While the passing of Baseball Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda at 86 last week didn’t cause much of a stir around here, we’re betting some long-time St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves fans, the youngest now in their mid-60s like me, stopped eating their oatmeal and rubbing on Icy Hot long enough to have a moment of silence.
1969 was a big year for me and guys my age, an interesting year to turn 10. Vietnam. Apollo 11 and man landing on the moon. Sesame Street. Woodstock. And just when a guy like me in South Carolina’s backwoods had figured out there were other big towns besides Atlanta and that those towns also had baseball teams, suddenly a whole other country (Canada) was in the mix, thanks to the newborn Montreal Expos.
1969 was a lot to deal with.
Orlando Cepeda was no small part of the mix. You would think a Puerto Rican first baseman would have no real lasting impact on a kid from Dillon County.
You would be wrong.
Just the year before, me and fellow 9-year-old Jay Calhoun, the best pure pool shooter I’d ever seen and still have ever seen, had begun to understand geography and baseball on a much larger scale. Mr. Rozier, our school principal and once a boy himself, got us out of class, swore us to secrecy, and let us watch some of the 1968 World Series on a black-and-white set behind the curtain on the stage of the auditorium/cafeteria at Lake View Elementary.
God rest his wonderful soul.
By then, despite a few of our visits to his office after recess hijinks, he understood we were relatively bright boys — “relatively” being the key word — who loved baseball and were beginning to understand “the world” beyond our county and Six Flags in that far off region called “Georgia.” He also knew we loved Al Kaline and Bob Gibson.
It was an exciting time to be alive.
So by 1969, when the baseball season began, we were dug in. And the nearby Braves, having acquired the 1967 National League MVP Cepeda in the offseason, were poised to make a run for the big prize.
Cepeda was now 31, an “old man” on the Braves roster who’d been starting in the star-spangled outfield for San Francisco since he was 20. His nickname was “Baby Bull.” According to grainy pictures both on the tiny Sylvania and in “The Sporting News,” he was handsome and studly, long and muscularly lean.
For a 10-year-old used to looking at corn and hogs, it was difficult not to love him.
Cepeda and his worsening knees at first. Felix “The Kitten” Milan at second, Sonny Jackson at short and Clete Boyer at The Hot Corner. Rico Carty, Felipe Alou and Hammerin’ Hank across the outfield. Phil Niekro won 23 games and probably would have won the Cy Young if Tom Seaver and the New York Mets hadn’t picked that Summer of ’69 to become immortal.
Our own north Louisiana pitching heroes George Stone and Cecil Upshaw were on that Atlanta team too, something that wouldn’t matter so much to me until we moved to West Monroe in 1973 and there was George Stone of Ruston pitching on my television set, this time for the Mets and this time in a World Series the Oakland mini-dynasty would win.
Years later I would meet a writer who became a friend; he was a boy growing up in the South that summer too. His dad lost his job and the TV went on the fritz and he broke his arm, the Bad Luck Trifecta. The silver lining was that his limited entertainment options involved the radio, Milo Hamilton on the play-by-play and Ernie Johnson on the color, and he sat by the window as the attic fan sucked in a breeze that kept the AC-free home semi-tolerable, and while his arm healed, he listed to Baby Bull hit 22 dingers and knock in 88 as the Braves won the division before losing to the Mets in the first NL Championship Series in baseball’s 100-year history.
Funny what baseball makes you remember.
(And NOT remember. The Braves had traded Joe Torre, their catcher in 1968, to the Cardinals for Cepeda; even I remembered that as Torre would go on to be an NL MVP (in 1971), and I loved the Cardinals. So who caught for the ’69 Braves? Had to look it up: Bob Didier from Hattiesburg, son of the famous scout Mel and nephew of longtime Louisiana college baseball coach Raymond. Mel and Raymond are among the three sets of brothers who are members of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. Life’s a circle …)
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu