Chapter 4

Becoming a Force

THE DECADE OF THE 1960S had brought forth a slew of unpredictable, shocking and spectacular events—and people—the likes of which man had never seen before. Assassins cut down three of America’s top leaders—John F. Kennedy; his brother, Robert; and Martin Luther King Jr. Thousands of miles from America’s shores, a conflict in the remote Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam escalated into a full-scale war, claiming the lives of thousands of young Americans, sparking massive demonstrations on college campuses and dividing scores of homes. The use of drugs such as marijuana and LSD and liberalized attitudes toward sex came out of the closet and occupied a front-and-center spot in America’s consciousness. A landmark civil rights law took effect, aimed at ending racial and other types of discrimination once and for all. The Beatles burst upon the scene, revolutionized the world’s musical landscape forever, and disbanded, all in the course of a decade. In the final year of the decade, the formerly hopeless New York Mets did the unthinkable—they won a World Series championship—just three months after Neil Armstrong took one step down from a tiny ladder and set foot on the surface of the moon. Both events showed the world that the impossible was, indeed, possible. And in the decade’s final days, a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder named Curt Flood decided he would fight his team’s decision to trade him to Philadelphia, and in the process challenge one of the fundamental building blocks of Major League Baseball—the reserve clause.

But for all of those memorable and earth-shattering events, the 1960s—which had started with the highest of highs in an improbable World Series championship over the vaunted New York Yankees—ended with barely a whimper for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Larry Shepard’s firing in the final week of the 1969 season created an opening in the dugout, and once again general manager Joe Brown turned to his trusted friend, Danny Murtaugh, to take over as manager. The two had gone back a ways, to the minor leagues when Brown was running a ballclub in New Orleans and Murtaugh was his field manager for three years. “We were poor together in New Orleans,” Brown said of Murtaugh. “I came to know and love him there. He was a marvelous man with a marvelous family.”¹

The decade of the ’70s would not enter with a whimper, but a bang. In May of 1970, campus unrest—fueled by rising dissatisfaction with the U.S. policies in Vietnam and continued racial tension—turned violent 10 days apart in two separate places, Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State College in Mississippi. In both instances, protesters lost their lives, gunned down by those sent to quell the respective disturbances. In the case of Kent State, it was Ohio National Guardsmen, and at Jackson State, it was city police officers and Mississippi State Police. The President’s Commission, chaired by former Pennsylvania Governor William W. Scranton, found that at Kent State, “The indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.” At Jackson State, nearly 400 bullets or pieces of buckshot struck one of the school dormitories, resulting in the death of two people, one of whom was a Jackson State student and the other a local high school student.²

Baseball, though, continued unabated—Flood’s challenging of the reserve clause notwithstanding. The Pittsburgh club that awaited Murtaugh in 1970 was far different from the one that he left at the end of the 1967 season. The young players who had risen to the big club in 1969—Hebner, Oliver, Sanguillen—had a full year of seasoning and, with plenty of help from holdover veterans Clemente, Mazeroski, Veale, Blass and Stargell, were about to lead the Pirates into a decade of unprecedented and unmatched success. And while they were at it, the Pirates shook baseball’s stodgy foundation to its core, particularly with regard to racial makeup and clubhouse attitude—and even on-field fashion.

“It was an interesting group—the team that changed baseball,” said Blass, who won 78 games for the Pirates from 1969 through 1972 before inexplicably losing the ability to throw a strike; he struggled through the ’73 and ’74 seasons before retiring. “It was a unique atmosphere. We didn’t have cliques—we had three separate but equal entities. We had almost as many black, white and Latin guys. Think of the figureheads—Maz is white, Clemente Latin and Stargell black. Willie’s leadership was not a lot of verbal, nor was any of the three. Clemente would scream about things, but it had nothing to do with leadership. He’d scream in a fun way. He’d holler at (Dave) Giusti and Giusti would holler back in Italian. It never meant anything. Maz never said anything. I never referred to them as leaders, but examples of how to go about your business.” All of the club’s leaders were available for encouragement, but none pushed himself on any of the younger players. “I’d see Clemente and Stargell in other people’s lockers, talking,” Blass said. “The unique thing about Willie was, it didn’t matter if you were white, black or Latin, he’d be in your locker.”³

While the Pirates of the early 1970s got along for the most part, they weren’t all choirboys. Murtaugh appointed Veale—the strapping 6-foot-6, 215-pound left-handed strikeout artist whose thick glasses had a tendency to fog up and create even more trepidation on the part of faint-hearted hitters—as the sheriff. “Anytime anyone got in trouble, I had to go get ’em,” Veale recalled. “Murtaugh would send me to go because he knew I would bring them back. They’d go out and get drunk and I’d come back walking with them or have them across my shoulders—it didn’t matter to me. As long as they didn’t bring any disrespect to the organization. I had a lot of guys the next day tell me, ‘Bob, I appreciate what you did.’ I might have saved the guy a couple thousand dollars in fines.” One time, Veale had to retrieve a player off the street and bring him in for a Sunday afternoon game at Forbes Field. Veale stuck him in a cold shower for 10 minutes and then in the bottom of the ninth, Murtaugh called on the player to pinch-hit and he delivered a game-winning triple. “He hit one of the most hellacious line drives to left center you’d ever want to see,” Veale said. “And he was highly inebriated.”⁴

Murtaugh’s quiet, patient manner worked well with the blend of old and young Pirates. And unlike previous managers who often felt a need to bench Stargell against some left-handed pitchers, Murtaugh wrote his slugger’s name in the lineup on a regular basis. The confidence Murtaugh showed in Stargell certainly could have been questioned early in the 1970 campaign, as Stargell got off to a horrific start. He went hitless in his first 22 at-bats and wound up hitting just .093 through the month of April. Still, he managed to show off his Ruthian power on two occasions that month—on April 20, he sent a Jim Bouton offering over the right-field roof at Forbes Field, his sixth and penultimate rooftop blast. It was the 17th homer deposited over the roof at Forbes. “I like to think the hits will start coming now,” Stargell said after the game. “There’s no place to go but uphill. I looked at that Sunday paper and saw that I was last in the league.” Stargell wasn’t pressing; he recalled that in 1966, he ended the month of April hitting less than .100 and wound up the season with 33 homers and 102 RBIs.⁵

Five days later, he entered the Pirates game against visiting Atlanta just 3-for-43 on the season, and his .070 batting mark was the lowest average among National League regulars that day. In the clubhouse before the game, broadcaster Nellie King was showing Stargell a plaque he was having made—a plaque commemorating the balls that Stargell had launched onto the Forbes Field roof. “Maybe,” King told Stargell, “it’d be a good idea to wait until Forbes Field closes before we send this thing to the engraver.” It was a splendid idea. Stargell, despite feeling weak from an undisclosed illness, jumped on the first pitch he saw from knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm in the last of the seventh and launched one, closing the curtain on his epic roof demolition show at the old ballpark. It was only the second time he had ever faced the 46-year-old Wilhelm, who had struck Stargell out two days earlier. This time, though, Wilhelm’s famous knuckler failed to dance. “The home run pitch didn’t do anything,” Wilhelm said afterward. “It didn’t dip and was out over the plate.”⁶

About the only other good news that came from Stargell’s slow start was that he didn’t have to worry about many payoffs at a new chicken restaurant to which he had lent his name. The venture, emblematic of Stargell’s desire to invest in his adopted home city of Pittsburgh, involved a Hill District restaurant that was owned by a Pittsburgh Steelers defensive back named Brady Keys—an up-and-coming entrepreneur who, like Stargell, wanted to develop business ventures in Pittsburgh’s inner-city area. In this case, Keys said he owned the restaurant but paid Stargell to use his name. But it was widely reported that Stargell was the restaurant’s owner. Stargell said in a 1970 interview that he put money into the restaurant because “there weren’t any decent places for the people there to eat. I went into it expecting to lose money because black people don’t tend to support black businesses. But we went into it thinking we’d treat people who came in nice, treat them like they were somebody, and it’s done real well.”⁷

Keys, who eventually would own more than 100 All-Pro Chicken restaurants, called the one in Pittsburgh “Chicken on the Hill with Will,” partly due to its Hill District location and partly in a tribute to the former slogan that fans in Asheville, North Carolina, took to using when Stargell was belting home runs onto the hillside behind McCormick Field during his 1961 season in the South Atlantic League.

Prior to the 1970 season, Stargell and Keys had talked about launching a promotion that would enable all patrons ordering a meal in the restaurant at the time Stargell hit a home run to receive their order for free. Bob Prince, the Pirates’ iconic broadcaster and a character of gargantuan proportions, was told about the promotion but somehow managed to convey the idea that if Stargell hit a home run, anyone coming into the restaurant would receive free food. The promotion turned into a nightmare, at least for Keys. “When Willie hit a home run, I’m telling you, the whole damn community came out,” he said in a 2011 interview. “From all over the Hill, 250 or 300 people would come. I’d have to rush over there and monitor the damn thing. We couldn’t feed all the people. We would feed until the food ran out, which was very difficult.” Keys said he couldn’t do anything to stop the onslaught. “Bob Prince said it,” he said, “so it was the law.” Keys said he went and talked to Prince—on the air, during a Pirate game—after the first incident in hopes of clearing up the misunderstanding. “We wanted to make sure Bob understood this was only for the people in the restaurant at the time Willie hit a home run,” Keys said. “But then Bob would get on the air the next game and mess it up again. This happened about five times. And we never stopped—we had to just keep serving the food. Finally, the season ended. And we did that for only one year.”⁸

Stargell’s April funk brightened a bit in May, as he slammed six homers, drove in 20 runs and finished the month with a .246 batting average. He held steady in June, as did the Bucs, who received a major shot in the arm on June 12 when Stargell’s roommate, Dock Ellis, no-hit the San Diego Padres in a 2–0 win in San Diego. It was hardly a masterpiece: Ellis walked eight and hit a batter, and was bailed out by a superb defensive play from the veteran Mazeroski, who from his second base position made a diving back-handed stab on a ball hit by Ramon Webster in the seventh inning. “I thought it was a base hit,” Maz told Charley Feeney of the Post-Gazette after the game, “but I dove and there it was in the glove.”⁹

Stargell supplied all the firepower his roomie needed, belting a home run that just made it into the first row of the left-field seats in the second inning and then smashing one to right in the seventh. Bill Christine, covering the game for the Pittsburgh Press, noted that Ellis was breathing heavily in the ninth inning of his gem, but wrote that it wasn’t because the eclectic right-hander had never faced pressure before. Just five years earlier, Ellis’s neighborhood was ground zero for one of the nation’s worst race riots—Watts, in Los Angeles. There, Ellis’s light-complected mother was nearly shot because rioters mistook her for a white woman. “The tanks were parked right outside our house,” Ellis told Christine. “That was pressure.” Ellis said if his neighborhood nickname—Peanut—hadn’t been stenciled to his car, his mother might not have made it through Watts alive. “They thought she was white and they were going to kill her,” said Ellis, who at the time was the fifth pitcher in franchise history to throw a no-hitter and the second in two years; Bob Moose turned the trick against the Mets the previous September. “She got in my car and then they knew. She was Peanut’s mother.”¹⁰

Ellis’s pitching gem took on added significance more than a decade later, when he claimed that he had taken LSD before pitching the no-no. Ellis, who by that time was a drug counselor in Los Angeles, told Bob Smizik of the Pittsburgh Press in April of 1984 that he didn’t even know the Pirates were scheduled to play that day until six hours before game time. Ellis told Smizik he had taken the drug in Los Angeles because he thought it was an off-day. A woman he was with looked at the paper and told him he was pitching that day. The woman drove him to the airport and he arrived in San Diego at 4:30 P.M. for a 6:05 start. Ellis said he could remember only portions of the game but he did remember feeling “psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the glove but I didn’t hit the glove too much.”¹¹

The Pirates’ 1970 schedule was top-heavy with road games from mid–June until mid–July to accommodate last-minute construction on the Pirates’ new home, Three Rivers Stadium. Pittsburgh’s last home date at venerable Forbes Field came on June 28 in a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs. For Stargell, the day was a forgettable one, as he said good riddance to the ballpark that he believed could have robbed him of 100 home runs or more by going 0-for-8 in the two games. However, the Pirates were none the worse for Stargell’s woes, as they took a pair of games from the Cubs, 3–2 and 4–1, and found themselves 40–35 and in a first-place tie with the New York Mets. And heading into the All-Star break, which was to be followed by the long-awaited opener at Three Rivers Stadium on July 16 against the Cincinnati Reds, the Bucs owned a 50–39 record and a 1½-game lead over second-place New York in the National League East.

That July evening, some 48,846 fans made their way into the glistening new ballpark, which took its name from the nearby Allegheny, Ohio and Monongahela rivers. What the fans saw stunned them—an ultramodern, wide $1 million scoreboard, spotless eateries that carried names like Zum Zum and Wienerstop, a new type of ersatz grass known as Tartan Turf and, unlike the heavily girdered Forbes Field, an unobstructed view of the playing field. The sports palace, which would also become home to the soon-to-be resurgent Pittsburgh Steelers, cost more than $35 million but would provide priceless sports memories for several generations of Pittsburghers.

The stadium wasn’t the only new thing on the agenda for the fans who turned out that night. Perhaps most stunning of all, their beloved Pirates were bedecked in dazzling new white uniforms that would revolutionize the baseball fashion world. Rather than sporting their traditional sleeveless button-up flannel tops and belted pants—a look they began using in 1957—the Pirates took the field in short-sleeved pullover double-knit tops with no buttons and beltless pants that relied on an elastic waistband and a drawstring to hold them up. “It’s like taking off a girdle,” one player was quoted as saying.¹² If that weren’t enough, the traditional black cap was gone, replaced by a two-tone job that boasted a black bill and a dark mustard beanie. No major-league team had ever worn a button-free pullover jersey or pants with an elastic waistband.¹³

“They’re outta sight, man, they’re outta sight,” exclaimed Ellis, the Pirates’ starting pitcher for the historic event. The media weren’t as kind; local newspaper columnist Phil Musick wrote in the next day’s Pittsburgh Press that it looked like the uniform designer had “crossed a softball outfit with a pair of Carol Burnett’s old pajamas.”¹⁴ Neither was the enemy enthralled; Reds first baseman Tony Perez, whose ballclub debuted in a similar stadium the same year in Cincinnati, told members of the press that the Pirates looked like “sissies” in their new duds.¹⁵

A huge portion of the 48,846 fans who witnessed the first game came away impressed with the new stadium. “There’s just one word for it,” said Pittsburgh native Al Udell, who made the trek from Youngstown, Ohio. “It’s class.” Even the price tag didn’t seem to bother some, at least on Opening Night. “From what I can see, it was worth all the money they spent on it,” Herb Soltman of Mount Lebanon told Robert Voelker of the Post-Gazette.¹⁶ Just about everything was perfect that night. Even the politicians kept their remarks short. About the only thing that wasn’t perfect was the outcome, as the Reds edged the Pirates 3–2. Stargell crushed the first Pirates home run in their new playground, a sixth-inning shot into the second-tier box seats that earned him nearly $1,000 in a promotional giveaway from a local lumber yard. The homer certainly caught the attention of the Reds’ right fielder Ty Cline, over whose head Stargell’s drive sailed before landing in the new seats. “Did anybody measure it?” Cline asked later. “It had to travel 450 feet, at least. It was 200 feet over my head.”¹⁷

It only took one game for people to realize that the Pirates were not playing at Forbes Field anymore. That moment of clarity materialized when Perez launched one to center field with a man on base and two outs in the fifth inning. At Forbes Field, Perez’s drive would have been a long out. At Three Rivers, the ball cleared the center-field wall for a two-run homer. “You had better forget Forbes,” wrote the Post-Gazette’s Feeney following the game, “because it’s just a ball yard with a history now.”¹⁸ Stargell certainly was looking forward to the move to Three Rivers Stadium, with its symmetrical outfield and the friendlier-than-Forbes dimensions—340 feet down both lines, 410 feet to straightaway center and 385 feet to the right- and left-center field power alleys. He figured those numbers would enhance his own numbers; in fact, Stargell claimed on several occasions that his wife Dolores had tracked Stargell’s at-bats in 1969 and concluded that he would have hit 22 more homers that season if he had been playing in Three Rivers Stadium rather than Forbes Field.

