A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (36 page)

The "rivalry" between the Yankees and Red Sox
was non-existent in 1962, at least from the Yankees' standpoint. It
had existed in fits and starts since the sale of Babe Ruth and
other stars to New York in 1920. It certainly had reached fever
pitch in 1949, when Williams and Joe DiMaggio were at the height of
their powers, pushing their respective teams in a tight,
wire-to-wire pennant race. In later years, the rivalry more
resembled the "Troubles" in Ireland, with New York symbolizing
Great Britain, Boston the IRA, with similar results. Even that
comparison lacked oomph in '62.

Kansas City (72-90) finished 24 games back.
They were mere cannon fodder for Yankee guns, winning five of 18
games against New York. Their star was a former Yankee, Norm
Siebern, who hit .308 with 25 home runs and 117 runs batted in.

Washington - "first in war, first in peace,
and last in the American League" - lived up to that moniker, going
3-15 in heat-to-head competition with New York en route to a
desultory 60-101 record, 35 1/2 games back. 10
^th
place
was their normal destiny. However, this was a cruel joke on what
was left of the baseball fandom in the District of Columbia. These
were not the old Senators. These were the expansion Senators. After
JFK threw out the first ball at the Presidential Opener, the first
three Senators struck out. Their only bright spot was two straight
shutout wins over Cleveland, nailing the coffin on the Indians'
chances in August. That prompted Indians GM Gabe Paul to remark,
"I've never seen such a sudden and complete collapse. Hitting,
winning and losing are contagious." In September the Senators
called up Jack Kennedy, a rookie shortstop who even shared the
President's birthday and "responded with vigor," wrote Bill Wise.
The only reason to come out to Griffith Stadium was outfielder
Chuck Hinton (.310) and journeyman center fielder Jimmy Piersall,
who responded to boos by "nose snubbing" the fans. It was
emblematic of the Broadway musical that was still touring.
Damn
Yankees
proffered the notion that only a deal with the devil
could orchestrate victory for the Senators.

The "cruel joke" played on Washington
manifested itself half a continent away, in Bloomington, Minnesota.
The old Senators were now the Minnesota Twins. After years of last
place finishes, the Twins were now a powerhouse - and would remain
one for the rest of the decade, more or less . . . using players
developed when the club was in Washington prior to the 1961 move
west. Harmon "Killer" Killebrew was one of the most dangerous
sluggers the game had ever known, slugging 48 homers and driving in
126 runs. Both statistics eclipsed those of either Mantle or
Maris.

In seven seasons with the old Senators,
Cuban-born curveball artist Camilo Pasqual had gone 57-84. At age
29 in 1962, backed by a solid club, he dominated, winning 20 games
while leading the league in strikeouts with 206. Catcher Earl
Battey dropped out of UCLA to pursue baseball, and at age 28 was an
All-Star. Rich Rollins hit .298. Manager Sam Mele also featured
18-game winner Jim Kaat, ex-Yankee prospect Vic Power (.290), and
power-hitting outfielder Bob Allison (102 RBIs). Their 91-71
record, good for second place, was five games back of New York.
Four of those five games came in head-to-head competition with the
Yankees, who bested them 11 wins to seven defeats. It would be this
Twins team, largely comprised of players on their 1962 roster, who
would break up the Yankees' dynasty three years later, but they
were still not ready for prime time.

Between 1959 and 1962, there were two
All-Star Game played each of those seasons. The first in 1962 was
played at Griffith Stadium in Washington. 45,479, including
Kennedy, came out and were thrilled by Los Angeles's Maury Wills,
who was not allowed in the stadium by a security guard who said,
"He doesn't look like a ballplayer." Once inside, Wills stole the
show, stealing two bases to key the National League's 3-1 win. The
second game was held at Chicago's Wrigley Field. Leon Wagner of the
Angels and Rocky Colavito of the Tigers powered the American League
to a 9-4 triumph, which turned out to be their last until 1971.
They would keep losing after that until finally turning things
around beginning in 1983.

While the Twins were the closest
competition, at least in the final standings, the surprise
challenger to the Yankees' throne was an unlikely group of
upstarts, playboys, party animals and evangelical Christians in Los
Angeles. Only in Hollywood.

A midsummer's dream

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost than
never to have loved at all."

