UNLIKE TWO YEARS EARLIER, when the Pirates were in the midst of a pennant run that would culminate with the most unlikely of World Series championships, the 1962 version that Stargell joined was on its way to a fourth-place finish in the 10-team National League, albeit with a sparkling 93–68 record. It was a mostly veteran club filled with holdovers from the ’60 Series champs—fixtures such as second-baseman Bill Mazeroski, shortstop Dick Groat, pitchers Vernon Law and Bob Friend, catcher Smoky Burgess and outfielders Bob Skinner, Bill Virdon and Roberto Clemente.
Virdon, who later worked with Stargell as a hitting instructor and also managed Stargell and the Pirates in 1972-73, said that when he first saw Stargell as a minor-leaguer in spring training, Willie had as much natural talent as anyone he’d ever seen. “He could run, throw, hit and hit with power,” Virdon said. “As he grew older, he matured and got bigger and put on weight, and he didn’t have the speed he had earlier. He wasn’t necessarily out of shape—he was just a big person. And he had as good an arm as anybody until he got a little older and hurt it a little bit. When he was young, he could throw with Clemente. And that’s saying something.”1 At the plate, Virdon said, Stargell’s approach could be summed up in one word: aggressive. “He swung the bat—he had good power and he didn’t just pull it, he hit the ball all over. And he loved to hit.” Virdon said Stargell had virtually no weaknesses as a hitter. “The only problem he had was with real slow stuff. Because he had a tendency to be aggressive, they could fool him on some of the off-speed pitches, but I think he learned how to deal with that. I don’t know whether he needed to go up there looking for the curve ball or if he got to where he just recognized it. But he got to the point where he could hit just about everything.”
Skinner wasn’t surprised the Pirates summoned Stargell as the ’62 season wound down. He recalled seeing Stargell in spring training the previous couple of years “and you could see the type of player he was going to be. He had everything. But the best thing he had was the person he was. I’ve been around a lot of ballplayers in my life and he has to be right at the top as far as his attitude and being a gentleman.”2 On the field, though, the writing was on the wall for Skinner—both he and Stargell were left-handed hitters who played left field. No one was going to supplant the superstar Clemente in right field, and Virdon won a Gold Glove for his defense in center. “I was getting down near the end and he was just coming along,” said Skinner, who would be moved to Cincinnati for Jerry Lynch the following season to make room for Stargell in left. “It was very apparent.”
Skinner, who later became a successful hitting coach and in fact coached with Stargell under Chuck Tanner in Atlanta in the mid–1980s, said the thing that struck him about Stargell in the early days was his ability to hit with power to all fields—particularly his non-pull fields. “He would hit balls to left-center like nobody else could,” he said. Stargell utilized what became his calling card—a looping or windmilling of his bat while awaiting a pitcher in the batters box—to help him get ready. “That was his timing device,” Skinner said. “He’d get that bat going in a circle. But when the pitcher was ready to turn his back to him and throw, his bat was very still, in the cocked position. And his record shows what happened after that.”
Part of the record shows a whopping 1,936 strikeouts, which ranks him sixth on the all-time major-league list. But the strikeouts never seemed to faze Stargell, said Skinner, who was Stargell’s batting coach with the Pirates later in his career. “It was like if he struck out, the next time somebody’s going to pay. That was his attitude. Striking out was part of the game. For him to do the things he did, he had to strike out.”
Stargell would later say that he never considered striking out to be a failure because those experiences yielded crucial knowledge that essentially fueled his successes. The first of his 1,936 learning experiences came in Stargell’s very first big-league at bat, on September 16, 1962, at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, in a game against the San Francisco Giants. Wearing No. 8, Stargell was called upon to pinch-hit for Virdon with Bill Mazeroski on second base and one out in the bottom of the 10th inning of a 4–4 game. A wild pitch put Mazeroski at third, the winning run a mere 90 feet away. But Stu Miller, a diminutive relief pitcher who specialized in off-speed stuff, set Stargell down on strikes. The next hitter, the veteran catcher Burgess, sent the Pirates home a winner when he took Miller deep for a two-run homer.
Stargell’s debut didn’t do much to rouse the interest of Biederman, the veteran Pittsburgh Press reporter. “During Miller’s strikeout of Willie Stargell, a pitch went a little wild and Maz ran to third. Burgess didn’t give Miller time to think of putting him on first base. He went after the first pitch and sent it on a line into the right field seats.”3 Two days later, against Cincinnati, Stargell made another plate appearance and was intentionally walked while pinch-hitting for starting left-fielder Howie Goss in the bottom of the ninth inning of a 4–4 game. In addition, Stargell appeared for the first time in the field, relieving Goss in left, where he registered one putout. The next night, again at Forbes, Stargell earned his first start—this one coming against the Reds’ fireballing right-hander Jim Maloney. Stargell, playing right field in place of Clemente, went hitless in four plate appearances, walking once and striking out once as the Pirates squeaked out a 1–0 victory behind Friend’s six-hit pitching.
Like his teammates Skinner and Virdon, Friend knew the Pirates had a major keeper in Stargell, even at the age of 22. “He stood out,” Friend said. “He just seemed very comfortable in his own skin—where he came from and what he wanted to do. He was a very confident individual—he had a lot of talent and he was a good guy with it. The others players respected him and knew he was going to be a big help.”4
Stargell’s first big-league hit finally came in the series finale against Cincinnati, on September 20, against Reds’ right-hander Bob Purkey—a Pittsburgh native who originally signed with the Pirates. With the Pirates trailing 1–0 in the fourth, Skinner doubled and Stargell sent a blast to Forbes’ spacious center field, scoring Skinner with the tying run. Stargell had third base made, but Pirates’ third-base coach Frank Oceak went for the kill and sent Stargell to try for an inside-the-park home run. He was cut down at the plate and the game remained tied until the sixth, when the Reds scored a pair of runs to go on top 3–1. With one out in the bottom of the eighth, Stargell was lifted for pinch-hitter Jim Marshall, who grounded out, and the Reds remained in front 3–1. But the Buccos rallied in the bottom of the ninth, scoring three times to take a 4–3 triumph, making a first-time winner out of Stargell’s former minor-league teammate Priddy, a local boy from nearby McKees Rocks who had come on to work the ninth in his major league debut.