Stargell continued to flex his power muscles both in his new ballpark and on the road, including a major display on August 1, when he rapped out two home runs and three doubles and drove in six runs in a 20–10 victory over the Braves in Atlanta. Stargell became only the third player at the time to manage five extra-base hits in a game, joining Lou Boudreau and Joe Adcock. “I know I’m one whipped man,” Stargell said after the game. “I can’t ever remember being this tired.”¹⁹ By August 9, Pittsburgh had surged in front of the NL East pack and an 8–3 win over New York that day that was punctuated by the first of what would be many tape-measure homers by Stargell at Three Rivers left the Pirates with a 3½-game lead over the Mets.

It was the first home run hit into the upper deck of the new park and it came off Ron Taylor, a Mets reliever who said after the game that, despite the distance, the blast was “still only one run.” Christine of the Press wrote that Stargell hit the ball “so hard and so far so quick yesterday that there were at least 43,000 opinions regarding where it landed.”²⁰ He noted that Pirate owners John and Dan Galbreath planned to visit the upper-deck section in right field to find anyone who might have witnessed Stargell’s blast. Dan Galbreath said if the shot made it to the seats, he would paint the ultimate destination seat a different color and have the date placed on it. “If it hit the concrete façade in front of the upper deck, we might put an X there. We don’t feel that there’ll be a lot of balls hit that far in this stadium.” He was right; only 13 balls reached Three Rivers’ upper deck before it gave way to PNC Park for the start of the 2001 season. Stargell was responsible for the first three, and four in all. As was his custom, Stargell downplayed the 469-foot distance afterward. “At contract time, distance doesn’t mean a thing,” he said. “It’s how many you hit out that does the talking for you.” While Stargell was not impressed, teammate Oliver was. “If somebody had tried to catch that ball,” Oliver said, “his hands would have come off.”²¹

Although the outlook seemed bright in mid–August, a 1–9 skid to end the month had fans a little on edge. And when the Pirates lost three in a row the second week of September, the defending World Champion Mets grabbed a share of the NL East lead. But the Bucs rebounded to win seven out of the next 10 to right the ship and take command, and the club finally clinched the NL Eastern Division title with three games to play by beating the Mets 2–1 on September 27, capping a three-game sweep of their top rivals. Brown, the Bucs’ general manager, was all smiles in the champagne-soaked clubhouse afterward. “You were a helluva man in 1960; you were five times as great this year,” he told Murtaugh. Brown was alluding to the numerous replacements that the Pirates had called upon to spell injured players like Alley, Mazeroski, Stargell—who was dogged by a bruised heel most of the season—and Clemente at various times throughout the season. Brown saluted the role players—players like Clines, who was summoned twice from the minor leagues to fill in for injured players, and Jim “Mudcat” Grant, the veteran hurler who was acquired September 14 and appeared in seven games down the stretch, pitching 11⅓ innings and allowing just one run while picking up a pair of wins. “He’s another example of what I mean,” Brown said of Grant. The win had Stargell—who pulled a leg muscle the previous game and could not play in the division-clinching victory—talking in terms of a new magic number. That would be seven. “Three from Cincinnati and four from somebody else and we’re in,” Stargell said amid the popping of more champagne corks.²²

The Pirates, who drew more fans than any season since 1960—1,341,947, including 955,040 in 36 dates at Three Rivers—were a balanced bunch. Clemente hit a sparkling .352 but played in only 108 games while Stargell led the club with 31 homers and 85 RBIs and—displaying his powerful arm—also led all NL outfielders in assists with 16. Bob Robertson, the burly young first baseman, supplied right-handed power with 27 home runs and 82 RBIs to back the other productive youngsters—Sanguillen, Oliver and Hebner. On the mound, Blass, Ellis, Veale, Luke Walker and Moose each won at least 10 games. But perhaps the most valuable arm belonged to reliever Dave Giusti, who won nine of 12 decisions and closed out many a victory. Still, the Pirates went into the best-of-five National League Championship Series as underdogs to the Reds, who had beaten them eight out of 12 times during the regular season. Cincinnati won 102 games and boasted a lineup that included two future Hall of Famers in catcher Johnny Bench and first-baseman Tony Perez, not to mention the all-time hit king Pete Rose, and were skippered by another future Hall of Famer in George “Sparky” Anderson. Stargell had three hits in the opener, including a one-out double in the seventh that was followed by a walk to Oliver. But Reds starter Gary Nolan came back to strike out both Sanguillen and Hebner, and that ended the Pirates’ biggest threat. Pittsburgh’s offensive troubles continued in Game 2, as lefty Jim Merritt gave the Reds five-plus quality innings, and Cincinnati’s 3–1 win put the visitors up two games to none heading home to Riverfront Stadium.

The Reds finished off the three-game sweep the following day, winning 3–2, although the Pirates had the tying run at third with two outs in the ninth before Oliver grounded out to end the game. Afterward, Murtaugh told reporters it wasn’t that the Pirates played poorly in getting swept but that the Reds played exceptional baseball. He compared them to the Brooklyn Dodgers “Boys of Summer” teams in the ’50s, a club that was fundamentally sound in all three phases of the game—pitching, defense and hitting. Pittsburgh held the high-powered Reds to just nine runs in three games but scored only three runs of its own, stranding 29 runners, including 12 in the deciding game. “If somebody had told me before this thing started that we’d hold the Reds to three runs a game and lose, I wouldn’t have believed them,” Murtaugh said.²³

Though disappointed, the Pirates’ fortunes were most definitely on the rise. While America continued to grapple with the myriad social issues that dominated the news, Stargell and his teammates were looking ahead to what would be an unprecedented run of success. But first, before the Pirates could mount a run at a second straight National League East crown and a longer run in postseason play in 1971, the big slugger had a little off-season business to take care of. He drove to the Hill District on a regular basis to work with youngsters and tell them the wrong way isn’t the only way. “I find out who they respect the most, the bad man,” he said in a 1970 interview. “He’s usually the strongest one, the one who smokes the most pot and takes the most pills. I tell the kids that I did almost all the things they’re doing, but somehow I always felt I wanted something more. I tell them they’re not chained and bound. There’s something they can do.”²⁴ He had made similar remarks two years earlier when he first began working with youngsters in the Hill District. “They thought it was all uphill. I’d like to spend more time with them and show them how to get more out of life. I feel I owe it to them. If they learn I’m sincere, I know I can help them. This is the least I can do.”²⁵

Stargell’s other summer project took him much farther than the Hill District. His destination? Vietnam. He didn’t go alone. But Stargell was the unquestionably the biggest name among a group of major leaguers invited to tour the war-torn country in November 1970. He was joined by his Pirate teammate Grant, Braves knuckleballer Phil Niekro, two members of the new World Champion Baltimore Orioles—outfielder Merv Rettenmund and pitcher Eddie Watt—and the irascible Pirates broadcaster, Bob Prince. For 17 days, the group traveled around what was then called South Vietnam, looking to boost the spirits of U.S. servicemen and women who were hip-deep fighting in what had become a largely unpopular war that—along with deepening racial tensions—was polarizing the nation.

Rettenmund had responded in the affirmative to a questionnaire sent out by the commissioner’s office months earlier, asking if he’d be willing to go on the tour. But he had forgotten about it until he received a phone call near the end of October inquiring if he would indeed give up nearly three weeks of his off-season. Roughly two weeks later, Rettenmund and the rest of the group met in the San Francisco Bay Area and took off from Travis Air Force Base. The first five-hour leg of the trip took them to Anchorage, Alaska, then another eight hours to Japan and five more hours to Saigon. “I’d never been on a plane for more than five hours,” Rettenmund recalled. “But the trip to Vietnam was just one flight after another—and all of them were long. But there was no sense complaining. The soldiers were doing it. And they weren’t going to be coming back in 17 days.”²⁶

The first night in Vietnam, the group was taken to an army hospital. They were told what types of things they could talk about—and what types of questions not to ask. You weren’t, for example, supposed to ask an injured soldier how he was doing. “They were in the hospital,” Rettenmund explained. “Obviously they were not doing well.” Most of the talk with the injured soldiers focused on where they were from—and when they were going home. “But even most of the injured ones would say they were going to re-up,” Rettenmund said. “Here they are, sitting there with a hole in their thigh and they want to re-up.” Although Rettenmund made a living playing baseball, it wasn’t hard for him or the others to put themselves in the place of those they were visiting. “I thought I’d be going over there [to serve] when it first started,” Rettenmund said. “But for some reason, I never even got a letter from the military. When you get over there and see what we saw, you just feel so bad. These guys had it so tough. They go out on patrols at night and they might not come back. It wasn’t like going 0-for-4.”

