Lest We Forget: Orlando Cepeda

We boomers lost another hero from our childhood with the passing last week of Orlando Cepeda. I was talking about this with a colleague at work who recently lost an uncle, a die-hard Giants fan. We commiserated over the fact that the players we followed with awe and reverence are elderly now. And as they shuffle off this mortal coil it makes me think of a couple of lines from the Beatles’ song, “I’m a Loser”:

My tears are falling like rain from the sky.
Is it for her or myself that I cry?

When we were younger, we probably didn’t think of our mortality that much. But as we age, it’s only natural, and these deaths are an increasingly frequent reminder.

Here’s his obit from The New York Times by Richard Goldstein.

While Willie Mays, who died the previous week, was no doubt a star for the Giants when they moved to San Francisco, the “Baby Bull” was the team’s first home grown hero, debuting in 1958 and winning the NL Rookie of the year award.

Cepeda was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals mid-season in 1966 and led them to a World Championship the following year when he was named league MVP. This is the card that sticks out in my mind when I think of him.

Knee problems limited his mobility and he ended his 17-year career — with time also spent with the Braves and A’s (very briefly) — as a DH for the Red Sox and Royals. His final numbers included a .297 batting average, 1,365 RBI, and 379 home runs, which strikes me as low when I look at them.

Cepeda was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1999, voted in by the Veteran’s Committee, which, all due respect, makes me scratch my head just a bit considering he led the league in “black ink” numbers just three times. He was a seven-time All-Star (or 11 if you consider they played two games each year from 1959-1962).

Like many other athletes of color, the Puetro Rico born Cepeda had to deal with racism and xenophobia. (His father Pedro Cepeda, nicknamed “The Bull,” was considered one of the best players of his generation.) Al Dark, the Giants’ manager from 1961-64, was a particular thorn in the collective sides of African-American and Latino players. I’m not going to get into his whole inappropriate narrow-mindedness, but you can read about it here.

Cepeda published three memoirs — My Ups and Downs in Baseball, with Charles Einstein in 1968; High & Inside: Orlando Cepeda’s Story with Bob Markus in 1984; and Baby Bull: From Hard Ball to Hard Time with Herb Fagen in 1998. I find the cover art of High & Inside particularly honest and interesting in that it dealt with his legal problems stemming from drug charges. He was also the subject of The Orlando Cepeda Story, by Bruce Markusen in 2001 as well as a few other, lesser-known (and marketed) titles.