Stargell played in six more games that season, making 24 plate appearances. The young left-handed hitting slugger compiled a .290 batting average, going 9-for-31 with three doubles, a triple and four RBIs to go with 10 strikeouts and four walks. After the season ended, Stargell was sent to the Pirates’ Arizona Instructional League team for the second straight year with the rest of the club’s top prospects. After his stay there, he returned to the East Bay, where the young Stargell family—which now included his wife, Lois, and their daughter, Wendy—set up shop in an apartment in East Oakland, near Gladys, Percy and Sandrus as well as Lois’s family. Being a family man brought on new responsibilities for Stargell, and his usual off-season activities—pickup basketball games and dancing with his friends—gave way to more family time with Lois and Wendy.
Stargell’s first winter as a true family man led to some major physical changes, as Lois’s home cooking went directly to Stargell’s waistline. And by the time he reported to spring training in Florida in February 1963, he had gained considerable weight. Brown, the Pirates’ general manager, was not pleased and let Stargell know about it. Despite his unhappiness over Stargell’s weight, Brown felt he had a good relationship with the budding slugger. “Early in his career we became close,” he said. In fact, Stargell did not hesitate, for example, to go to Brown when he was short on money during his first few seasons as a professional. Brown said that Stargell came to him at one point and told him he was in over his head with bills, and Brown showed him how to make a budget for the very first time. Brown said he never brought up Stargell’s money issues later on when it came to talking contract. “He was my friend and I was his friend,” Brown said. “And he knew it.”
Despite Brown’s genuine interest in Stargell, the young slugger resented Brown’s inference during the winter of 1962-63 that the additional weight Stargell had gained resulted from his laziness and said that no matter how much he had exercised or dieted, he had difficulty keeping off excess weight. While Stargell was enjoying his bride’s home cooking, Brown was busy remaking the Pirates, peddling key pieces from their ’60 world title team in shortstop Groat—traded to the St. Louis Cardinals for fellow shortstop Dick Schofield—and third baseman Don Hoak—dealt to the Philadelphia Phillies for Pancho Herrera and Ted Savage. Also sent packing was slugging first baseman Dick Stuart, traded along with pitcher Jack Lamabe to Boston for pitcher Don Schwall and catcher Jim Pagliaroni.
Those moves freed a spot in the lineup for young Clendenon at first, while Schofield was tabbed to fill Groat’s position at short and Pagliaroni split time behind the plate with the veteran Burgess, still a force with the bat at the advanced age of 36. Stargell reported to Florida with an eye on a starting outfield spot, but when Opening Day arrived in 1963, the Pirates’ outfield featured the same three starters as it did the previous year—Clemente in right, Virdon in center and Skinner in left. Still, it was clear that the Pirates had a significant role in mind for Stargell at some point. “I never get enough of looking at that youngster,” Murtaugh said of the budding slugger a few weeks into the season.5
Stargell, relegated to part-time play and pinch-hitting, did not make a plate appearance in the season’s first nine games and it wasn’t until game No. 11 that he earned a start—this one coming against Glenn Hobbie and the Chicago Cubs at Forbes Field. And it took him until May 8, in the Pirates’ 24th game of the season—and Stargell’s 21st career contest—to strike the first of his 475 major-league home runs. With Skinner and Schofield aboard in the eighth inning of a game the Pirates were trailing 5–1, Stargell took reliever Lindy McDaniel deep with two outs to pull Pittsburgh within a run in what proved to be a 9–5 loss. McDaniel, a 27-year-old right-hander out of Hollis, Oklahoma, would be joined by 243 other pitchers who were touched up for home runs by Stargell before his retirement in 1982. It would be the first of two occasions that Stargell deposited a McDaniel pitch in the seats, and although nearly a half-century later McDaniel didn’t remember what Stargell hit or where he hit it that May day in 1963, he clearly remembered the other time the left-handed slugger would homer off him. It was five years later, in his first relief appearance of the 1968 season for the San Francisco Giants. McDaniel came on in the sixth inning and gave up singles on the first two pitches he made to Gene Alley and Matty Alou. Clemente then lined a shot to center that bounced over Willie Mays’ head for an inside-the-park home run. McDaniel then tried to slip a curve, low and away, past Stargell, but the young slugger hit it over the scoreboard to the opposite field for a home run. “I’d thrown five pitches and given up four runs,” McDaniel said. “My earned run average was infinity because it could not be figured. The next game, I did get somebody out, so the next day in the newspaper, my ERA was 168.”6
Homer number 2 for Stargell did not come until the Pirates’ 39th game of the season, on May 24—a day after the Pirates dealt starting left fielder Skinner to the Cincinnati Reds for fellow outfielder Lynch. It was a Friday night game in Milwaukee’s County Stadium against the Braves, and with Pittsburgh leading 4–2 in the sixth, Murtaugh sent Stargell up to pinch-hit for Savage. He promptly launched a three-run homer off Tony Cloninger to give Friend all the cushion he needed in a 7–2 victory.
Roughly a quarter of the way through his rookie season, Stargell was hitting a robust .321 with a .371 on-base percentage and .482 slugging percentage. But during the next month, Stargell would see his average drop nearly a hundred points, enduring a 4-for-39 slide in the process. A few bright spots surfaced, with perhaps the brightest coming against the Braves in Milwaukee on June 17, when he had his first two-homer game and drove in six runs in a 9–3 Pirates win. The two bombs gave Stargell five on the season—three of which came against the Braves, much to the consternation of Milwaukee manager Bobby Bragan. Stargell, meanwhile, tried to explain what happened afterward. “I took my troubles to Hank Aaron before the game and he told me to relax and take it easy,” Stargell told Biederman of the Pittsburgh Press, referring to the man who in 1974 would surpass Babe Ruth as the game’s all-time home run leader. “He kept saying, ‘Easy does it’ and I guess that’s the way.”7
Aside from the occasional highlight, though, Stargell’s slump would continue through the rest of June, all of July and into the final week of August, when his batting average slid below the .200 mark to .195. But from that point on, Stargell got hot, finishing the season on a 31-for-84 tear with five home runs and 18 RBIs. The late-season surge left him with a final batting average of .243, an on-base percentage of .290 and a .428 slugging percentage. He finished with 11 home runs, 11 doubles, six triples and 47 RBIs in 304 at-bats. He also struck out 85 times for the Pirates, who finished in eighth place, 25 games behind the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers. The Bucs’ 74–88 record was only better than the league’s two second-year franchises, the Houston Colt .45s and the New York Mets.