Being in close quarters thousands of miles from home—and undergoing some stressful situations—brought the traveling contingent close in a relatively short period of time. Grant recalled flying through monsoons more than once—and one particular hairy occasion. “We were sweating that out pretty good,” he said. “We were in one of the oldest airplanes in the war. And we had to land somewhere in Cambodia. This was serious stuff. Eddie Watt was with us and he had taken a few drinks. He got pretty upset—he turned all kinds of colors and started sweating. Eventually we knew we’d get through the monsoons but we didn’t know if that plane would last.”²⁷ Rettenmund said such incidents helped the visitors “learn about each other right away. Willie had that smile—he could make people talk and feel it ease. Being the big name player in our group made it easy on all the rest of us.” Grant said the Vietnamese people were most excited to see Stargell “because he was the largest person they probably ever saw. They called him the ‘beaucoup man’—much large man.”

The group of ballplayers witnessed firepower—and devastation—beyond their comprehension. During their first night in Vietnam, they had to walk through a burn ward. Lying in a bed was a helicopter pilot. “You wouldn’t eat a steak if it was burned that bad,” Rettenmund recalled. “He was split up both sides so his skin could breathe. People told us not to spend too much time with him because he was going to die at any time. I felt so bad about that.” Later, Grant encountered one particular soldier who had sustained major injuries. The rest of the group moved on, but Grant stayed behind to visit a little longer. “They had his purple heart on his pillow, so that meant you were not going to last very long,” Grant said. “He had sat on a booby trap. I whispered in his ear that I was going to read some passages from a couple of books and I hoped that he would hear me.” Amazingly, Grant learned after returning to the states that the man did indeed hear him. The man and his family attended a game while Grant was pitching for Oakland and the man asked a clubhouse attendant if he could have a word with Grant after the game. “I went outside the clubhouse and there he was with his family,” Grant said. “He said, ‘I just had to come and tell you that I heard you.’ That was unbelievable.”

Equally hard to believe, though, was the specter that was Vietnam. Rettenmund couldn’t get over the sheer mountain of raw materials waiting to be put to use by the U.S. military forces. “It was beautiful country, but from the air all you could see was miles and miles of tanks and jeeps all parked,” he said. “I think they had more equipment than soldiers to operate it. You could fly for miles and miles and see nothing but that equipment and bomb holes. Those bomb holes looked like swimming holes.” While they never were directly attacked during their visit, Stargell, Rettenmund, Grant and the others weren’t exactly on vacation in Vietnam. Up at the crack of dawn, the group would motor to the nearest military air base, hop on a helicopter, fly to their next destination—mostly hospitals and officers clubs—and hop off. “It was a tough 17 days,” Rettenmund said, “simply because we were going somewhere every day at least twice a day. They’d wash our clothes on the run—we’d put our clothes outside our door at night and they’d be back in the morning. We didn’t have much luggage.”

One thing all of them packed was fear. “We were all kind of afraid,” Grant said. “We were in the Cambodia area and there was fire there. But they had us protected pretty good. One thing we were really worried about was Agent Orange—everyone knew about that.” It was the uncertainty about chemical warfare and other aspects of the fighting, Grant said, that weighed on the visitors’ minds. “Wars are not easy—they’re not easy to figure out,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen in the next minute.”

Stargell said virtually the same thing a few months after his return. “We were in enemy territory, flying in choppers with machine guns at the ready, and yes, I was afraid, to be very honest,” he told Jim O’Brien of the New York Post. “It was a different type of fear. At any given time, at any given moment, you could have your life taken from you.” Stargell said he had some doubts about making the trip and that, in fact, he had put it off for two years. “My family was against me going,” he said. “But I think we did some good and that made me feel good about the whole thing. It was some experience. I’ve been rewarded in many ways.”²⁸

The experience stayed with all of those who made the trip, and whenever any two of them would cross paths, they would reflect on their time together, far, far from home. “You talked about how fortunate you were not being in a war,” Grant said. “You talked about the complexity of it all, the family members those soldiers had to leave behind, many of them never to return, many of them battered and bruised and maimed. When you go into a war zone, baseball is the last thing that you think about in terms of what it means in life. You might think about maybe the soldier that you see might not be coming home when you leave there. It’s a whole different circumstance.”

Stargell’s experiences in Vietnam certainly left an impression on him. That, combined with some complications that his oldest daughter, Wendy, began experiencing during the 1970 season, prompted him to want to make a greater contribution to his fellow man. Yes, he was providing top-shelf entertainment to a city that was starved for a winner, and his entry into the business world with Keys’ All-Pro Chicken restaurant showed that Stargell was serious about investing in the heart of an underprivileged—yet culturally rich—section of his adopted hometown. But when Wendy began having physical difficulties, a series of tests was completed and the verdict came down—Wendy was carrying sickle cell anemia, an inherited disorder that decreases the blood’s ability to deliver oxygen to the body. “A doctor said she could lead a normal life, but if she married a man who also had the trait, her children would stand a chance of having it, too,” Stargell told People magazine in December 1979. He knew nothing about sickle cell anemia in 1970 but began to research the disease in an effort to do something about it.²⁹

According to the Sickle Cell Society, the disease changes the shape of a substance within red blood cells known as hemoglobin, and these altered cell shapes can form blockages in veins and arteries. The result is a low blood count, or anemia, and this can lead to a number of other issues, including strokes, seizures, severe joint pain and tissue destruction.³⁰ Research indicated that it’s vital that at-risk people—mostly those of color—undergo a simple blood test to screen for the disease. That test can tell if a person carries the sickle cell trait or actually has the inherited disease. According to the society, while sickle cell is a unique and difficult medical condition, it can be managed with the proper care.

Little was known about the disease as the 1960s segued into the ’70s, but Atlanta Braves slugger Henry Aaron was already involved, lending his name to a benefit bowling tournament staged to generate funding for the Atlanta Sickle Cell Foundation. Stargell followed suit and began holding a similar tournament in Pittsburgh—a tradition that would continue for 10 years. He also began working with a group known as the Black Athletes Foundation, a national organization leading the effort to bring more screening opportunities to test for sickle cell anemia. “I’m worried about what is being done on this sickle cell thing,” he said in the fall of 1971, noting that some of his fellow athletes hadn’t followed through with promises to help the cause. “If I have to do it myself, I’m going to do all I can to fight this disease because it’s killing black folks the most.” Stargell said his desire to help was all just a part of his desire to give back. “I think the black ballplayer should be responsible to the black community. The people, in many ways, have helped to put him where he is. He should be visible to the kids in the ghetto. Sometimes just a smile and a word of concern from him can help change the life of a young brother toward the better.”³¹

Later, the Black Athletes Foundation would morph into the Willie Stargell Foundation and serve as the receptacle for donated funds used to fund sickle cell-related activities, including research. Eventually, tax issues prompted Stargell to shut down the foundation, but his work for sickle cell continued unabated, as he later was named to serve on the Washington D.C.-based National Advisory Board.

Although committed to pursuing what he envisioned as his heroic efforts outside the lines, Stargell—heading into spring training in 1971—remained focused on helping the Pirates finish what they started in 1970. In December, GM Brown pulled off the first of two key off-season deals, sending shortstop Freddie Patek, catcher Jerry May and pitcher Bruce Dal Canton to Kansas City for pitcher Bob Johnson, shortstop Jackie Hernandez and catcher Jim Campanis. Johnson made 27 starts and fashioned a 9–10 record with a 3.45 earned-run average while Hernandez did not hit much but played well in the field—particularly in the season’s final weeks. Then, in late January, with players just a few weeks away from reporting to Bradenton, Florida, Brown dealt outfielder and former NL batting titlist Matty Alou and pitcher George Brunet to the St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Nellie Briles and outfielder Vic Davalillo. The trade opened up a ready-made spot in center field for Oliver to slide into, and Briles became one of the club’s most reliable pitchers that season, appearing in 37 games—including 14 as a starter—and winning eight of 12 decisions while posting a fine 3.04 earned run average. Davalillo, meanwhile, became a pinch hitter deluxe and a valuable spare outfielder.

