Thank You, Masked Man

What Juan Marichal’s bat couldn’t do, the fury of two blood clots did.

There lay the toughest Los Angeles Dodger catcher two weeks ago, the sudden victim of two strokes, barely able to speak, still trying to call the game.

“I’m done,” John Roseboro mumbled to his wife and daughter. “I’m done.”

Three years with a failing heart had sapped his strength. Three years of seclusion in his basement had flat-lined his perspective. This latest squealing ride to Cedars-Sinai had stolen his will.

Once the emotional core of a Dodger team that was beloved by millions, John Roseboro, 69, had quit, surrounded by a cheering section that numbered two.

“He wanted to leave us,” said his wife, Barbara Fouch-Roseboro. “This was the end.”

Then it wasn’t.

Something blocked the catcher’s path.

The doctors say it was science. His family believes it was 1960s Dodger chemistry.

Those teammates from whom he had hidden in embarrassment over his feebleness were contacted by a stubborn wife who decided her husband needed their love.

And so they emerged from the shadows with a dugout full of it.

“It was everybody he had once stood up for, standing up for him,” Barbara said.

It was Peter O’Malley sending prayers over a cell phone. It was Tommy Davis sending messages through a nurse’s station. It was Maury Wills on one line, Sandy Koufax on the other.

It was thoughts and strength from some of this franchise’s most glorious moments.

And even one of their darkest.

John Roseboro’s cry for help eventually spanned a continent, reaching a phone in the Dominican Republic.

“Please tell John to hang on,” Juan Marichal said. “Please tell him I’m praying for him.”

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Today John Roseboro is still hospitalized, still suffering from a failing heart and stroke-impeded speech.

But his condition is stable. And after three years of hiding, he is again among friends.

“An amazing thing, against the odds, he’s still hanging in there,” Barbara said between calls on her cell phone in the hospital cafeteria. “And I think I know why.”

Koufax sent a quip:

“Tell John he didn’t make much sense even before the stroke.”

Wills sent a memory:

“Daryl Spencer, a hard-nosed player, trying to score on a fly ball, John didn’t just tag him, he picked him up and carried him over to the dugout and dropped him inside.”

Marichal sent a bombshell:

“What John did for me, I will never forget.”

It was supposed to be the other way around.

What Marichal did to Roseboro at Candlestick Park on Aug. 22, 1965, was something that Roseboro was never supposed to forget.

Irritated that Marichal had brushed back two of his fellow Dodger hitters that day, Roseboro retaliated while Marichal was batting.

After catching an inside fastball from Koufax, he directed his return throw near Marichal’s face, allegedly nicking his ear while the ball whizzed past his nose.

Marichal spun and began beating Roseboro’s head with the bat, raising a giant lump and causing a two-inch gash from which blood poured down his face.

It was the most violent incident in Dodger history and the most heated moment of one of baseball’s best rivalries.

It was also the defining moment of Roseboro’s career.

But for reasons you’d never imagine.

Seventeen years later, after failing to be elected to the Hall of Fame in his first two years of eligibility, Marichal was worried that voters were biased against him because of the incident.

So he phoned Roseboro, who had barely spoken to him since that game.

According to Roseboro’s wife, the conversation went like this.

“John, are you still mad?”

“No.”

“John, I need your help.”

Marichal wanted Roseboro to publicly forgive him, hopefully convincing voters that he should be allowed into the Hall of Fame.

“John couldn’t see any reason not to forgive,” Barbara said. “He wanted the pain of that day to go away.”

Roseboro not only agreed, he flew to the Dominican Republic to play in Marichal’s golf tournament and show the baseball world that they were friends.

A couple of months later, in 1983, Marichal phoned again.

This time, he was crying.

“He had just been elected to the Hall of Fame, and all he could say was, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ ” Barbara said.

Reached by phone about Roseboro’s illness last week, Marichal’s voice broke again.

“A wonderful, wonderful man,” he said. “I have long ago forgiven him, and I really hope he has truly forgiven me.”

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In a Dodger culture that once dubbed dour Burt Hooton as “Happy,” and gentle Orel Hershiser as “Bulldog,” it was only fitting that John Roseboro was known as “Gabby.”

He spoke very little. He was never really heard.

“John was lost in the shuffle,” Wills said.

Playing for the Dodgers from 1957 through ‘67, Roseboro spent some of their flashiest seasons gratefully hidden by a mask.