Stargell did not set the baseball world on fire, but he became a known commodity in the game and began endearing himself to Pirates fans. Although his family and close friends back home in Alameda called him by his given name, Stargell became universally known in the baseball world as “Willie.” Bob Prince, the Pirates’ venerable play-by-play man during much of Stargell’s career in Pittsburgh, would occasionally call Stargell “Wilver,” and Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame broadcaster, made it a point to use “Wilver” throughout his career. Scully said Stargell once told him that his mother, Gladys Russell, considered Scully her favorite of all baseball broadcasters because he used Stargell’s given name.
Stargell’s rookie numbers were good enough to convince a team in the Dominican Winter League—the Aguilas Cibaenas of Santiago—to offer him a contract following the conclusion of the Pirates regular season. There, he was reunited with his former Arizona Instructional League teammate Blass, who had spent the 1963 season with Class AAA Columbus in the International League, where he went 11–8 with a 4.44 ERA as a 21-year-old.
At the time, the Dominican Winter League featured some established Latin stars from the major leagues, but it also was a place where U.S. prospects would go to work on parts of their games that needed development. Blass said it was also a chance to make a few extra bucks. “That’s the reason I went down there,” he said. “I was making about $800 a month in Triple-A and they said they’d give me $1,350 a month for two months, with no taxes. I said, ‘I’m getting married, but I could use the cash.’ So I got married and then went down there.” When he arrived, he and his new bride, Karen, were in for a rude awakening. “I got married on October 5 and two days later I walked into a country under siege,” he said. “My first day there, my wife and I walked down the street in Santiago and everyone started whistling at her and calling her the Spanish name for ‘prostitute’ because she was wearing Bermuda shorts.”8
Blass recalled that Stargell had rented a room above a brothel and it was during that winter that he got to know Stargell. “We weren’t soul mates,” he said. “I didn’t know him intimately—just as a teammate who was a good guy, friendly. He liked to drink rum and coke. And he could play. We were both full of piss and vinegar. He was free and easy and it looked like he was having the time of his life. He was doing what he wanted to do. He had gotten out of the projects and made it to the big leagues. Even at that young age, in 1963, he had felt like he had beaten the system.”
The Aguilas team had a bushelful of standout players. All three Alou brothers—Jesus, Matty and Felipe—suited up, as did Rico Carty and Juan Marichal—the latter of whom was among the top five pitchers in major league baseball throughout the 1960s and earned his induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame five years prior to Stargell. Stargell made the most of his opportunity, slugging eight home runs to lead the winter league. “Willie had a monster year,” Blass said. “He just killed it. And we dominated our league.”
Aguilas reached the best-of-seven championship playoffs, where the club promptly won the first three games—and then somehow lost the last four in a row. The rowdy hometown fans, upset with the collapse, tipped the team bus over on its return. That wasn’t the only scary moment for Blass. In fact, the entire winter was a bit stressful, as the country was still reeling from the assassination of former dictator Rafael Trujillo two years earlier and the world was knocked wobbly by the killing of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. Blass recalled that Dominican military police, armed with machine guns, stood watch at each end of the dugouts during winter league games. “One night we were playing and the lights went out,” he said. “We had to crawl back to the dugouts on our hands and knees, like we were out on maneuvers at Parris Island.”
Stargell’s productivity carried over into spring training in 1964 and he was ready to take on a larger role in the Pirates’ outfield, now that Skinner was gone and Lynch was nearing the end of his line. Murtaugh said in the spring he planned to spot Stargell against right-handed pitching. “I think he has the potential to hit 25 or 30 home runs,” Murtaugh said. “He has a great arm. I thought he was a little lax in ’63, but he has to improve with all that talent.”9
Stargell rewarded the franchise’s faith in him by getting out of the blocks quickly and remaining hot throughout the season’s first half. Through the month of June, Stargell batted an even .300, with 11 homers and 46 RBIs in 203 at-bats over 49 starts. Dodgers’ manager Walter Alston, who headed the National League All-Star team by virtue of his team’s title the previous season, took notice and named Stargell to the mid-season classic roster, where he joined fellow Bucs Clemente, Burgess and Mazeroski. Al Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, called Stargell “a future star of great promise” and wrote there were “stars” in Stargell’s eyes when he took the field for batting practice prior to the All-Star Game. “I’m excited,” the husky Pirate youngster admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about anything as I am today.”10 Although he did not start, Stargell did appear in the game, pinch-hitting in the bottom of the third for starting NL pitcher Don Drysdale of the Dodgers. Facing AL starter Dean Chance, a standout with the Minnesota Twins, with the Mets’ Ron Hunt at first, Stargell hit a ground ball back to Chance, who threw him out at first.
Willie taking it easy during one of his early spring training trips with the Pittsburgh Pirates to Fort Myers, Florida (courtesy Sandrus Collier).
The Pirates maintained their solid first-half start into the dog days of August, as they were 10 games over .500 at 63–53 on August 17, trailing the first-place Cardinals by only 1½ games. But they tailed off badly down the stretch, winning just 17 of their last 46—including only four of the final 16—to finish 80–82, good for a tie for sixth with the defending champion Dodgers, 13 games behind new champion St. Louis. With the end of the season came the resignation of manager Murtaugh, who cited health reasons for stepping down. Murtaugh’s decision came as a blow to Stargell, who regarded his first big-league manager with the utmost respect and admiration and appreciated the way Murtaugh brought him along at the start of his career.
In addition to having a losing record on the field, the Pirates brought up the rear at the gate, drawing only 759,496 people, good enough for just 15th among the major leagues’ 20 teams. It was the Pirates lowest home total since 1955, when they attracted only 572,957 fans to Forbes Field, and paled in comparison to the title season of 1960, when the club drew 1,705,828.
Individually, Stargell continued to make strides. Despite missing time with several injuries, he clubbed 21 home runs, 19 doubles and seven triples in 421 at-bats over 117 games. He also drove in 78 runs, second on the team only to Clemente, who had 87 RBIs but played in 38 more games than Stargell. Stargell’s production tailed off as the season went along, however. On August 6, after going 1-for-4 against the Dodgers, he was batting .300. But over his final 40 games, Stargell hit just .216 with 5 home runs and 14 RBIs in 134 at-bats and finished with a .273 batting average.