Most of the players remained quiet about their pennant chances, but Stargell wanted to set a tone even in spring training and the Bucs stormed out of the Grapefruit League gate, winning nine of their first 12. “A lot of people say that it doesn’t make any difference what you do in the games down here,” Stargell said, “but I don’t buy that. You go north losing more than you win in Florida, and you have to be thinking to yourself. This is the time and the place to create a winning aura.”³² The Bucs’ top brass was not shy, either.

“Pirates Pennant Timber And Murtaugh Knows It” blared the top headline on the first page of the Pittsburgh Press sports section the day before the season opener. Writer Christine noted that the Bucs entered the opener as consensus favorites to win the Eastern Division “and Murtaugh, never a negative thinker, has said nothing in Florida to discourage the notion.”³³ Stargell, quietly determined to have the best season of his career, put together an April of historic proportions, at least in terms of the long ball. Twice in an 11-game stretch he clubbed three home runs, both times against Atlanta. In both games, he struck out in his final bid for a fourth home run—the last time on three straight mighty swings-and-misses that Press columnist Musick wrote “probably altered atmospheric conditions in Charleroi.”³⁴ The mighty cuts were no accident. “I know one thing,” Stargell said after his first outburst against the Braves, “if I ever connect, I’m not going to miss No. 4 by inches.” He no doubt was referring to his ultra-close calls against the Dodgers in Los Angeles and the Cubs at Chicago’s Wrigley Field years earlier, when he had to settle for near-miss doubles to go with his three homers. Afterward, Stargell had no clue what led to his latest outburst. “It’s just a funny game, I guess. I was out there trying to do my best and the balls went into the seats.”³⁵ He was also making mental notations of how much money he might have lost in free chicken dispensed to customers at the All-Pro Chicken restaurant on The Hill. “I better go down and see what they’ve been doing,” he said later, flashing back to the time he had homered and dished out $17 in free food to one customer. “Sometimes it’s a snack pack, which cost a dollar; sometimes it’s a superburger, which costs 59 cents. But this one guy, he had a cab waiting outside. He’d ordered six buckets.”³⁶

Stargell continued his long-distance onslaught; on April 22 he became the third major-leaguer in history to hit 10 homers in April, tying Baltimore’s Frank Robinson (1969) and Cincinnati’s Tony Perez (1970). Ridden by the flu, he was not in a mood to celebrate after the game. “I’m going to take some penicillin and go find a casket,” he told reporters.³⁷ Then, on April 27, he carved out a spot for himself in the major league record book when he blasted his 11th home run of the month. The record-breaker was a 430-foot drive to center that came off Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Pete Mikkelsen in the ninth inning of a 7–5 loss before a sparse gathering at Three Rivers Stadium.

The game was played on the same day that another famous slugger reached a milestone of his own, as Henry Aaron—who would go on to become the career home run leader in 1974—slugged his 600th homer. And on the same day, Curt Flood, who had challenged baseball authority by refusing to accept his trade to the Phillies and ultimately took baseball to the Supreme Court, ended an ill-fated comeback with the Washington Senators by bolting for Barcelona, Spain.

After Stargell blasted home run number 11, a fan came into the clubhouse to give Stargell the historic ball, but he wanted no part of it. “What do I want that ball for?” he asked. “I can put any ball in the trophy case. Let him have it.”³⁸ By hitting 11 home runs in 19 games, Stargell was on pace to hit more than 90 home runs. Ruth didn’t hit his 11th home run until the 34th game and Roger Maris did not club his 11th until game number 40. But Stargell had no interest in talking about either one of them. After he had hit his 10th of the month, reporters brought up the immortal sluggers—Ruth, who set the all-time single-season home run record of 60 in 154 games in 1927, and Maris, who eclipsed it with 61 in 162 games in 1961. “Babe Ruth, I’m not concerned about,” he said. “Or Roger Maris.” When someone brought up Ruth’s career numbers 714, Stargell said, “If I hit a hundred a year for five years, we’ll talk about it.”³⁹

Despite Stargell’s long-ball exploits, the Pirates did not get off to a similar blazing start, going just 12–10 and holding onto third place in the NL East heading into the month of May. Still, the Bucs maintained confidence, based in large part on their performance the previous season and the various personalities that dotted the roster. The ’71 clubhouse, Blass said, was a unique atmosphere. “Nothing was sacred. In a clubhouse of athletes, you hear degrading, defaming and insulting. But we were like brothers. It was a way to get rid of the tension and deal with pressure. It was really formed from a base of affection. But if an outsider walked in, he’d think, ‘My God, it’s awful.’ But that’s the inside of a clubhouse. We were pretty much aware of when the door was closed and when it was open. We’d create rumors and leak them to the ground crew, and then see how quickly it got to the Post-Gazette. ‘Tonight it went over the edge—Hebner attacked all of us with a tire chain.’ It was a great atmosphere. And it was all based on the fact that we knew we were good. You don’t have that type of atmosphere when you know you’re horseshit. Success breeds confidence and camaraderie.”⁴⁰

Soaking all of it in was Bruce Kison, a 21-year-old pitcher who opened the ’71 season at Charleston—then the Pirates’ top farm club in the International League—and won 10 of his first 11 Triple-A decisions as a starter. That earned him a recall to the big-league club in July, and he had a front row center seat to the craziness that was the Bucco clubhouse. Kison, whose boyish looks made him look even younger than his age, said the bantering that went on was partly entertainment value, but it also served a purpose in that it told the players who was strong enough to survive in the white hot caldron of a pennant race. “If you have thin skin, you can’t handle it,” he said of players getting on one another. “If you can’t handle it in the clubhouse, how are you going to handle it between the lines? We were a championship-caliber club and if you have that kind of a group and you add a player, you want a championship-caliber individual. You don’t want a meek, non-championship caliber guy just passing through. You want the best you can get on the team. Willie orchestrated a lot of that on a daily basis.”⁴¹

Nelson “Nellie” King, a one-time Pirate pitcher who began broadcasting his former team’s games in 1967, said Stargell “ran the clubhouse in a way that nobody noticed it. Nobody was above anybody. Everybody was open for jokes and everything else. That team was as close as any team I’d seen there.”⁴²

Stargell told Sports Illustrated writer Roy Blount Jr. that he wasn’t sure why the various cultures got on so well in the Pirates clubhouse when that wasn’t always the case with other ballclubs. “It really doesn’t make a difference what color you are, you’re just a guy to me. I know some black so-called friends who are dogs.”⁴³

Clines, the young outfielder who would ascend to a key role on the ’71 club, said the clubhouse atmosphere was special. “We could say anything about each other and get on one another,” he said. “But we did everything together. Everyone talks about the ’79 team being ‘We Are Family.’ For me, that started back in the early ’70s—’71. There was no theme song or anything, but we treated each other like brothers. If someone’s kid had a birthday, everyone showed up. If someone had a party, everyone showed up.”⁴⁴ Stargell was known for his team parties—and for a special elixir that he would whip up for just about everyone. He called it Purple Passion, and while the ingredients were somewhat of a mystery, there was nothing mysterious about its impact. “He’d get this big bucket,” Clines recalled, “and he’d put Welch’s grape juice and these other things in there. It was like punch that had a punch.” Blass recalls Stargell going to Sears and buying a big rubber garbage can. “He’d fill it halfway with ice and then put every conceivable type of alcohol in it, and then disguise the poison with five gallons of grape juice—and then stir it with one of his bats.” Blass joked that Stargell “could have sold the stuff in Home Depot as paint thinner. But we couldn’t get enough.” Oliver did not drink, but he would partake in the Purple Passion anyway. “It was grape juice—and everybody loves grape juice,” he said. “But Willie would put grain alcohol in there. I mean, it was good. You’d drink it like it was Kool Aid. But before you knew it, you were laid out. You were through.”⁴⁵

Oliver, who played the game aggressively and with great passion, said Stargell “really knew how to throw parties—and nobody on the team would be left out. He was a great host—he had a great demeanor about him. Nobody could say they didn’t have a good time. We’d sit around and talk about everything. And laugh—we were a laughing team. We were serious on the field, but after a game, we were as loose as we could be. We were loose when we took the field. Most games can be won or lost in the clubhouse, and when we left the clubhouse, we knew our chances of winning were good. That’s how much confidence we had as a team. We had as much confidence in our teammates as we had in ourselves. That’s why those Pirate teams in the early ’70s were so strong. Our ’71 and ’72 teams were probably the best teams the Pirates ever had, talent-wise.”