- Lord Alfred Tennyson

On May 4, 1962, the Sunset Strip of Los
Angeles was hopping with Mexican festivities for Cinco de Mayo. Bo
Belinsky, a rookie left-handed pitcher for the second-year Angels,
was scheduled to pitch the next night. Never one to favor rest and
preparation when he could make the scene, Bo ventured to the strip
where he met a lovely brunette. They spent the evening at her pad.
Bo departed with dawn’s early light, but this encounter inspired
him. He asked for her phone number and meant it.

“I’ll see you again,” she assured him. Bo
told her he was leaving tickets for that night’s game against
Baltimore and insisted she make it, because “You’re my lucky
charm.”

“I never saw her again,” Bo told writer Pat
Jordan in 1972. “It was like she was my lucky charm and once she
was gone that was the end of that.”

Eventually, maybe, but first Bo Belinsky was
about to skyrocket to the heights of Hollywood fame and glory. That
evening he threw a no-hit, no-run game against his old team, the
Baltimore Orioles.

1962 was not supposed to be
a memorable year for the Los Angeles Angels. An expansion team in
1961, the Angels were a creditable 70-91 in their first year,
playing at dilapidated Wrigley Field in south-central L.A., at the
corner of 42
^nd
Place and Avalon Boulevard. In '62, they rented
Dodger Stadium from Walter O'Malley, who "nickel and dimed" them
with surcharges on just about everything, as well as relegating
their ticket booth next to a storage shed in a remote part of the
stadium. The Dodgers were the toasts of Hollywood. The Angels, a
combination of cast-offs and kids, were tenants who played before
family and friends. The first Angel to receive attention was
Belinsky. The Angels thought he would attract female fans (he did).
Another rookie, Dean Chance, was an emerging star, winning 14
games. Former Giant Leon "Daddy Wags" Wagner hit 37 home runs and
knocked in 107 runs.

Belinsky started the year living in Ernie's
House of Surface with Laker wildman "Hot Rod" Hundley, but
apparently Bo's consumption of women and alcohol was too much even
for the Rodster. Belinsky then moved his act to the Hollywood
Hills, where some adoring girl almost killed herself trying to
climb a tree into his bedroom window. When Bo was not wining and
dining Tina Louise and Ann-Margret, he was winning games. By
August, an early-morning run-in with the L.A.P.D. and escapades
with the Hollywood crowd had slowed his win total down, but the man
had put the club on the map.

On July 4, Los Angeles was in first place in
the American League. Bill Rigney and Fred Haney were shrewd
baseball men. Rig had been schooled under Leo Durocher in New York.
Haney had developed the great Milwaukee Braves' pennant winners of
1957-58. The Angels played them tough, finally succumbing in the
dog days of late August and September. Their 86-76 record earned
Rigney Manager of the Year honors. Haney was named Executive of the
Year. Chance was the best rookie pitcher in the game. Movie stars
like Carey Grant and Doris Day cheered them on.

“
Chance was the best
pitcher I ever managed,” Rigney said. “He was a farmboy who started
hanging out with Bo and the Hollywood crowd. Oh, what a pistol
those two were! But he was the best chucker from the right I ever
saw, ” which was an amazing statement.

What about Belinsky?

“
Oh my,” said Rigney, who
had a shock of white hair. “He’s the reason I had white hair.”
Behind his back, Belinsky called him "the White Rat.”

“
He also looked like a cab
driving down the street with the doors open,” recalled Bo of
Rigney’s rather oversized ears.

“
Working for Gene Autry,
managing Bo Belinsky, and dealing with Hollywood,” Rig said of the
1962 season, “made that the most interesting year of my
career.”

The story of Bo and the Angels in their
early years in Los Angeles is so interesting because the team’s
character was utterly different from what modern fans came to know
about the team in Anaheim. It was night and day. In 1962 they were
owned by "the Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, who was old Hollywood
all the way. Belinsky had garnered his “15 minutes of fame” holding
out for the enormous sum of $6,500. Writer Bud Furillo captured
some of Bo’s choice comments about women, sex and hustling pool on
a slow news day.

Fred Haney tired of negotiating with Bo over
the phone. He sensed that if he were brought out to Palm Springs,
it would create needed publicity in the shadow of the mighty
Dodgers. He was right.

