Earlier I mentioned that Dark had become involved in contract negotiations. I made $46,000 in 1962, and at Dark's suggestion the Giants wanted to cut my salary by $7,000. I held out while we negotiated with Chub Feeney. Finally I was able to coax a $1,000 raise for 1963 to $47,000-although according to Dark five players were ahead of me in team productivity.

The Look article-"Orlando Cepeda: Can He Slug His Way out of the Doghouse?" suggested that I was expendable for several reasons: (1) I didn't produce the crucial hit often enough; (2) I wasn't a team man; (3) when things went wrong, I blamed everybody but myself; (4) I didn't rebound and take it out on the opposition; (5) and I was a hearty holdout every year.

Public sympathy was in my corner, although most of the writers were not. Dark said my late-season slump did not help the team during the stretch drive when we were making a run for the flag. Everything he said publicly was negative. It was as if I had nothing to do at all with getting into the playoffs or winning the National League pennant.

Horace Stoneham backed me. "You can say no, no, no, all the way," he told writer Roger Williams. "Sure Orlando has been a holdout, but other than that there is no truth to the charges listed." And one sympathetic writer noted the following:

[The Giants'] attitude all along was Orlando was a minus player all season and of little help to the club in its stretch for the flag.
Little mention was made of the games he helped win earlier in the race, yet, without them, the Giants would never have qualified for the playoff with the Dodgers. . . .
Granted that Orlando tailed off toward the end. He helped put a lot of hay in the barn before the Giants started asking, "What has he done for us lately?"

In a piece called "How the Giants Can Lose Flag," Charlie McCabe urged Dark to leave me alone in 1963. "Dark talks about hitting. Cepeda can hit," he warned.

The Latin players, he went on to say, "are a marvelous lot, alienated from the rest of the club by more than the language barrier. Cepeda is the cement which keeps them functioning as part of the team. . . . And let us not forget for a minute that the fortunes of the Giants rest on the Caribbean fellas more than any other single group."

Early in his career, Matty Alou hurt his leg. He was running a ground ball and his leg completely collapsed on him. The next day Dark sent him down to Tacoma. After the Giants traded Matty to the Pirates, he immediately won a batting championship, hitting .342 in 1966. For the next three years he never hit less than .331. Dark never gave Matty the opportunity to show what he really had. Felipe had already been traded to the Braves, where he became a big-time star.

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