Still, the rising slugger had several stellar moments during the 1964 season. On April 17, he collected four hits and unloaded a rather memorable drive—the first home run struck in the New York Mets’ new home ballpark, Shea Stadium. The line drive, which landed in the lower right-field stands, just to the left of the 341-foot sign at the foul pole, came off Jack Fisher in the top of the second inning. Then, on May 11, he showed off his prodigious strength by clubbing a line drive toward Forbes Field’s right-field roof off Cincinnati’s Sammy Ellis. The ball hit a girder under the roof and at least one long-ball expert estimated the drive would have gone about 505 feet had it not struck the girder.11 Later that season, on July 22 against the Cardinals in St. Louis, Stargell would hit for the cycle—collecting a single, double, triple and home run—becoming only the 14th Pirate to do so. Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, observed a day later that Stargell, when healthy, can “take his place alongside the top power hitters in the majors. The big boy, whom I dubbed the ‘colored Babe Ruth’ the first time I saw him in Ft. Myers last year, can’t miss making it big with the Bucs.”12
Stargell opted not to play winter league ball following the 1964 season, electing instead to undergo surgery to repair the same knee he had damaged while trying out for football at Encinal High School. The Pirates off-season, meanwhile, was marked by upheaval and change. With Murtaugh moving from the manager’s office to a role that would include a mix of scouting and instructing, the team was in the market for a new field manager and hired Harry Walker, son of a major leaguer and younger brother of another big leaguer, Dixie Walker, a former National League batting champion. Known as “The Hat,” Harry was considered a hitting guru of sorts, and while he was able to work his magic with a couple of the Pirates—most notably outfielders Manny Mota and Matty Alou, the latter of whom would go on to the win the National League batting title in 1966 with a .342 average—he did not draw rave reviews from Stargell largely because he decided to platoon the Bucs’ big bopper. That meant Stargell would play largely against right-handed pitching and see fewer plate appearances against left-handers—an approach that Stargell did not support, given his selection to the NL All-Star team a year earlier in his first season as a fulltime starter.
Willie kicks up dust as he slides safely into third base (courtesy Pittsburgh Pirates).
The Pirates got off to a sluggish start in Walker’s initial season, but won 62 of their last 108 games to finish 90–72, good enough for third place behind the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers and the runner-up San Francisco Giants. The free-swinging Buccos also recaptured the hearts of Pirates fans, who streamed into Forbes Field at a much more robust clip than they had the previous season. The club drew 909,279 fans, an increase of 20 percent.
Despite Walker’s platoon strategy, Stargell was chosen to his second straight All-Star team and finished with numbers good enough to place him 14th in the league’s Most Valuable Player voting. In 533 at-bats, Stargell collected 145 hits, mashed 27 home runs to go with 25 doubles and eight triples and drove in 107 runs while finishing with a .272 batting average and a .501 slugging percentage. He also walked 39 times—more than double the previous year’s total of 17. Also on the rise, though, was his strikeout total, as his 127 whiffs were fourth in the league. It was in 1965 that he also began to show more signs of his prodigious power. In the month of May, Stargell clubbed 10 home runs and drove in 20 while batting .320, and he topped himself the following month when he struck 10 more home runs and drove in 35 runs in just 106 at-bats. There were also several memorable individual clouts. On June 8, leading off the bottom of the second inning of a scoreless game against Houston’s Dick “Turk” Farrell, Stargell became one of a select group of left-handed batters that included Willie McCovey of the Giants to hit a ball over Forbes Field’s massive left-field scoreboard. Just 16 days later, his monstrous power surfaced once again, this time before a crowd of 28,867 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, when he twice took Hall of Fame right-hander Don Drysdale deep and added a three-run homer off John Purdin. Then in the eighth off left-hander Mike Kekich, Stargell hit a long drive down the left-field line, barely missing a fourth homer when it struck a railing in front of the stands near the bullpen. He would settle for a double in what would prove to be a 13–3 Pirates victory punctuated by five home runs in all. “Six inches higher—even four inches higher—it’s his fourth home run of the game,” said GM Brown, who accompanied the club on that road trip.13
Frank Finch, reporting for the Los Angeles Times, called Stargell and the Pirates’ long-ball effort “the most violent display of slugging power in Dodger Stadium’s four-year history.” “I don’t want to hear any more complaints from our players that this park is too big,” Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi said afterward. “The Pirates proved it isn’t.”14 Stargell, meanwhile, was understandably ecstatic. “Those three homers were the thrill of my life,” he said.15 The outburst boosted his home run and RBI totals to 20 and 54, respectively, and it appeared he had a legitimate shot at reaching his spring training goals of 40 home runs and 130 RBIs.
Hot hitter: Willie’s bat was on fire—literally—in this promotional photograph taken before a game at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field in 1965 (courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York).
Stargell capped his breakout first half with a show at the All-Star Game at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, going 2-for-3 with a base hit off starter Milt Pappas and then a two-run bomb off hometown hero Jim “Mudcat” Grant, who would later cross paths with Stargell both as a teammate on the Pirates and on a memorable off-season journey to the battlefields of Vietnam. After the home run, he sped around the bases rather than go into a slow home run trot. “I took my time running the bases on the very first home run I ever hit, and my high school coach gave me a dressing down for show-boating,” Stargell laughed after the game. “And I haven’t trotted since.”16
The good times that came with the 1965 season only got better the following year in what would prove to be Walker’s second and final full season with the Bucs. A quick start helped the Pirates rise to the top of the National League standings by the beginning of May and they remained on top until the final month of the season, when a flat final 45 games turned what could have been a season to remember into a second straight third-place finish behind the league champion Dodgers and bridesmaid Giants. Pittsburgh, led by Stargell and eventual Most Valuable Player Clemente, owned a 70–47 record at one point but slogged to a 22–23 mark down the stretch and wound up three games in back of Los Angeles.
