Orlando Cepeda, the second Puerto Rican native to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and one of the leading sluggers in the game at the time, from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, died on Friday. He is 86 years old.
His death was announced by the San Francisco Giants. The organization did not say where he died.
Playing for 17 seasons in the major leagues, mostly at first base but also in the outfield and, at the end of his career, as a designated hitter, Cepeda hit 379 home runs, had 2,351 hits, drove in 1,365 runs and had a career. .297 batting average.
He was a unanimous choice as the National League rookie of the year with the Giants in 1958, his first season in San Francisco. He was also the unanimous choice as the league’s most valuable player in 1967, the year he helped lead the St. Louis Cardinals for the World Series championship. He hit at least .300 in nine seasons and played in nine All-Star Games.
Cepeda’s father, Pedro, known as the Bull for his strength, was a professional baseball player, especially a shortstop, who was called the Babe Ruth of Puerto Rico. Orlando Cepeda, a 6-foot-2-inch, 210-pound right-handed power hitter, is known as Baby Bull.
While pitching in the Giants’ farm system, Juan Marichal, a future Hall of Famer from the Dominican Republic, was inspired by Cepeda and his fellow Latino players on the Giants.
“I will see Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou and Ruben Gomez on television,” Marichal told The Associated Press. “I’m starting to learn what the major league is about, and I hope that one day I can be one of them.”
Marichal, who joined the Giants in 1960, said Cepeda “was the type of player who was fearless, the type of player you wanted to play behind you.”
But Cepeda’s reputation has been tarnished a year after his playing days ended.
He was arrested in San Juan in December 1975 for his role in smuggling marijuana from Colombia and spent 10 months in federal prison.
The Baseball Writers Association of America, which may have considered a prison sentence, denied him induction into the Hall of Fame in 15 years of election. It wasn’t until 1999, and a vote by the Veterans Committee, that Cepeda came to Cooperstown.
Cepeda has been honored in Puerto Rico almost like Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder and the first Commonwealth Hall of Famer, who died in a plane crash in 1972 while he was sending earthquake relief supplies to Nicaragua.
But Cepeda’s drug addiction, in contrast to Clemente’s altruism, made him an outcast at home after his release from prison.
“When you play baseball, you have your name and your money and you feel like a bullet,” Cepeda told Sports Illustrated on his way into the Hall of Fame. “You forget who you are. Especially in Latin countries, they make you feel like God. I know that one mistake, in two seconds, can create a seemingly eternal disaster.
Orlando Cepeda was born in Ponce, PR, on September 17, 1937. His father, although a baseball hero in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean, was a victim of major league color barriers. He died in 1955, before his son played his first game in the Giants farm system.
Cepeda hit .312 with 25 home runs for the 1958 Giants to win rookie-of-the-year honors. Three years later, he led the league in home runs, with 46, and walks batted in, with 142, as part of a slugging lineup that also included Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Felipe Alou. Cepeda helped push the Giants to their first pennant in San Francisco in 1962, but they were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series.
Due to a knee injury, Cepeda was traded to the Cardinals early in the 1966 season for pitcher Ray Sadecki. The following year, he hit a career-high .325 and led the National League in runs batted in, with 111, in taking MVP honors. The Cardinals then defeated the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.
Cepeda played on the Cardinals’ winning 1968 team, and later with the Atlanta Braves, Oakland Athletics and Red Sox. He retired in 1974, after one season with the Kansas City Royals.
He moved to Southern California in the mid-1980s, then converted to Buddhism as he sought to return to the world of baseball. “From the moment I entered the temple, it changed my life,” he told the AP in 1993. “It taught me to take responsibility for my actions, not to blame others.”
Cepeda returned to the San Francisco area in 1987. He scouted for the Giants in 1988 and then became a member of the public relations department, speaking to young people over the years about drug and alcohol abuse.
But trouble came again in May 2007, when Cepeda was pulled over for speeding in Solano County, north of San Francisco. Police reported finding cocaine, marijuana and a hypodermic needle in the car, but he pleaded no contest to a charge of possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, and was fined $100.
The district attorney, David Paulson, fired the prosecutor who handled the case hours before the prosecutor was scheduled to withdraw, saying the decision to drop the felony cocaine charge suggested that Cepeda had received favorable treatment because of his celebrity status.
Cepeda held the title of community ambassador in the Raksasa organization at the time of his death. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
For all the years he was shunned in Puerto Rico, Cepeda won redemption when he was elected to the Hall of Fame. The government of Puerto Rico brought him back for a parade in his honor. It starts at the San Juan airport, where he was detained 24 years earlier, and goes through Old San Juan through the streets lined with people.
The Giants retired the No. 30 two weeks before entering the Hall of Fame. In September 2008, they honored him with a bronze statue outside the stadium, AT&T Park (now Oracle Park). It sits next to a statue that pays tribute to Mays, McCovey, Marichal and pitcher Gaylord Perry. After all the trouble, Cepeda was very happy.
“When things like that happen to you,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle at the unveiling of his statue, “that’s when I say, ‘Orlando, you’re a lucky guy.’