For his part, Stargell did his best to keep the club on an even keel, as he had inherited—partly by the force of his personality and partly by the force of his prodigious hitting—a piece of the leadership mantle. Blass certainly could sense it. “You could see him emerging and being a presence,” he said. “He was a big man, and he had a big physical presence. But he had that wonderful soft voice when he wanted to use it. He had a wonderful delivery. You could see him go over to a locker and spend time with guys who were struggling. And he was also part of the levity. We played clubhouse tricks on writers and clubhouse boys that were just obscene.”

Sam Nover, a young Pittsburgh television sportscaster, was victimized in one such prank—the infamous “three-man lift.” A few of the players were telling Nover for weeks that Bartirome—the team’s trainer, who stood 5-foot-10 and weighed 155 pounds in his playing days—was so strong that he could lift three men at one time. Nover was skeptical and wanted to see proof. So the players had Nover lie on his back in the clubhouse, with coach Don Leppard on one side and pitcher Johnson prone on the other side. “I had my suit and tie on, so Jose Pagan tells me to take off my shirt and tie because I might get a little sweaty,” Nover recalled. “All the players are sitting around watching. Stargell’s laughing his ass off. I’m lying down and Johnson and Leppard intertwine their arms and legs with me—I couldn’t move if my life depended on it. I had a photographer shooting the whole thing—I was going to see Bartirome lift three people weighing over 600 pounds. So Tony steps over me and puts a belt around my waist. This is how he’s going to do it—by lifting that belt, he’s going to lift everybody, since we’re all bound together. I’m shouting instructions to the photographer—‘Ronnie, you got a good shot of Tony? Can you see me?’ I’m directing this thing flat on my back. Tony says, ‘When I count to three, clench your muscles.’ He says, ‘One, two, three.’ I clench my muscles. Bartirome leans over and pulls my pants down. I jerked and tried to fight it, but I wasn’t going anywhere. I’m completely naked from the waist down.” What happened next wasn’t pretty, as a mixture of analgesic balm and orange juice was dumped all over Nover’s testicles and legs. “Clemente’s standing there laughing, saying, ‘You good sport, Sam, you good sport.’ The clubhouse was howling. I was laughing my ass off. It was a classic setup—and that’s the kind of relationship you could have with ballplayers in those days.”⁴⁶

Stargell wasn’t above getting involved in such clubhouse hijinks but he was clearly taking on more of a leadership role, according to Bartirome. “He was blossoming and it was him and Clemente who were the leaders of that club,” Bartirome said. “They did it in different ways—Stargell did it in a quiet way. Clemente was more vocal when he was in the clubhouse. He exerted his feelings more—he was more of a fiery leader. Then we had Maz, who was quieter than Stargell.”⁴⁷

Clines certainly viewed Stargell as a key leader on that team. “He was a leader by example. All you had to do was follow his lead. He wasn’t a big rah-rah guy. You just watched the way he went about his job, how he played the game. He was not a big cheerleader. But for me, Stargell and Clemente were leaders by example.” Oliver, then a young player trying to get comfortable in center field, said Stargell “knew when to approach a player when he wasn’t going good. That’s the type of leader he was. He always had great timing when going to a player.” Oliver said one important thing he learned from Stargell was the idea of self-control. “Every now and then, especially when I first came up, I would throw a batting helmet,” he said. “Ask anyone on that team and they’ll tell you that Hebner and I were the president and vice president of the lumber company—we’d go down in the runway next to the dugout and tear up some bats if we didn’t get a hit. But Willie always kept calm. Win or lose, 0-for-4 or 4-for-4, he was always the same. And as a young player, when you see someone like him carry himself that way, you start to follow suit.”

The ’71 club—packed with plenty of hitting, solid defense and sufficient if not exactly spectacular pitching—moved into first place in late May, right about the time Murtaugh had to be hospitalized. The veteran skipper remained out of commission until the second week of June, and although the club fell out of the top spot during his absence, it remained in the thick of the race, thanks in part to consecutive shutouts hurled by Moose, Blass and Ellis from May 30 through June 3, the last of which boosted the Bucs’ record to 30–19. Less than a week after Murtaugh returned, the team regained first place and went on a 22–8 rampage to open up a nine-game lead at the All-Star break.

Stargell’s hot home run pace in April did not cool off much, as he established another major-league record, this time for most home runs by the end of June—28. He was also hitting for distance—he clubbed a 458-foot shot off the Cubs’ Ken Holtzman that reached the upper deck of Three Rivers Stadium on May 30, and then on June 20, he again launched one into the top deck at his home park, this time a 472-foot blast off the Expos’ Howie Reed.

Willie crosses home plate and is greeted by Pirates teammates Roberto Clemente (21), who scored ahead of him, and Al Oliver (16), who was hitting behind Stargell (courtesy Pittsburgh Pirates).

Murtaugh attributed Stargell’s record-breaking start to being in top shape; Stargell came into spring training having lost 18 pounds over the winter. “The time he used to spend running off fat, he spent at batting practice,” Murtaugh told Dick Young of the New York Daily News. “He got off to a great start.”⁴⁸

Roy McHugh, a legendary Pittsburgh journalist, first encountered Stargell during the player’s earliest days with the Pirates and he watched him evolve from a young colt to a thoroughbred who was mashing everything in sight in 1971. McHugh painted a word picture of Stargell’s hitting stature that year. “Tall, weight shifting rhythmically from one foot to the other, his bat moving in circles like an airplane propeller, Stargell creates a feeling of menace as he waits for the pitch. He takes a full, free swing with his entire upper body committed and there is never anything hesitant about it. Once Stargell decides he will swing, the decision is not subject to change.”⁴⁹

By the time Stargell showed up for the All-Star Game in Detroit—his first trip to the Mid-Season Classic since 1966—he had collected 30 home runs and 87 RBIs. So it was no surprise that the media wanted to talk to him about Ruth and Maris. But Stargell said he spent no time at all thinking about them or any home run records. He did allow that the move from spacious Forbes Field, whose 457-foot distance to center field was so cavernous the Pirates would store their batting cage there—in play, no less—to Three Rivers Stadium certainly was aiding his home run cause. He was able to hit the ball to all fields rather than concentrate on pulling the ball to right because the new park was symmetrical. Going to all fields made him a better hitter.

Stargell used the opportunity at the All-Star break to talk about his work on the sickle cell anemia front, telling the media about his work in the Pittsburgh area to raise funds for research and to raise awareness of the disease. He also used the forum to wonder aloud about the possibility of a black man becoming a major-league manager—speculation that was spawned when someone asked Stargell about Murtaugh. “I like to think that the owners will make it happen, that there will be a black manager soon,” he said. “But the way they’re going to have to do it is the way Branch Rickey did it with Jackie Robinson. The owners are going to have to give that manager full backing. They’re going to have to say to that man, ‘You’re my man and you go out there and run things your way and I’ll back you all the way.’ The man will have an awful lot of pressure. He’ll take an awful lot of things.”⁵⁰ Later that year, Stargell would say that at least a half-dozen black or Latin players were qualified to manage in the big leagues—Frank Robinson, Maury Wills, Junior Gilliam, Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.⁵¹

At the All-Star Game, Stargell also alluded to knee pain he was experiencing, telling reporters that some days it felt fine, but other days he was in great discomfort. He injured one knee before the break at the same time he had been experiencing pain in his other knee. The problems left him unable to properly pivot at the plate and that cut into his power production, as his home runs dropped off markedly in the season’s second half. Murtaugh and others suggested he have surgery then, but Stargell declined, not wanting to miss a potential pennant drive. “I had a chance to be in a World Series,” he would say after the season. “I told the doctor the only way I was coming out was in a wheelchair.”⁵²

Stargell also used his newfound notoriety to speak out—albeit somewhat quietly—about what he perceived as a lack of endorsement opportunities for the game’s black stars, noting that Clemente had virtually no such opportunities despite his stature in the game. “It just irks me, but it shouldn’t even have to be discussed,” Stargell said. “Why doesn’t Clemente have his own sports program here in Pittsburgh? I mean, baseball has gotten a lot off this man. Why do they feel he shouldn’t reap something because of what he’s done? He doesn’t say these things, but I know how he feels. We get together and talk about them. Maybe they don’t even want us to talk about them, but it’s not fair to the guys coming up if we don’t talk.”⁵³

The Pirates rolled to a 67–39 record by the end of July and at one time owned an 11½-game lead in the NL East. But they slumped badly in August, winning just seven of their first 22 games. By August 16, the resurgent Cardinals had pulled to within four games, but the Bucs rebounded with an 18–5 run and wrapped up the division title on September 22 by beating St. Louis 5–1.