On the whole, Stargell had another outstanding campaign, as the powerful cleanup hitter established career highs in home runs (33), batting average (.315) and RBIs (102). Stargell was selected to the All-Star Game for the third straight season after slugging 22 home runs and driving in 63 while hitting .337 in 75 games before the break. Included in that stretch was one remarkable two-game burst where he collected nine consecutive hits against the Houston Astros in Pittsburgh. Afterward, he brushed aside the back-to-back performances and swore he wasn’t concerned about trying to tie—or break—the National League record for consecutive hits, which stood at 10 and was held by eight players. “Honest, I’m not interested in records. I can’t be an individual. The name of this game is team.” Interjected teammate Andre Rodgers, “He means it. Willie’s that kind of guy.” Stargell acknowledged that it was great to be close to the record “because a lot of great people have played in this game” but said he didn’t want to establish unreal expectations—something he believed happened the previous year when he hit 10 home runs in a month. “I began to get the idea the public expected me to hit a home run every time I swung. I learned a lesson—just swing and the home runs will come.”17 Stargell had a premonition his streak would end before the next game when he broke his bat in pre-game batting practice. He had used the same bat to rap out nine straight hits and 13 in the previous four games. He was correct, as the streak ended in the first inning when he grounded out to short against the Cardinals’ future Hall of Fame right-hander Bob Gibson. But he wound up going 2-for-5 that night and helping the Bucs to a 9–1 victory.
In assessing the club’s 1966 shortcomings and trying to address them for 1967, the Pirates brain trust decided that hitting wasn’t the problem. Indeed, Clemente—one of five Pirates to finish in the top 23 of the MVP balloting—put up numbers of 29 homers, 119 RBIs and a .317 batting average in 1966. Alou, Walker’s pet hitting student, won the batting title with a .342 mark. Stargell made his presence known once again and shortstop Gene Alley, who shared a few meals with Stargell back at Don’s Café in Grand Forks of the Northern League, wound up 11th in the balloting after hitting .299 with seven home runs and 43 RBIs. Ol’ reliable Mazeroski, meanwhile, chipped in with 16 home runs and 82 RBIs while batting .262. And first baseman Clendenon broke through in the power department, slugging 28 home runs and driving in 98 runs while matching Alley in the batting average department. Although the starting pitching performed reasonably well—all five starters finished with records above .500—management turned its attention to the mound corps in the off-season, sending knuckleballer Wilbur Wood to the Chicago White Sox for veteran Juan Pizzaro and bringing in Dennis Ribant from the New York Mets in exchange for Don Cardwell.
The club did make one major deal that did not involve pitching, sending former bonus baby Bailey and future Yankees GM Michael to the Dodgers for veteran infielder and base-stealer supreme Maury Wills. A shortstop for the Dodgers, Wills was tabbed as the Bucs’ starting third baseman, and his steady presence was expected to pay huge dividends for a team that had legitimate aspirations as a title contender, given its previous two seasons. Many oddsmakers agreed, favoring Pittsburgh to win the 1967 National League pennant. Pirate players liked their own chances, and why not? As Blass—who had won 11 games in his first full season in 1966—said, the team had future Hall of Famers in right field (Clemente), at second base (Mazeroski) and in left field (Stargell). “Hit the ball to them—I’m going to get a sandwich,” he cracked, referring to his gifted teammates. “It was rather reassuring. And as Virdon always said, it’s nice to drive to the ballpark when you know you’re going to get six or seven runs every night.”
Although Stargell was still young—he was starting just his fifth full season in the big leagues—Blass said the gifted outfielder was beginning to show signs of the leadership that he ultimately would display in huge quantities later in his career. “Willie started becoming somewhat quotable,” Blass said. “He was always accommodating and always kind of a steady figure, so the press liked him. And the fans loved him—he hit home runs and had a gun for an arm.”
He was also beginning to make his presence felt off the field, showing teammates and opponents alike how much fun baseball could be. During a particularly rough stretch at the plate, Stargell took a bat and buried it in the ground near one of the Forbes Field dugouts. He pounded it in such a way that only a few inches of the barrel stuck out of the ground; a longtime Pittsburgh journalist named Roy McHugh said the bat “remained as immovable as the legendary sword of Kumasi, in Ghana, planted two centuries ago by an Ashanti sorcerer, who said the nation would endure as long as the sword remained in place.” Even heavyweight boxing champ Cassius Clay—later and better known as Muhammad Ali—couldn’t extract it, and neither could Joey Diven, described by McHugh as a “celebrated Pittsburgh strong man.”18 Then one day, Chicago Cubs third-baseman Ron Santo happened by and—voila—he extracted the bat. While Santo was a slugger of some repute, he was no physical brute at 6-feet and 190 pounds. Even Santo didn’t know what to make of his heroics. “He had this bat and it was known that if anyone could pull it out of the ground, you’d get a beer,” Santo recalled in a 2010 interview. “Willie was a funny guy and a great guy, too, and one day I was walking down the tunnel and he says, ‘Ron, come here—nobody’s been able to pull this bat out.’ I’m looking at it in the ground and the barrel was sticking up. I don’t know how he got it in there, but I had a feeling it would be pretty tough to do. So I said, ‘Well, OK.’ But I knew this must have been impossible knowing Stargell. So I gave it a try and I pulled the barrel out. And he was amazed.”19
Little did Stargell know that teammate Clendenon had taken a crowbar to the bat and loosened it up before Santo’s attempt.
Stargell’s fun-loving nature soon became well known, and influenced multiple generations of Pirates. He often would point out that the umpires don’t yell “Work ball!” at the start of a game, but rather “Play ball!” Still, once the game started, he was a focused professional, intent on winning games and terrorizing pitchers. He had several in particular whose lives he made miserable—Ted Abernathy, for one. A right-handed reliever who threw sidearm and submarine, Abernathy had virtually no chance against Stargell. In 10 career at-bats against Abernathy, Stargell collected six hits, including a home run and two doubles, and he walked eight other times for an on-base percentage of .778. “Poor Ted Abernathy—he’s probably in a psycho ward,” Blass said. “Willie just pummeled him. It was just cruel. We’d turn our heads so we wouldn’t have to see the carnage. It was like a white-gloved butler serving you a chest-high hanging slider—‘Here, sir, I believe this is yours.’” But others had the young slugger’s number. Take Joe Hoerner, for example—over their careers Stargell would manage just four hits in 29 at-bats against Horner for a paltry .138 average—and he struck out nearly half of the time (14). “I remember Willie talking about trying to hit Hoerner,” Blass said. “He said it’s like ‘eating soup with a fork.’” Stargell was quoted as saying the same thing about two other tough lefties with stronger pedigrees—Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Steve Carlton.
The Pirates were a loose club under Walker. Blass recalled that in one of the three years Walker managed the club, the team broke spring training and did a bit of barnstorming on its way north to open the season. One of the stops was in Birmingham, Alabama, and Blass said Walker stood up in the plane and announced that a picnic would be held near Leeds, Alabama, where Walker lived. “Willie got up and asked, ‘Do you know where we are?’ referring to the racial climate of the south at the time. ‘Are us black boys invited?’ And Harry said, ‘Yes, Willie—we’re going to use your ribs.’ Then Willie comes walking up with a sheet over his head. We had quite a bunch.”
People noticed the talent—and they also noticed the club’s complexion. Literally. The Pittsburgh Courier, in February, noted that it was very possible that the Pirates could field eight “Negro” players in their starting lineup, with second-baseman Mazeroski being the only exception. As of 1966, the Courier reported, no major league team had ever sported more than seven minority players in a starting lineup. The Courier praised Pirates management for “making it almost mandatory for Negro fans to keep at least 3,500 of their kind seated in Forbes Field seats this summer.”20 Nothing much was said about that development during that particular summer, but much would be written about a day four years later when, with no fanfare, the Pirates rolled out the first all-minority starting lineup in big-league history.
While the players were feeling confident heading into the ’67 season, both GM Brown and field manager Walker were not pleased when Stargell arrived for spring training weighing 225 pounds—15 pounds heavier than the two had hoped. Once again, some home cooking had more than a little something to do with it, as Stargell—whose divorce from Lois became final early in 1966—had remarried in the off-season. His new bride was the former Dolores Parker, a Pittsburgh native whom Stargell had met at a fashion show. The two began a serious relationship following Stargell’s divorce and it culminated in marriage in November of 1966.
Stargell’s winter full of good eating not only drew rebukes from Walker and Brown, but the GM hit Stargell where it truly hurt—in the pocketbook—as he fined him $1,500 for showing up in Florida overweight. The media wasted no time in pouncing on Stargell’s weight issue; a headline in the Pittsburgh Press on March 1 blared, “Mrs. Stargell’s cooking too good” and a smaller sub-head announced that Stargell had to shed 15 pounds. Said Stargell, “I just got married in November and my wife’s a good cook.” According to the local media, team doctor Joseph Finegold’s diet was to include no potatoes, no desserts and very little liquids. “I want you to weigh 210 pounds when we leave here,” Walker told Stargell. “And 210 hard pounds.”21
Whether it was the weight issue, a lack of game preparation or something else, Stargell got off to an exceptionally slow start in 1967, carrying a .193 batting average with seven home runs and 17 RBIs into the month of June. The media zeroed in on Stargell’s weight. The Post-Gazette’s Charley Feeney wrote that Stargell’s weight was just as much a conversation piece as his “anemic average.” Feeney also wrote that Stargell and Walker had a difference of opinion regarding Stargell’s optimum playing weight. Walker wanted Stargell at 215, but Stargell said he had his best season the previous year when he played at 222. Stargell told Feeney that his attempts to shed weight in spring training may have cost him. “Losing all the weight made me weak when the season started,” he said. “I wanted so much to get off to a good start, especially since there was so much talk about my weight.” Despite his struggles, he said he would maintain a positive attitude. “When I get in there again, I will keep swinging. I will think of getting base hits—not of making an out.”22 Somehow, the rest of the bats in the Pirates lineup held steady and the team remained several games above the .500 mark through late June. But with the favored Bucs sporting a break-even 42–42 mark, the front office had seen enough and sent Walker packing on July 18. In the process, the club brought back former skipper Murtaugh to manage for the rest of the season.
The change didn’t yield positive results, as the Pirates went on to finish a disappointing 81–81, good for sixth place in the 10-team National League. For Stargell, the year was equally disappointing in terms of his personal statistics. He did rally from his slow start and, by mid–August, the Post-Gazette’s Feeney was singing a different tune. “His batting average is a rising .275 and those left-handers who were supposed to be death on murderous Willie are being clobbered by his big bat along with the right-handers,” he wrote. “‘Let Willie alone’ is the new Buc theme. The people who wanted Willie to weigh about 215 pounds when the season opened are beginning to see their mistake. A 230-pound Stargell carries a lot of power and contentment. He’s a growing 230 and he’s no longer hurting. The only ones hurting now are rival pitchers who must challenge Big Willie and his big bat.”23
Still, Stargell’s .271 batting average, 20 home runs and 73 RBIs marked his lowest production in all three categories since he became a fulltime player in 1964. As far as Brown was concerned, there was no mystery to Stargell’s drop in productivity. “I thought he got heavy—he got too heavy,” he said. “He really wasn’t playing well.”
Following the 1967 season, Brown’s approach to Stargell’s conditioning changed to some degree. Instead of ordering a strict diet, Brown told Stargell about an athletic trainer he knew at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club by the name of Alex Martella. By this time, Stargell was a year-round resident of Pittsburgh, and he made a commitment to arrive at spring training in 1968 in the best shape possible. “Willie went over there every day except Sunday and went through a regime,” Brown said. “This guy really worked him and Willie worked hard—he got himself in good physical condition. He had him doing aerobic things, working on his arms, his legs, the whole body routine, the big ball. I watched one whole workout one day and even I was tired when he got through. But Willie never complained. He thought it was a good idea. After doing it a couple of weeks he said, ‘You know, I really feel good doing this—I feel better.’ He certainly had some marvelous years after that. I think he realized how necessary it was to stay in shape.”
While Stargell focused on his waistline, Brown had several holes to fill, most notably in the manager’s office and on the mound. He filled his first vacancy by hiring veteran minor-league manager Larry Shepard, who knew a number of the Pirates players—including Stargell—by virtue of managing the organization’s Columbus team in the Class AAA International League from 1961 to 1966. On the field, Brown shipped two of the club’s top prospects—Don Money and Woody Fryman—to Philadelphia for veteran right-handed starter Jim Bunning.
Now that Stargell was once again a family man—he and Dolores had their first child together, a son named Wilver Jr. that winter—he was eager to put down roots in his adopted home town. He focused on a neighborhood just outside downtown Pittsburgh that reminded him of his boyhood neighborhood back in Alameda. Known as the Hill District, it had at one time been a fashionable place to live but had fallen on hard times after a sizable portion of it was gutted to make room for the new Civic Arena. Within a couple of years, Stargell would become involved in a business there that caught the fancy of Pirates fans everywhere and spawned one of the most memorable phrases in baseball broadcasting history.
