chirps, waiting for the pitch. "Base hit! Base hit!" he screams, whenever he connects), in the solicitous way he treats the hordes of youngsters who hound him for his autograph ("I remember how I felt about ballplayers when I was a kid"). Juan's father died when he was three ("Too much rum," explains Widow Marichal), and his mother took a dim view of the lad's fanaticism. She railed against his playing ball because it interfered with school and farm chores, tried to stop him from attending grownups' games for fear he would be hit by a foul ball. Luckily, Juan's older brother Gonzalo and his sister's husband, Prospero Villalona, were baseball nuts too. By the time he was nine, Juan could throw a curve (his lopsided, homemade baseballs wouldn't do anything else), and he quit school after the eleventh grade "because I was crazy about the game."

At first, Juan played shortstop. Then one day when he was 15, Brother-in-Law Prospero took him to watch a local favorite named Bombo Ramos pitch amateur ball in the town of Monte Cristi, six miles up the highway from Laguna Verde. "He was great!" recalls Marichal. "You know, he used to talk to the batter. He'd say, 'You'd better hit this pitch. If you don't, you'll never hit the next one.' Once, I hear, he even told his infielders and outfielders to sit down. I went home that day and I never played shortstop again."

Within a year, Marichal himself was good enough to pitch for Monte Cristi. When he was 17, a recruiter for the United Fruit Co. persuaded him to join the company's team at Manzanillo, a banana port on the Massacre River, which separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. The inducement was a job driving a tractor-lawnmower ("I only had to do it when it rained, and it didn't rain much"), in return for which he got room, board, laundry and $12 a week. That idyl ended abruptly when Marichal pitched Manzanillo to a 2-1 victory over a Dominican air force team sponsored by Ramfis Trujillo, eldest son of El Benefactor, Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. The next thing Juan knew, he was recruited into the Dominican air force.

Off to Jail. Military life did not particularly agree with Private Juan Marichal, 18--especially the crew cut and the long-sleeved khaki uniform he had to wear. It must have hit him pretty hard because one payday Juan went out on a toot: two drinks. He had never touched a drop of hard liquor before, and he hasn't since. The final blow came when the air force, despite a heroic performance by Marichal, lost both ends of a doubleheader to his old teammates at Manzanillo. "And so," he sighs, "we were put in jail. Five days' restriction and a $2 fine." That was it for Private Marichal: he got out--sort of--by signing a professional contract with the Escogido Leones, who just happened to be owned by Francisco Martinez, who just happened to be El Benefactor's brother-in-law.

The coincidences progressed--geometrically. Escogido also just happened to have a "gentleman's agreement" with a certain U.S. baseball team named the Giants; every player signed by the Leones was simultaneously signed to a Giant contract by one Horacio Martinez (no kin to Francisco), who was employed both as a coach for Escogido and a "bird dog" (an irregular, unsalaried scout, paid on commission if successful) by Horace Stoneham. Since no regular Giant scout ever saw Martinez' prospects before they were signed, the limit he could offer on bonuses was $200. "Imagine my surprise," says Giants Executive Jack Schwarz, "when I opened my mail one morning and there was a signed contract, binding us to pay a $500 bonus to a kid I had never even heard of, named Juan Antonio Marichal Sanchez."

Nowhere to Go But Up. Today, of course, Schwarz probably would not bat an eye if Martinez spent $5,000 of the Giants' money. In addition to Marichal, he has supplied the National League with such stars as Atlanta's Felipe Alou, first in hits (67), second in doubles (11), third in runs (30); Pittsburgh's Matty Alou (Felipe's brother), the league leader in triples (7), and Manny Mota, who last week was leading the league in batting (.361). It is a tribute to Horacio's loyalty that all three were originally the property of the San Francisco Giants--and no reflection on his judgment that none still is.

Together with other Escogido prospects of 1958, Marichal was flown to Sanford, Fla., for a tryout with the Giants. There, either because he really was impressive, or because he was already into them for $500, the Giants decided to keep him in the organization. Off he went to the Michigan City White Caps in the Class D Midwest League--where he led the league in innings pitched (245), victories (21;) and earned-run average (1.87). In 1959, he moved up to Springfield in the Class A Eastern League. There he invented his now famous high kick and taught himself how to throw a screwball--but otherwise it was the same story: No. 1 in innings pitched (271), No. 1 in victories (18), No. 1 in ERA (2.39), and No. 1 in strikeouts (208).

Once again, there was no place to go but up, so up Juan went to Tacoma, Wash., in the Class AAA Pacific Coast League. In May 1960, a San Francisco scout visited Tacoma, gave Juan a hard look and filed a report that takes its place among baseball's famous last words. "Potential major-league material," it read. "Should make the parent club in two years."

Two months later, almost to the day, Juan Marichal stood on the mound in San Francisco's windswept Candlestick Park, took his eight regulation warmup tosses, and prepared to pitch his first game for the "parent club"--against the Philadelphia Phillies. Maybe Juan was prepared; but nobody else was--not for what followed. For the first 61 innings, not a single Phillie reached first base. After 7 innings, Marichal still had not given up a hit. At that point, Philadelphia Catcher Clay Dalrymple singled sharply to leftfield, and the spell was broken--barely. Juan shrugged, retired the next four Phillies in a row and thereby put the finishing touches on one of the most glittering debuts by a rookie pitcher in the history of baseball: a one-hit, 2-0 victory.

