Felipe Alou's journey was eventful ... and historic

The old routine was familiar.

Old Friend and Colleague writes a book. OF&C sends you a copy, knowing you may or may not actually open it. OF&C plans to return in a few weeks for request of favorable review in your publication.

Check, check, and check.

But this time the old routine had a weird kink. This time, the review is an honest and genuine thumbs-up. Felipe Alou’s autobiography — “Alou: My Baseball Journey” — was penned with OF&C Peter Kerasotis and is certainly more than originally expected.

“Many people, including my wife and children, they believed I had a story to tell,” the 82-year-old Alou said by phone from his Boynton Beach home this past week. “It’s not a complete baseball book. I used to tell people, ‘if I write a book, it has to be all or nothing.’ ”

Alou quickly righted himself with a chuckle.

“Actually,” he said, “it’s really not all. I don’t believe there’s a man or woman alive who would tell everything. There are some things you don’t share with anybody, only God.”

There’s the expected assortment of tales from Alou’s 19 seasons as a professional ballplayer (17 in the majors) to his 14 seasons as manager of the Expos and Giants, spanning from the mid-’50s to the early 21st century — along with seeing two brothers, Jesus and Matty, join him with the Giants, he was teammates with Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and later managed his son Moises.

But there’s also this: On opening day this season, of the 877 big-league players on MLB rosters (including the inactive players), 254 were born outside the 50 United States. The biggest representation (84), not surprisingly, belongs to the Dominican Republic, the tiny Caribbean island nation that has been exporting baseball-talent for 60-plus years.

Felipe Alou was the first.

In 1956, the Giants signed him for $200, and though Alou’s parents were reluctant to see him leave the University of Santo Domingo during his freshman year, the $200 would go a very long way in their poor homeland.

The stories of Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball — and the stories of many others who soon followed his trail — are well known. Alou and his Latin cohorts had an added hurdle — language.

Alou, with Kerasotis, a former sports columnist at Florida Today in Brevard County, gracefully include geo-political elements, deeply discussing the early issues with Alou’s new homeland (segregation, namely) and those in his native Dominican (the crippling poverty and hopelessness under the 1930-61 rule of dictator Rafael Trujillo).

Many others of Alou’s generation came and left. He wonders now how many other Felipe Alous, Juan Marichals and Manny Motas may have had their baseball talents overwhelmed by an inability to adapt and survive.

“I was a college student, a freshman. I had that little bit of advantage over most of the Dominican players of that era,” Alou said. “I was a little advanced. I’d heard about the U.S. and segregation. I was fortunate. But there were some other men, other boys, who went home and never came back.

“The different food. The language. The race problems. The travel. It was very difficult.”

Daytona Beach makes a couple of appearances in Alou’s book, including one early-career scene involving the young outfielder, the Florida State League batting race, and this newspaper.

Late in the 1956 FSL season, Alou was with the Giants’ Cocoa affiliate, and was an hour up the road to play the Indians’ FSL affiliate, the Daytona Beach Islanders.

“I got a newspaper and began deciphering names and numbers,” he writes in the book. “I saw that a Daytona Beach Islanders player named Don Dillard had wrestled the batting title away from me the night before.”

That night, Alou writes, he went 5-for-6 to surpass Dillard and finished with a league-leading .380 average, which helped launch him on a quick rise through the Giants’ system to San Francisco in 1958.

In talking about his work with Alou, Kerasotis marvels at his subject’s memory of all details, big and small. Details such as the batting race with Dillard, and the numbers involved, always check out upon research, he says.

So while chatting with Alou last week, I assumed there would be other clear memories of Daytona Beach, since he’d spent several springs here in the 1970s. He was the longtime manager of the Expos’ FSL team in West Palm Beach, and the entire Montreal organization spent spring training here from 1973-81.

“We used to train on the fields right next to the airport,” he said, recalling the long-ago, multi-field complex immediately north of the airport that housed the minor-league operation.

Forget the baseball, what about the fishing? One theme weaving in and out of the Alou book is his deep love of the rod-and-reel and the chase for fish. Here, too, his memory is gill-sharp.

“Oh yeah, I did a lot of fishing there,” he said. “I fished in the surf and fished some from the bridges on the Intracoastal. Bluefish, some trout, you name it. You could sometimes catch pompano in the surf.”

He didn’t just fish for the sport of it. He was a culinary fan.

“There was a place in Daytona I used to love, called B&B,” he said of the former B&B Seafood beachside on ISB. “They had a little restaurant, but also a fish market. Some of the best fish I’d ever eaten, especially the grouper. I’d eat dinner, then I’d buy some fish to take back to the apartment.”

Today, Felipe Alou keeps a boat at a marina near the Boynton Inlet and takes advantage of that every chance he gets. A knee replacement is likely in his near future — “The old injuries, as you get older, they start to wake up again.”

He went to spring training last month in Arizona and remains a Giants’ consultant, which keeps his head in the game. He says he could’ve never imagined the wave of Dominican talent that would eventually follow him here, but is thrilled about it.

“The baseball people, they got smart,” he said last week. “They send American coaches to the Latin American baseball academies to mingle with the coaches and players. They teach English in the academies. It’s an incredible movement.”

And Felipe Alou made the first move.

Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com