I tend to prefer my baseball books pure, untainted by "larger" themes (as though there were any).I knew that this book, billed as a frank autobiography of Orlando Cepeda, would deal with his conviction for smuggling marijuana. But I am interested purely in his baseball career and was planning not to take much interest in what happened afterwards.
And yet, it must be confessed that Orlando's story of the disgrace that he suffered among his fellow Puerto Ricans after his arrest and conviction and how Buddhism helped him to overcome his difficulties and make peace with the world and find his way back into major league baseball was a moving one. Especially touching is the story of his reunion with a son sired out of wedlock.
But the story of his personal experience with weed is uncomfortably vague. He acknowledges having smoked it as a youth in Puerto Rico and that he picked up the habit again in 1965, while still with the Giants, to relieve stress after a particularly bad run-in with The Evil One, Manager Herman Franks.
Yet Orlando appears to have become as happy as a clam after having been traded to the Cardinals in 1966, and this is certainly reflected in his performance while with the Cardinals and in the championship seasons that "El Birdos" compiled with him on the roster.
So with the stress gone, did he continue to smoke pot as a Cardinal? And with the teams that he played on afterwards? How did this affect his performance at game time? Orlando simply does not tell us.
Still, it's "Baseball Forever", and baseball purists will be glad to know that most of this book is set in between the foul lines. This is a familiar-sounding story of a youngster who grew up in poverty, despite having been born the son of Puerto Rico's most celebrated ballplayer, the great Perucho Cepeda. Perucho was known as "The Bull", and Orlando's nickname, which is the title of this book, was naturally passed onto him.
He used his natural ability (presumably also inherited from his father) and effort to overcome prejudice in the United States and build a storybook career.
The year-by-year recapitulation of his performance and that of the teams he played on is interesting but unremarkable and gives the reader a chance to reacquaint himself with the players from that era. What I primarily wanted to hear was Orlando's version of his alleged refusal to move from first base to left field in order to enable the Giants to get both his big bat and that of Willie McCovey into the lineup in a way which would not sacrifice too much defense (McCovey was not mobile enough to play left field effectively).
It is remarkable that a team laden with as much talent as the San Francisco Giants of the 1950's and 1960's won only one National League pennant, and many blame this on Cha-Cha's alleged refusal to make the switch to left.
In interviews conducted by Steve Bitker for his book, "The Giants of `58", Herman Franks repeats this charge, and Orlando sidesteps it. But even Bill Rigney, revered by Orlando as a father figure, states that he thinks that the Giants would have won the pennant in 1959 (McCovey's Rookie of the Year season) if Orlando would have been more cooperative.
Again, Orlando is uncomfortably vague in dealing with this issue, stating only that by 1966, he was ready to try to become the best left-fielder in baseball but that Herman Franks was already set on getting rid of him. But McCovey and Cepeda had played together for six years before 1966 (Cepeda was hurt for virtually all of 1965). What of those years?
The statistical comparisons from those years of how often Orlando played the outfield and of McCovey's at-bats and Orlando's might provide a slightly better defense of Orlando than he does of himself.
After 1959, 1962 seems to be the only year in which McCovey, while healthy, might have been deprived of at-bats because of Orlando's possible resistance to playing left field. Yet the Giants won the pennant that year and so this resistance appears not to have cost them.
But while McCovey does not appear to have been deprived of at-bats during those other years, he mostly played left field in 1963 and 1964, and played it poorly, while Cepeda was anchoring first. Would a switch have made enough of a difference to mean a Giants pennant? The statistics show that Orlando played creditably in left field in 1960 and 1961.
Cepeda also responds to Herman Franks's charge that he was a poor clutch hitter by pointing to his 553 RBI's garnered over his first five seasons. It's an astounding number, but it includes a monstrous 1961 season in which Orlando produced 142 "ribbies", which staggers the five-year total somewhat. From 1958 to 1960, he averaged slightly under 100 RBI's a season.
100 RBI's is usually a sterling number, but RBI's, by themselves, do not a clutch hitter make. Runs batted in during the early stages of a close game might make a difference later but are not the stuff that heroes are made of.
And runs produced when one's team is hopelessly ahead or behind are meaningless. But situational statistics weren't kept in Orlando's day so the case for him having been a good or a bad "clutch" hitter can only be made through anecdotal evidence, which is lacking in both the Cepeda and Franks accounts.
So to this day, it remains unresolved whether Orlando's complaints about being under-appreciated are valid - or just a lot of Baby Bull.