Felipe Alou’s book tells more than game stories

Jorge L. Ortiz | USA TODAY

Felipe Alou has plenty of captivating stories to tell from the six decades he has spent in pro baseball, including stints playing alongside Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and managing Barry Bonds, three of the top five home run hitters of all time.

However, one theme emerges repeatedly in his new autobiography — Alou: My Baseball Journey, written with author Peter Kerasotis — and it has little to do with the game on the field.

Alou, the first player to reach the major leagues directly from the Dominican Republic, has encountered racism from the time he arrived in the U.S. in 1956 to this day, and the lingering wounds from those episodes permeate his memoir.

Alou’s observations are particularly topical at a time of increased racial tensions in his adopted country, now led by a president who has frequently demeaned immigrants while refusing to denounce white supremacists.

A proud man whose family is regarded as baseball royalty in the Dominican Republic, Alou is initially flummoxed, then aggravated by the countless instances of prejudice he encountered. He seethed over not being allowed to play because of the color of his skin at his first minor league stop, Lake Charles, La., even though he would become the only player from his team to reach the majors.

That experience left a profound impact on Alou, the son of a black Dominican father and a white mother of Spanish ancestry, and he felt the pain anew all the times he was not allowed to eat in the same restaurants as white patrons, and when the Boston Red Sox rushed him in for what he believed was a token managerial interview.

Even now, Alou notices a subtler form of racism when fellow members of his South Florida boat club mistake him for the help and ask him to clean their boats or the fish they’ve caught.

However, Alou’s book is far from merely a screed against racial injustice. He provides fascinating details about his upbringing as the eldest child in an impoverished family that produced the only three-brother outfield in major league history, in 1963, when Felipe, Matty and Jesus Alou played together for the San Francisco Giants.

He also tells the inside story behind the Aaron-Rico Carty scuffle on the Atlanta Braves team plane in 1967, and of the indignant reaction among his Latino teammates when Giants manager Alvin Dark forbade them from speaking Spanish. There’s also a humorous anecdote about gifted but enigmatic Montreal Expos outfielder Ellis Valentine, and a bit about the time when he and brother Matty, then the two leading hitters in the National League while playing for opposite teams, were fined for pregame fraternizing.

Numerous stories from his playing days illustrate the bond formed among Latinos from various teams as they navigated the game’s challenges in a foreign country in the 1950s and ’60s. Alou dedicates a chapter to Roberto Clemente, the Hall of Famer from Puerto Rico who first gave voice to the Latino players and inspired him to speak out when he felt mistreated.

Alou was a three-time All-Star during a 17-year playing career that yielded 2,101 hits, 206 home runs and a .286 batting average, and his distinguished 14-year run as a major league manager featured the league’s best record with the Montreal Expos in 1994 and a 100-win season with the Giants in 2003.

At both stops, he managed his son Moises, a six-time All-Star. As the father of 11 from four marriages, Felipe Alou also endured a devastating tragedy when his first-born died in a pool accident at 16.

All those experiences make for an engrossing book, with baseball as the background and the lessons from a remarkable life going well beyond the game.