But that was still two years down the road. Stargell and the Pirates were focusing on the upcoming 1968 season and making amends for their major flop the season before. In spring training, Stargell befriended Gene Clines, a young outfielder who had idolized him while growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area community of Richmond. Clines had met Stargell once before, while serving as a batboy at a March of Dimes benefit All-Star Game that involved Bay Area professional ballplayers including Stargell, Pinson, Robinson and others. “I used to go watch those guys come to the park to take batting practice,” Clines recalled. “I met Willie then, but not in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be his teammate and play with him or play next to him.” But in the spring of 1968, Clines found himself in Fort Myers, Florida, and had a chance to renew acquaintances with the now-established big league slugger. The two began talking and Clines told him some stories about the March of Dimes game back in Richmond. “From that day on,” Clines said, “he called me ‘Homes.’” Stargell became a mentor to Clines, who spent five seasons with the Pirates and played a key role in several division championship teams, and the two spent hours talking baseball. “He was the one who showed me how to play this game and play it the right way,” Clines said. “How to respect it. He was the one who took me under his wing to show me what professional baseball was all about and how I should carry myself.”24
He didn’t do it in a loud way or call attention to himself, Clines said. “His demeanor was very low key. If you had something on your mind, if you had a question, you didn’t hesitate to ask. If you had information for him, you didn’t hesitate to give him that information. But one thing about Willie was, he would always say if you asked him a question, he was going to be up front. He’d say, ‘I’m going to tell you exactly how it is.’ So when I asked him a question, he shot right from the hip. He gave me the information I needed to know for what I inquired about, whether it was good news or bad. If I asked him a question, I knew I would get an honest answer.”
All went well in spring training that year for the Pirates, but before the 1968 season could gain traction, the nation was rocked by one of its darkest deeds—the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. As they did in many urban centers across the nation, African Americans rioted in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, triggering a dusk-to-dawn curfew that lasted for five days in the city. In the hours directly following King’s shooting, the situation reached a boiling point. Sections of town hit by violence included Uptown, Herron Hill, lower Oakland and Lawrenceville, and firebombs were reported tossed on some streets. Dozens of windows were shattered, looting occurred in a number of stores and police cars were stoned.25
Even after Mayor Joseph M. Barr lifted the curfew on April 9, several other “safety measures” remained in place, including a ban against outdoor gatherings of more than 10 people, a ban against the sale of alcoholic beverages anywhere other than by beer distributors, and a ban on the sale of gasoline unless it was directly dispensed into a vehicle’s tank.26 In Pittsburgh, state and local police joined with the National Guard to keep watch over the city, even manning check points at various locations. A Pittsburgh Press reporter who went on a ride-along after curfew related an incident in which a guardsman pulled over a car occupied by four “Negroes,” including a minister who was behind the wheel. As the guardsman checked the driver’s papers, he noticed a passenger in the back seat unzip his jacket. “Then, when the man in the back seat began to reach slowly inside his unzippered jacket, the lieutenant quickly cocked his gun, held it to the minister’s head and ordered everyone in the car to freeze or he would shoot. The man in the back seat stammered that he did not have a gun but was only reaching for identification papers. Nevertheless the four men were ordered out of the car and searched by the guardsman. Eventually they were sent on their way after the lieutenant “apologized profusely.” The unrest upset even those in charge of keeping the peace. “This whole scene is wild,” the guardsman said. “I mean like unreal and it scares the hell out of me,” he added, waving his hand in the direction of the Hill.27
While blacks rioted in the Hill District and other urban centers across the land, black major-league baseball players wanted time to grieve in their own way. By April 6, two major-league openers scheduled for Monday, April 8, were postponed, but at that point, the Pirates’ scheduled opener for that day in Houston remained on. However, the Post-Gazette reported that the Pirates’ black players planned to boycott that game if it was not postponed—along with an exhibition game on April 7. The boycott never occurred, as the hometown Astros chose to postpone their opener with the Pirates until April 10, and the exhibition game was canceled.
Stargell felt a kinship with the slain King and years later would talk about those feelings in more detail while narrating some of King’s writings as part of a symphonic piece performed by an orchestra in several of the nation’s largest cities.
In 1968, though, Stargell was focused on hitting the curve ball and showing Pirates brass—and fans—that his down season of 1967 was an aberration and not a portent of things to come. The media certainly expected big things. In his preview of the season opener, the Post-Gazette’s Feeney wrote:
HOUSTON, April 9—It’s the beginning of a new season for the Pirates tomorrow night in the Astrodome and it could be the year that Willie Stargell really makes it big.
Feeney wrote that Stargell “could be the difference from a fourth-place finish and a pennant. He is capable of 40 home runs and 125 RBIs. He also has proven he can slump miserably and drag the club down with him.”28
But for the second straight season, things didn’t go according to plan. It took Stargell most of April to lug his batting average above the .200 mark, and by May 19 the Bucs’ cleanup hitter and primary power source had just two home runs. He broke out of the doldrums in a major way on May 22 at Wrigley Field, when he went 5-for-5 with three home runs and seven RBIs and just about single-handedly propelled the Bucs to a 13–6 comeback win over the Cubs. He added a double and a single, giving him 15 total bases, and scored four times, helping the Pirates erase a 5–1 deficit.