“He was the greatest thing to ever happen to
us,” said publicity director Irv Kaze. Kaze showed up at the
airport and, without having to ask, immediately recognized
Belinsky, oozing charisma in an open-collared shirt, sportscoat,
long, slick hair, and “the biggest pair of sunglasses you’ve ever
seen.”

“Damn,” said Bo when Kaze introduced
himself, “I expected Autry.”

Bo was immediately driven to the Palm
Springs Desert Inn, where Kaze arranged for a poolside press
conference complete with a full bar and strategically placed
bikini-clad girls lounging about. For a couple of hours Bo regaled
them with stories of his pool-hustling exploits, which he made out
to sound like “Minnesota Fats.”

His sexual descriptions were explicit.
Nobody had ever heard anything like this guy, and in reality nobody
has ever heard anything like it since. As a “kiss and tell” artist
Belinsky put Jose Canseco, Derek Jeter, even Joe Namath to shame.
The bizarre poolside scene; part carnival act, part “true
confessions,” part striptease show, was “the greatest thing I’d
ever seen,” recalled Kaze. All of this was over between 1,000 and
1,500 1962 dollars for an unproven career minor leaguer who said he
would not sign “unless Autry begged me personally.”

For three days Belinsky never suited up or
came close to “training” for baseball, preferring instead to seek
out those bikini-clad “chickies” by day and night. Finally Haney
called him and said, “this is enough.” A gentlemen’s agreement to
re-negotiate if he made the club and proved himself was hammered
out.

“Don Hoak when he was managing in the Winter
Leagues down in Latin America once held up his finger and thumb
just this far apart,” Bo said years later. “ ‘Boys,’ he said.
‘There’s only this much difference separating you from ‘big league
p---y!’ ”

Thus did Bo have his motivation. Out of
shape, and continually distracted by the Palm Springs “scenery,” Bo
inspired nobody on the mound, however. Rigney wanted to ship him
out. Haney tried to trade him back to the Baltimore organization,
where he had been before getting plucked in the expansion draft.
They had seen all of Bo’s act they could handle.

While in the Oriole chain he had to be snuck
out of one town when an underage girl whose mother was, uh,
“seeing” the chief of detectives, threatened rape if he not marry
her.

Earl Weaver watched in despair when Bo and
Joe Pepitone would somehow find hot nightspots in Aberdeen. In
Miami Bo hooked up with a married woman. Later he found himself
drinking with her husband, an Army general, and in a moment of
supreme honesty owned up to being the guy she had left with,
offering a toast with the statement, “we sure had a helluva time
with your money.” He had gone AWOL in Mexico. Oriole pitchers Steve
Dalkowski, Steve Barber and Bo were fined by Baltimore manager Paul
Richards for drilling holes in Belinsky’s hotel room to sneak a
peak at the reigning Miss Universe, staying next door.

Like Rod Steiger rejecting
Sidney Poitier’s offer of “pity” in
The
Heat of the Night
, the Orioles said, “No,
thank you,” to Haney's offer to take back Bo.

Autry stepped in and, in a rare act of
ownership control, informed his employees that Bo was to make the
squad, at least for the first few weeks of the regular season. His
hope was that the Spring Training publicity might sell a few
tickets. Rig was none too pleased but carried out the orders. Then
injuries depleted his rotation. On April 16 Bo was given an
emergency start against Kansas City at Dodger Stadium.

Given the news of his start the next day, Bo
went out to the Sunset Strip, made “friends,” and finally fell
asleep at four or five. “Sex always relaxed me, nobody ever died
from it,” Bo told sportswriter Maury Allen in 1972.

In the locker room Rigney handed him the
game ball and said simply, “Win or be gone.” Bo won 3-2. It earned
him a second start, which turned out to be a brilliant 3-0 shutout
against Washington. When he won in his next start, the publicity
was enormous, and of a national character. Furillo’s original story
had made the wire services. His Palm Springs quotes received major
attention. Suddenly Bo was the subject of every media report. He
was invited to major Hollywood parties. Actresses and starlets were
calling him.

One of Bo’s favorite Sunset Strip haunts was
the famed Whisky-a-Go-Go, which gave rise to such 1960s L.A. acts
as The Doors, The Byrds, Jan and Dean, and Jefferson Starship,
among many others. Belinsky once played pool with Jim Morrison of
The Doors and rubbed elbows with numerous superstars, usually
before they were famous.