FOX Sports presents "The Boys in the Hall," a series featuring
interviews with legendary members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Check your local listings on June 10 for showings of "The Boys In The
Hall" featuring Juan Marichal.
Juan Marichal was best-known for two things: a high leg kick and one swing of the bat.
Nearly
everybody knows of The John Roseboro Incident in 1965 in San
Francisco's Candlestick Park. Marichal was in the batter's box when he
and Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John Roseboro engaged in a verbal joust
and Marichal began swinging his bat at Roseboro's uncovered head,
torching a 14-minute brawl.
Roseboro's head was bloodied,
requiring 14 stitches and Marichal was suspended for nine days and fined
$1,750. Roseboro filed a lawsuit that was settled out of court when
Marichal paid $7,000.
The offshoot is that Roseboro and Marichal
later became fast friends and jointly signed autographs on photographs
of the incident.
That, unfortunately, was a legacy Marichal left,
despite a more than noteworthy pitching career that saw him win more
games in the 1960s than any major-league pitcher, more than Sandy
Koufax, more than Bob Gibson.
His numbers during his 16-year
career are staggering -- a 243-142 record with a career 2.89 ERA. He
pitched 244 complete games, one more complete game than he won, and earned 52 shutouts.
He was 25-8 in 1963, pitching 321 1/3
innings, and he was 26-9 with 30 complete games in 1968. He and Koufax
are still the only pitchers since World War II to win 25 or more games
more than once and both did it three times.
And Marichal never won the Cy Young.
"In
1968, when I won 26 games and completed 30 games, I couldn't get one Cy
Young vote because Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA," Marichal said.
Most
talk about Marichal involves his high-kick delivery. During his
wind-up, his left leg pointed skyward, his toe pointed toward the light
towers, a distracting feature to hitters.
Plus he had five pitches — fastball, slider, curveball, change-up and a lethal screwball, delivered from a half-a-dozen angles.
Said
Pete Rose, "He mastered five different pitches and he put them all
where he wanted and he changed speeds on them so well it was more like
he had 50 different pitches."
When he was a 15-year-old on the
sandlots in the Dominican Republic, Marichal was a shortstop. A friend
took him to an amateur game and he was dazzled by a side-armed pitcher
name Bombo Ramos
From that day he became a sidearm pitcher and
was eventually signed by the Giants and sent to Class D Michigan City,
Ind., where he was 21-8 with a 1.70 ERA.
He was promoted to Class
A Springfield, Mass., the next season and manager Andy Gilbert asked
him, "Why do you throw sidearm?" When Marichal told him he learned it
youth leagues, Gilbert asked him if he wanted to throw overhand.
Marichal
thought it strange that his delivery would be questioned after he won
21 games the year before, but Gilbert told him an overhand delivery
would make him more effective against left-handed hitters.
They
went to the bullpen and Marichal found the overhand delivery awkward and
said, "I couldn't do it without kicking my leg high in the air. And I
couldn't throw my screwball without kicking my leg high."
And history was made.
Marichal,
only the second Dominican pitcher to make the majors, made his debut
for the Giants on July 19, 1960, against the Philadelphia Phillies and
took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. Clay Dalrymple ended it with a
single with two out in the eighth but Marichal pitched a one-hit
shutout, walking one and striking out 12.
He eventually got his no-hitter on June 15, 1963, a 1-0 victory over the Houston Colt .45s.
But
he pitched a better 1-0 game than that just two weeks later. He and
Milwaukee's Warren Spahn hooked up in a game that went 16 innings in
Candlestick Park. After 15 innings, it was 0-0 and both starters were
still in the game when San Francisco's Willie Mays hit a one-out home
run in the 16th to give Marichal a 1-0 victory over Spahn.
Marichal pitched in 10 All-Star games and was 2-0 with a 0.50 ERA and was the game's MVP in 1965.
Ron Fairly, part of The Roseboro Incident as a Dodgers outfielder, remembers facing Marichal in not-so-fond grudging terms.
"I
just didn't like Marichal's attitude on the mound and that bothered
me," Fairly said. "Plus there is the fact he was a Giant and the
Giants-Dodgers was oil and water. We didn't mix. We didn't even like
each other's uniforms.
"It seemed to me that when Marichal was
winning he kicked his leg up just a little bit higher and it just
aggravated the hell out of me."
Marichal cherished his battles with Pittsburgh star Roberto Clemente and had some early trouble getting him out.
"One
day I overheard Roberto talking to a bunch of hitters on my team near
the dugout and he said, ‘Well, the pitch I really have trouble with is
up and in,' so that's where I began going when I faced him.
"Then I struck him out three times one day in Pittsburgh and I think that was the greatest day of my life," he added.
Marichal's
philosophy, which helped earn him the reputation as a guy who was
fearless, was that home plate belonged to him, not the hitters.
"You
had to pitch both in and out," he said. "Those areas didn't belong to
the hitters, they belonged to the pitcher. Today, if you pitch inside,
the umpire stops you right there. I don't think it's fair."
With
his foot-in-the-sky delivery, his five pitches, his change of speeds,
his location, his laser beam control and his no-fear to throw anywhere
approach, hitters never thought that was fair, either.