Somewhat lost in the regular season’s final month was a game in Philadelphia against the Phillies on September 1. It was that night that the Pirates made major-league history by fielding an all-minority starting lineup. It wasn’t completely out of the blue; in a game at Connie Mack Stadium against the Phillies in 1967, the club started eight Latin or black players, with pitcher Dennis Ribant being the only white player. King wrote in his book Happiness Is Like a Cur Dog that Stargell got everyone’s attention that night in the clubhouse before the game and said, “Fellows, they will not be playing the National Anthem today. They’re gonna play ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’”⁵⁴ On September 1, 1971, though, there were no exceptions. Murtaugh’s lineup card read:

Rennie Stennett, 2B
Gene Clines, CF
Roberto Clemente, RF
Willie Stargell, LF
Manny Sanguillen, C
Dave Cash, 3B
Al Oliver, 1B
Jackie Hernandez, SS
Dock Ellis, P

It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, although it was unusual that the left-handed hitting Oliver—who had played mostly center field that year—would start at first base in place of Robertson against Phillies left-hander Woody Fryman. It didn’t take long for reporters at the game to notice that Murtaugh had fielded a starting nine consisting of all minority players and researchers concluded it was the first time that had happened since Jackie Robinson integrated baseball 24 years earlier. Bruce Markusen, in his book The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, wrote that several players certainly noticed the all-minority look to the lineup that night. “We had a loose group, [so] we were all laughing and hollering about it and teasing each other,” Blass said. “I thought that was a great reaction.” Oliver, though, was not even aware of the historic nature of the lineup until Cash mentioned it to him in the third or fourth inning. He said he didn’t think Murtaugh had the racial makeup of that lineup in mind when he wrote the names on the card that night. “I think Danny was just putting the best team on the field and he probably didn’t notice [the all-black lineup] until later. I didn’t know until the third or fourth inning.”⁵⁵

While the Pirate players seemed most comfortable with the roster’s racial mix, the same could not be said for many of the hometown fans. Brown, the general manager, said he would hear about it during his public appearances. “There were bigots in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I would hear people say that the reason we couldn’t draw more people when we had all those good teams was that we had too many blacks. I remember going to a luncheon one day and the question/answer session was a major part of my talk. A guy in the back of the room stands up and says, ‘I know why you’re not drawing: you’ve got too many niggers.’ I said, ‘Let’s put it this way. Do you want me to get rid of Clemente?’ He said no. ‘Bob Veale?’ No. ‘Stargell?’ ‘Sanguillen? Oliver?’ No. I named all the blacks and he wanted me to keep them all. So I said, ‘I guess we don’t have too many.’ I didn’t see them as blacks. I saw them as black people who were good guys and could play baseball.”⁵⁶

The Pirates’ win over the Cardinals on September 22 sparked the customary championship-clinching clubhouse scene, highlighted by the agitated Ellis dumping a small washtub filled with champagne and water on the head of the stately Clemente. “The old man got it, the old man got it,” Ellis kept repeating. Stargell, who had scored his 100th run of the season—the first time in his career he had ever reached that milestone—also went after Clemente with a bottle of the bubbly.⁵⁷

Up next for the Pirates was a second straight trip to the National League Championship Series, this time against the San Francisco Giants. Pittsburgh, installed as a 6-to-5 favorite despite winning only three of 12 regular-season meetings with San Francisco, tabbed Blass to start the series opener but the Giants won 5–4. But in Game 2, Robertson—the young first baseman whom broadcaster Prince would occasionally refer to as “The Maryland Strongboy”—bludgeoned three home runs to go with one by Clines, enabling the Bucs to win 9–4 and earn a split in San Francisco. Meanwhile, over in the American League playoffs, Stargell’s boyhood friend from the Alameda projects and his former Encinal High School teammate Curt Motton drove home the tying run with a pinch-hit single that keyed a four-run seventh-inning rally and lifted Baltimore to a playoff series-opening win over the Oakland A’s. A 5–1 victory in Game 2 put the defending champion Orioles on track for their third straight World Series appearance.

The ever-unpredictable—and often volatile—Ellis made things interesting before Game 3, ripping Pirates management for what he viewed as substandard travel accommodations, both on the air and on the ground, during the trip to San Francisco. But Game 3 was even more riveting on the field, as Hebner—the young off-season grave-digger—put a nail in the Giants coffin by depositing a Juan Marichal screwball just over Three Rivers Stadium’s right-field fence, snapping a 1–1 tie in the eighth inning and giving the Pirates a pivotal 2–1 win. Right-fielder Bobby Bonds, who made a leaping attempt to flag down Hebner’s drive, told reporters afterward he missed it by five inches. Bonds and his teammates did not take the loss lightly. “Get the (bleep) out of here, you (bleep),” one Giant player told Press reporter Musick, who wrote that he “promptly got the (bleep) over to a small office where Giants manager Charlie Fox froze a used-car salesman’s smile on his wide Irisher’s face and allowed the words to leak from his mouth one at a time. Fox was more quotable than his players, at least for a family publication.”⁵⁸

The Bucs wrapped things up the next day in a 9–5 win, getting key contributions at the plate from Hebner and Oliver—each of whom homered—and on the mound from Kison. The young right-hander allowed only two hits in 4⅔ innings after relieving a battered Blass, who surrendered eight hits and five runs in two innings. By the end of Kison’s stint, the Bucs had gained the upper hand and booked their tickets to the World Series for the first time since the magical 1960 season. “He’s ice water out there,” Murtaugh said of Kison. Oliver, meanwhile, who often played with a sizable chip on his shoulder, felt slighted because Fox ordered an intentional walk to Stargell—despite being 0-for-14 in the playoffs—in the sixth inning just after the Pirates had taken a 6–5 lead on Clemente’s RBI single. The walk put runners at first and second, and Oliver promptly lashed a three-run homer to put the game away. “I hate it when they walk someone to get to me,” Oliver said later. “I think I can hit, see.”⁵⁹

The Pirates now turned their attention to Baltimore’s Birds, they of the four 20-game winners, the clutch-hitting Frank Robinson, slugging first-baseman Boog Powell and peerless third-baseman Brooks Robinson. The series opened in Baltimore, where the oddsmakers had installed the Orioles as 9–5 favorites and where hometown fans were justifiably confident that their club would polish off the Bucs for a second straight world title. Dave McNally, one of Baltimore’s four 20-game winners, would start for the home club against Ellis. Getting home runs from Don Buford, Frank Robinson and Rettenmund—Stargell’s traveling companion to Vietnam less than a year earlier—and a solid if not perfect pitching performance from McNally, the Orioles came from 3–1 down to post a 5–3 win in the opener. Baltimore collected 10 hits to just three for the Pirates, chasing Ellis in the third inning. After a rainstorm delayed things for a day, the misery continued in Game 2, as Baltimore parlayed 14 singles, seven walks and a Pirate error into an 11–3 beating, knocking out Pittsburgh starter Bob Johnson with one out in the fourth inning. If there was a silver lining, it was that Stargell’s long post-season hitting drought finally ended at 18 at-bats with a single in the seventh inning, but by then the Orioles were roosting on an 11–0 lead. Only Hebner’s three-run homer in the eighth stood between Baltimore starter Jim Palmer and a shutout.

The first two games seemed to substantiate what most of the experts predicted before the series—Baltimore clearly had the better ballclub. Jim Murray, the noted Los Angeles Times sports columnist, wrote after Game 2: “This World Series is no longer a contest. It’s an atrocity. It’s the Germans marching through Belgium. It’s the interrogation room of the Gestapo. It’s as one-sided as a Russian trial.”⁶⁰

The Pirates finally made a series of it in Game 3, returning to Three Rivers Stadium, where they posted a 5–1 victory behind Blass’s complete-game three-hit gem. Pittsburgh was aided by—of all things—a missed sign that led to the game’s key hit. With the Bucs nursing a tenuous 2–1 lead in the seventh and Clemente and Stargell aboard, third-base coach Frank Oceak flashed the bunt sign to the slugging Robertson. But the big first baseman, not often called upon to lay one down, missed the sign and instead touched Orioles’ starter Mike Cuellar for a three-run homer that put the game away. Robertson learned of his missed sign as he crossed home plate and Stargell—there awaiting him—told him, “Attaway to bunt that ball.”⁶¹ Both Clemente and Stargell had seen the bunt sign, but Clemente wasn’t completely positive, given that Robertson hadn’t been given the sign all year, and he attempted to ask for time. But umpire Jim Odom rejected his request—thankfully for Robertson, his teammates and Pirate fans everywhere.

Game 4, played on October 13, had a historic tone to it, as it was the first night game in World Series history. It did not start out in promising fashion for the Pirates, as the Orioles mugged Bucs’ starter Luke Walker before he could work up a sweat, scoring three times in the top of the first inning. But the young Kison again turned in a masterful long relief appearance, holding Baltimore to only one hit while working 6⅓ innings. That enabled the Pirate batters to regroup and hammer out a 4–3 victory, squaring the series at two games apiece. Stargell, who claimed he’d been booed by Pirate fans in Game 3, had his best offensive game of the series, going 2-for-5 with a double and an RBI and he also scored once. Milt May, the young backup catcher, delivered the key blow—a pinch-hit single in the seventh inning that, he told Bing Crosby—one of the nation’s most beloved entertainers and also a member of the Pirate ownership group—“just fell in.” Crosby, who was on hand for the win, wasn’t buying it. “Fell in, nothing,” Crosby replied. “That ball was barkin’, bitin’ and screamin’ by the time it got out there.”⁶²

That left the two teams to battle it out in a best-of-three for the title. For Game 5, Baltimore tabbed Game 1 winner McNally while the Pirates called on the versatile Briles, who delivered only the game of his life—a two-hit shutout as the Bucs took a 3–2 series edge with a 4–0 blanking of the O’s. The scene shifted back to Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, with the Pirates needing only one win to wrap things up. They wouldn’t get it in Game 6, though, despite holding a 2–1 lead in the seventh inning, as Davey Johnson singled home the tying run off Giusti and Baltimore won it in the bottom of the 10th on a walk to Frank Robinson, Rettenmund’s single and Brooks Robinson’s sacrifice fly off reliever Bob Miller.

So it came down to Game 7, just as it did 11 years earlier, when the Pirates—again heavy underdogs—knocked off the vaunted Yankees on Maz’s once-in-a-lifetime, bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning homer. This time there would be no bottom-of-the-ninth heroics, only a classic pitchers duel between the clever Blass and the no-nonsense Cuellar. Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ crafty manager, tried to throw Blass off his game by complaining early on that the right-hander was violating a rule that required pitchers to maintain contact with the pitching rubber on the mound while delivering the ball to the plate. Blass said later that Weaver’s decision to come on the field and complain actually settled him down and helped him focus because had been a little out of sorts at the game’s outset.

The game was scoreless through three, and then in the fourth, Clemente—who had made the series his personal showcase, displaying for all the nation to see his splendid hitting, all-star fielding and other-worldly throwing arm—smacked a two-out homer on the first pitch he saw to give Pittsburgh a 1–0 lead. It remained that way through seven, with Blass limiting the Birds to just two hits. In the eighth, Stargell—dropped from the cleanup spot in the batting order for the first time all year due to his post-season slump—led off with a single. With Jose Pagan at the plate, Murtaugh called for the hit-and-run and Stargell took off with the pitch. Pagan lined a double to deep center and Stargell rumbled all the way around to score to boost the Bucs’ lead to 2–0. That play loomed most large in the bottom of the inning, as the Orioles finally broke through with a run against Blass and moved the tying run to third. But Johnson grounded out to end the threat and the O’s went down in order in the ninth, giving the Pirates a 2–1 win and the series championship, touching off a wild celebration that started on the field in Memorial Stadium and spread quickly to every corner of the greater Pittsburgh area.

The Bucs had gone all the way—again—and this time the hometown folks got carried away. What started as a celebration morphed into a small-scale riot as storefronts were smashed and stores were looted, at least three taxicabs were overturned and police reported a dozen rapes and more than 50 injuries. One estimate put the crowd that had made its way downtown at 100,000.⁶³ The team plane arrived back in Pittsburgh about 8:30 P.M. and it took the team caravan 30 minutes to travel a mile from the freight depot—where the plane had landed—to the main portion of the old Greater Pittsburgh Airport, as well-wishers jammed the route. It wasn’t until 10:30 P.M. that the caravan traveled the 14 or so miles to reach downtown, as cars had jammed the Parkway West, parking in every direction as adoring fans fought to get a glimpse of their conquering heroes.

Stargell had a somewhat forgettable series, going 5-for-24 with just one extra-base hit—a double—and one RBI. And that came on the heels of his 0-for-14 performance in the NLCS. But he did walk seven times and scored three runs against Baltimore, including what proved to be the series’ winning run. Brown, the club’s GM, would say years later that Stargell’s performance in the clubhouse after those World Series games was among the classiest he’d ever seen in all his years in baseball. “He did nothing in that World Series,” he said. “But after every game, his locker was surrounded by the media. And Willie never retreated. He didn’t hide. He stayed and answered every question, until the last dog had died. He never alibied. He never gave excuses. He answered them all in the most gentlemanly fashion.” Brown said there was almost a sense of poetic justice that Stargell would score what proved to be the winning run on Pagan’s double. “I thought it was payback for him being such a class guy,” he said.

For Clemente, the ’71 Series was vindication of sorts, as he finally received the accolades he felt he had been unjustly denied for well over a decade. He hit a blistering .414 with two doubles, a triple, two home runs and four RBIs and walked away with the Series’ Most Valuable Player award. He showed his skills off the field as well. King, the Pirates’ broadcaster, recalled being in a Baltimore hotel elevator with his wife the night before the series opener and seeing Stargell and Clemente together in the same elevator. “Roberto says, ‘Willie, when we get off here, you go to your room if you have to, but come over to my room—I want to talk to you.’” A year or so later, King asked Stargell about that incident and he said Clemente told him that his first time in the World Series, in 1960, he was young and the flurry of excitement and all the publicity made the pressure seem more extreme to the point where it wasn’t the same sort of a game. Clemente told Stargell he had trouble handling that, and although he got a hit in every game, he didn’t think he performed particularly well. He told Stargell not to try to do too much and that because he’d been through it before, he would carry the load. “Well, Willie didn’t have a good World Series that year because he was hurt,” King said. “But Stargell really appreciated that a guy like Clemente would take the time to discuss that with him. And he got that big hit and scored the winning run in Game 7.”

Although Stargell fared poorly in the postseason, he had figured he was in a good position to take home an award of his own—the National League’s Most Valuable Player award. He had carried the club through the first half of the season with power numbers of record proportions, and finished his first full year at Three Rivers Stadium with an eye-popping line of 48 home runs, 125 RBIs, 104 runs scored and a .295 batting average. But when the ballots were counted, the Cardinals’ Joe Torre was voted the league’s top player and Stargell was the runner-up. Torre, who received 21 first-place votes to just three for Stargell, certainly had MVP-worthy numbers, as he smacked 24 home runs and led the league in three offensive categories—hits (230), average (.363) and RBIs (137). But Stargell’s Bucs finished ahead of the Cardinals in the NL East and the Pirates slugger was surprised he didn’t win it. “I feel I deserved it,” he told a reporter after the voting. “I’m basing my thoughts on the fact that I did everything I set out to do and we won the World Series.” Stargell harkened back to the previous season when Billy Williams, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench all enjoyed standout seasons, but Bench earned the MVP award because many believed he played the key role in leading the Reds to the NL West title. “Now everybody says if the player does well day in and day out, he deserves it,” Stargell said. “I was under the impression that if a fellow had a big year and his team got into the division playoffs, he would win the MVP. I thought I had the credentials.”⁶⁴

Stargell said he believed that if hadn’t hurt his knee that season he could have eclipsed Ruth and Maris and hit more than 61 home runs, given that he already had 30—and 87 RBIs—in the season’s first 76 games. “I was seeing the ball very well,” he said later. “But my knee got to the point where I couldn’t stand all the way up on it. I couldn’t put any pressure on it at all. I probably struck out a hundred times in the second half of the season.”⁶⁵

Stargell believed his poor post-season play cost him the MVP, but traditionally votes are submitted before such play begins. In any event, he didn’t let the snub darken his mood, for he had done what he’d always wanted to do—play for a World Series winner. And the way the Pirates were built, many believed it might not be their last.