He made three All-Star teams for the Dodgers, but their most renowned position player during that time was Wills.

Roseboro had two game-winning hits in two World Series triumphs, but the most valuable player of both series was Koufax.

“Rosie never got the acclaim,” Wills said. “But then, he never wanted it.”

It’s coming now, thick and deep, like that three-run homer against Whitey Ford that set the Dodgers up for a four-game sweep of the New York Yankees in 1963.

So you think Mike Piazza was Los Angeles’ greatest catcher?

“To me, John Roseboro was the catcher,” Koufax said. “With him out there, I felt like I was never alone.”

Koufax recalled a time when he wanted to go against a scouting report and throw a certain pitch, the sort of unexpected pitch that led to his greatness.

But he didn’t have enough confidence to throw it if Roseboro called for something else.

“If I had to shake my head to get to it, I wasn’t throwing it,” he said. “But then I looked in, and John’s hands came down, and there it was, that pitch, and I thought, ‘Wow, he knows me.’ ”

And to those who think more celebrated catchers such as Steve Yeager and Mike Scioscia were Los Angeles’ toughest?

“Nobody was tougher than Rosie, because if Don [Drysdale] didn’t take care of you, Rosie would,” Wills said.

He remembers hearing Roseboro actually plotting to hit Marichal with a return throw during the infamous Giant game.

“But then at the last moment, he decided he couldn’t do it, and just buzzed him,” Wills said. “But he was a guy who always had your back.”

Yet when Roseboro needed to somebody to watch his back? He was too proud to ask.

So as his health began declining several years ago, so did his visibility.

For a couple of seasons in the mid-1990s, he worked for the National League as an umpire evaluator. But as a heart condition and prostate cancer softened his body, he was embarrassed to be seen.

“He would go to the games, sit down the line on the loge level, and not look or talk to anybody,” Wills said. “People would shout his name and he would ignore them.

“I finally had to come down and get in his face and say, ‘Look, it’s me, let’s talk.’ ”

They talked on that day, but few others.

“When I left him sitting there, he became motionless again, staring straight ahead,” Wills said. “I know what it’s like when you don’t want anybody to see you. I’ve been there. And he was like that.”

When Roseboro was put on a heart transplant waiting list in 1999, only to be taken off the list when his prostate cancer returned, he went into full hiding.

His haven became a windowless basement of his Bel-Air home, a room draped with Dodger memorabilia.

There are framed baseball cards and photos on the walls. There are old uniforms draped over a couch.

There are used bats in a giant vase, old gloves in a bookcase, even jerseys and pants and socks in blue duffel bags.

If the Dodgers needed a pinch-hitter, the aging, infirm star was ready.

“He never stopped being a Dodger,” Barbara said.

He would watch the Dodger games from behind his desk, shouting at the television, fuming at the work habits of the modern player.

He was, for a time, employed by a company that paid him to take phone calls from fans.

“He’d be on that phone for a couple of hours every day,” Barbara said. “Even though every call was about Juan Marichal.”

On June 13, Barbara found him sitting on his bed, unable to speak.

For the 51st time since 1988, she rushed him to the emergency room.

But as she later learned, for the first time, an era of Dodger baseball came with her.

“People use the word ‘family,’ but I think of it more as ‘friends,’ ” O’Malley said. “And friends lean on each other in hard times.”

There is talk these days that the current Dodgers, with their great pitching and smart hitting, are reminiscent of those 1960s Dodgers.

It’s going to take more than that.

“Whatever you write, please write that I love John Roseboro,” Tommy Davis said. “We all do.”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

*--* There’s a Catch A look at some of the best Dodger catchers and years spent with the team: Player Years Comment Roy Campanella 1948-57 League’s most valuable player in 1951, 1953 and 1955 for Brooklyn John Roseboro 1957-67 Caught two no-hitters by Sandy Koufax and won two Gold Gloves (1961, 1966) Joe Ferguson 1970-76, 1978-81 His best season came in 1973 when he hit 25 home runs and drove in 88 runs Steve Yeager 1972-85 Shared World Series MVP award with Ron Cey and Pedro Guerrero in 1981 Mike Scioscia 1980-92 Caught the most games in Dodger history (1,395). Was on two championship teams (1981, 1988) Mike Piazza 1992-98 Rookie of the year in 1993 and hit 30 or more home runs four times

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