Spanish Not Allowed. It was no fluke, either--as Marichal proved by winning his next two starts, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates 3-1 and the Milwaukee Braves 3-2. By the end of that first, abbreviated big-league season, his record was 6-2. The boy from Laguna Verde obviously knew how to pitch in the big time: now all he had to do was learn how to live there.

Juan found himself a good teacher: Blanche Laverne Johnson, a plump, elderly woman who lived near Candlestick Park. "Mama" Johnson took Marichal and Matty Alou into her home as boarders, force-fed them English, lectured them on "Getting Along in America." "If we didn't pay attention to what she said," recalls Alou, "she'd grab her dish mop and give us a swat. She'd tell us, 'You want to make good in this country, you learn to speak English. Nobody makes shaving commercials in Spanish.' " Lonely and homesick, Marichal played Dominican records over and over by the hour. "Finally I had to smash them," he says, "so I could forget about home and get to work."

Marichal's state of mind--and his 6-2 1960 record--might have been better if a back injury had not kept him out of action for most of a month. Freak ailments have been Juan's bugaboo ever since he broke into the big leagues. In 1961 he pitched his second one-hitter (against the Los Angeles Dodgers), but wound up with only 13 wins, ten losses when he was spiked in the leg trying to cover first base. In 1962 it was a twisted ankle that disabled him for 30 days--though he still posted an 18-11 record and picked up a victory in the All-Star game. Somehow, Marichal managed to stay healthy in 1963. On June 15, at Candlestick Park, he pitched a no-hitter, permitting only two Houston Astros to reach first base, and winning 1-0. Two weeks later he toiled 16 innings to win another 1-0 decision, over the old master, Warren Spahn. At season's end his record was 25 victories, only eight defeats.

Good fortune obviously could not stay at that astronomical peak--and it didn't. Marichal won 22 games in 1964; he also spent weeks in traction with a pinched nerve in his back. Even that was a minor crisis compared with The Incident of 1965, when for the first time anyone can remember Juan Marichal lost his cool completely--thereby endangering another man's life and his own career.

Beanballs & Bats. Most so-called U.S. sports rivalries are frauds, preserved only by tradition. The feud between the Giants and Dodgers is real. It was bad enough when it involved The Bronx and Brooklyn, two boroughs of the same city. Now the principals are San Francisco and Los Angeles, two cities 325 miles apart whose partisans hate each other's guts. In ordinary times, Giants-Dodgers games are still games. Aug. 22, 1965, was no ordinary time.

Dodger Catcher Johnny Roseboro was deeply concerned about race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles near his home. Giants Pitcher Marichal had been brooding over the bloody civil war in the Dominican Republic. For tinder, there was the tension of the tightest National League race in history; for fire, a provocative trading of beanballs, curses and threats. In the third inning, with the Dodgers leading 2-1, Marichal came to bat. The second pitch was low inside; Roseboro dropped the ball, then picked it up and deliberately fired it as hard as he could back to the mound--right past Juan's right ear.

Marichal later claimed that the ball had ticked his ear. He spun around, bat in hand. "Why you do that? Why you do that?" he screamed. Roseboro did not answer. He charged at Marichal, and in front of 42,807 witnesses at Candlestick Park, Juan clubbed him three times on the head with the bat, sending blood streaming down the catcher's face from a deep wound in his scalp.

Marichal was fined $1,750 by National League President Warren Giles and suspended for eight days; Roseboro was not punished. Neither Juan nor the Giants ever regained their form: 19-9 before the fracas, Marichal ended the season with 22 wins, 13 losses. The Giants blew the pennant to the Dodgers, wound up two games behind. And the incident is still not closed; Roseboro is suing Marichal for $110,000.

To the Giants, to his family, to Dominicans who idolize him as a national hero, the thought of Marichal in a blazing fury is hard to conceive. "I don't understand it at all," says his shy, slender wife Alma Rosa, 21, who has known Juan since she was twelve, married him at 16. "Juan is never angry--even when he gets up in the morning." Roseboro's own roommate, Dodger Shortstop Maury Wills, insists that Juan Marichal is "a nice guy--and a great individual." He is that all right. He is the grinning practical joker who passes around a perfume vial labeled "Apple Blossom," which actually is a stink bomb. He is the "Dominican Dandy" who dresses all in blue and cream. He is the mild hypochondriac who changes doctors with the wind and claims that he can't sleep properly in San Francisco because of "something in the air." He is the grand master of his trade. He is the stay-at-home who plays for hours at a time with his three daughters. And he is the fervent Dominican patriot who cannot wait to return home when the baseball season ends, and who bought a full-page ad two weeks ago in the nation's biggest newspaper, urging his countrymen to vote in the presidential elections.

SCENE THREE

THE TIME: Last week. THE PLACE:

Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. It is election eve, but most of the attention is focused elsewhere#151;just about every radio in the city is tuned to the broadcast of a baseball game at Crosley Field in the U.S.A., where Juan Marichal is pitching against the Cincinnati Reds. The game is very tense. "If Juan were running for President," a voter sighs, "it would be a landslide." It might, and at least one poiltician knows it. Presidential Candidate Joaquin Balaguer has Juan's cousin, also named Juan Marichal, as a running mate on his ticket, and has posters calling himself "The Marichal of the Palace." He can't lose.

*Behind the New York Yankees' Whitey Ford (.698) and Bob Caruthers (.700), an ace of another epoch who retired in 1893.

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