Brown, the Bucs’ general manager, was in Chicago that late spring day and watched his slugger assault three different Cubs pitchers—starter Joe Niekro and relievers Dave Wickersham and Chuck Hartenstein. “His double hit off the wall in left and I mean way up there—off the very top of the wall and bounced back in,” Brown said. Richard Dozer of the Chicago Tribune reported that Stargell missed “by a fraction of an inch” of getting his fourth homer that day, noting that it hit a yellow rail atop the left-field fence.29 Stargell couldn’t hide his elation afterward. “It’s a funny thing,” Stargell told reporters later about his just-miss double. “I thought I hit that ball better than the other three. But I guess it just wasn’t my day to get four of them.”30
Even the enemy fans at Wrigley appreciated the performance, as some of those sitting near the Pirates dugout gave Stargell a standing ovation as he rounded the bases following his third homer of the game. “What a warm feeling that gives a player, especially a visitor,” Stargell remarked. “The home runs make you feel good all over and the applause is welcome music. I just wish I could do this someday at Forbes Field and reward the Pittsburgh fans. I never had a better day.”31
Stargell’s surge continued for several weeks and he reached the .300 mark on June 2. But that would be his high-water mark for the season, as his average tumbled into the .260 neighborhood around the All-Star break and ultimately settled at .237 by season’s end—his lowest mark yet as a big-league hitter in what would become known as The Year of the Pitcher. His other numbers were equally disappointing—he played in 128 games, managed just 15 doubles in 435 at-bats and finished with 24 home runs and only 67 RBIs while striking out 105 times. He did manage a few noteworthy performances, however. On August 24, with Cardinal Bob Gibson in the midst of one of the greatest pitching campaigns in history, Stargell did what he could to inflict a little damage on the menacing right-hander, who absolutely hated hitters. Gibson, who would go on to post a 1.12 earned run average and a 23–9 record that included 13 shutouts—third-most all-time—and 268 strikeouts in 304 innings, was working on a 15-game winning streak when the Pirates visited Busch Stadium. Number 16 looked like a lock when the Cardinals bolted to a 4–0 lead, but Stargell connected for a three-run homer that pulled the Pirates within a run and then, with the score tied at 4–4, he led off the ninth inning with a double. His pinch-runner would score the winning run that snapped Gibson’s streak at 15 games.
Stargell’s subpar year fit with most of the rest of the club, as the Pirates finished a disappointing 80–82 and wound up in sixth place, 17 games behind the league champion Cardinals. Stargell’s injuries, which he said sparked a run of periodic headaches that neither glasses nor a neck brace could cure, prompted the slugger to announce that he no longer wanted to play the outfield. That meant a transition back to the position he played both at Encinal and in the low minor leagues—first base.
That wouldn’t be the only change to greet the Pirates in 1969. In fact, the baseball world in general was in upheaval. Both major leagues added two new teams—San Diego and Montreal joined the National League, while the American League welcomed franchises in Seattle and Kansas City. Both leagues also split into two divisions, with six teams in each of the East and West divisions. Changes also took place on the field—literally—in an attempt to negate the upper hand that major league pitchers had seized. The 1968 season saw an abundance of dominating pitching performances, with Gibson’s NL-leading 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts being Exhibits A and 1-A. But Gibson was not alone; Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers became the major leagues’ first 30-game winner in 34 years. Both hurlers would claim their respective league’s Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers tossed six straight shutouts, putting together 58⅔ consecutive scoreless innings. And two other pitchers—San Francisco’s Gaylord Perry and St. Louis’ Ray Washburn—threw no-hitters on consecutive days. The pitching was so dominant that only one American League hitter finished with a batting average higher than .290, and the batting title went to Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski, who finished at just .301.
In response, the major leagues made two substantive changes, lowering the height of the mound from 15 inches to 10 inches and adjusting the strike zone, essentially making it more difficult for pitchers to get the high strike called. The changes, in conjunction with watered-down pitching that resulted from the addition of the four expansion teams, seemed to work, as the mean earned-run average climbed from 2.99 in 1968 to 3.60 in 1969—a jump of 20 percent.
The Pirates also were in the midst of several key changes. First, the club moved its spring training operation from Fort Myers to Bradenton, Florida, where it had constructed a complex known as Pirate City. In addition, an influx of young players began making their way into the Pirate lineup, players who would lay the foundation for an unprecedented run of success in the following decade. Bartirome, the long-time Pirates minor-leaguer who helped show Stargell the first-base ropes way back in spring training in Jacksonville Beach in 1959, became a trainer with the big-league club in 1967 and could see the young talent coming of age. “I used to tell people about the Instructional League teams we had in 1968 and ’69,” Bartirome said. “More than 90 percent of the guys we had on those teams went to the big leagues. Now, if you have two or three players from Instructional League make it to the big leagues, you’re doing something. That’s the kind of farm system we had.”32
The players—particularly the young ones—certainly were aware of it. Young outfielders like Clines, for example, looked out from the dugout only to see two future Hall of Famers—Clemente in right and Stargell in left—patrolling two of the three positions. Catching prospect Milt May slugged 20 homers for the Bucs top farm team in Columbus and he was only 19 when that season started. But with young Manny Sanguillen almost ready to make the jump to the big club in 1969, the future was clouded for May. At second base alone, the Pirates had a future Hall of Famer in Mazeroski but nipping at his heels in the farm system were Dave Cash, Rennie Stennett and Willie Randolph—all of them All-Star caliber.
“There were so many guys in our system,” Clines said. “Such an abundance of talent and a lot of us played the same positions. Guys had to be traded or shipped out to make room. But I never got discouraged. My whole focus, even with all that talent there, was to play in the major leagues. I never thought I would play for another organization when I came up as a Pirate.”
Indeed, in 1969, the Pirates elevated three key players as everyday starters—catcher Sanguillen, a free-swinging Panamanian with an ever-present smile and a gun for an arm; third-baseman Richie Hebner, a left-handed hitting New Englander who dug graves in the off-season; and Al Oliver, a sweet-swinging left-handed line-drive machine who played mostly at first base but got into 32 games as an outfielder as well. Oliver finished tied for second in the Rookie of the Year voting after batting .285 with 17 home runs and 70 RBIs. Sanguillen hit a robust .303 in 1969, driving in 57 runs, while Hebner checked in at .301 with eight homers and 47 RBIs.
The new talent helped the Pirates make an eight-game improvement over the previous season and kept the club in the pennant race for a while. Stargell also had more than a little something to do with it, as he rebounded from his two straight sub-par seasons to post an outstanding year. His batting average hovered in the uncharacteristic .340 range into the month of August before tailing off. Still, he finished with a line of .307 batting average, 29 home runs, 92 RBIs and 31 doubles in 522 at-bats. Stargell’s standout season and another Hall-of-Fame caliber year from Clemente (.345 batting average, 19 home runs, 91 RBIs) couldn’t save the Pirates or Shepard, who was fired with just five games remaining in the season and replaced by third-base coach Alex Grammas.
That season would be the last full campaign in Forbes; taking shape on Pittsburgh’s north shore, just across the Ohio River from the city’s Golden Triangle, was a new sports playground—one that would be home to numerous championship performances in both baseball and football for the next three decades. And one that ultimately became home to one of the most memorable collections of talent in Pittsburgh sports history—the Pirate Family.