Introduction: Two Scary Beanings in 1969 The 1969 Major League Baseball (MLB) season was unkind to Willie Davis, but it was also kind. It was a season of calamities that resulted in the stud star with the Los Angeles Dodgers never quite being the same person anymore. At the Dodgers spring-training site in Vero Beach, Florida, date unknown, Davis fractured his right arm and missed the first month of the regular season, 16 games in total. He was hit by a pitch thrown by Canadian and Atlanta Braves pitcher Claude Raymond. Research at retrosheet.org tells me that. Five weeks after returning to the lineup on June 6, the Dodgers and Davis were playing at home against the Montreal Expos, who were in the terrible throes of an 18-game losing streak. The Expos were an expansion team in the National League (NL), and this losing streak was an ugly reminder of the pitfalls of a franchise starting from scratch against established clubs.
The Dodgers won the first game of the three-game series 2-0, and in the very first inning of Game 2 on a Friday night, Davis stepped into the batter''s box to face southpaw pitcher Dan McGinn of the Expos. First pitch, bam! McGinn beaned Davis in the right jaw. As one photo showed, Expos catcher Ron Brand looked on as Davis grimaced in pain, grabbing his jaw. Soon, a collection of people showed up, including Dodgers manager Walter Alston and Expos trainer Joe Liscio. As John Wiebusch reported in the Los Angeles Times the next day, there was much sadness emanating from the game. There was the sight of Davis being helped off the field, and there was Expos manager Gene Mauch walking to the clubhouse after his club''s losing streak stretched to 19 games. In 1961, the Mauch-managed Philadelphia Phillies had lost 23 in a row. Wes Parker''s two-run homer helped the Dodgers beat the Expos 4-2, but it was an uneasy situation in the L.
A. clubhouse as players expressed concern about Davis, who was rushed by ambulance to the now-defunct Daniel Freeman Hospital in nearby Inglewood. He was tended to by two doctors, one of them named Frank Jobe, who later became the most famous surgeon in baseball. Jobe fixed up injured elbows incurred by pitchers. Many of those surgeries were referred to as Tommy John operations after the Dodgers hurler who underwent surgery on his left arm in 1974 and came back a new man. The other doctor was Ronald Watsonaga, a cosmetic surgeon, who lent his expertise to modifying Davis''s badly deformed jaw. Together, Jobe and Watsonaga spent hours trying to fix Davis. "If it is serious, then it will have to be wired," trainer Bill Buhler told reporters after the game.
"The bone was pushed out of place and it could be bad, bad enough to keep him out for quite a few days. But there''s a chance that he might miss only miss four or five games. One thing, even if it is wired, he''ll still be able to eat. But there will be a lot of tenderness." Sitting in the stands watching this unfold were many concerned fans but none more than his wife, Jeanna Limyou, a dancer and actress Davis had married in 1963. "I got in the car and went to the hospital and found out where he was," Limyou told me in an exclusive interview in 2024, 55 years following the mishap. "He was knocked out. It was traumatic.
He had major surgery and had a plate put in his head to hold his head up to the right jaw. There was fusion. They put a float in the jaw. They shattered the bones all around his jaw to do it. His whole head was damaged. He died with a plate in his head. With that pitch, he was never the same person I married, particularly with the drugs and pain. I''m happy to tell you what happened.
I''ve had other calls, but yours is the only I responded to. You talked about doing a balanced story on Willie and that impressed me. "He had a dislocated jaw. He was a different person. It was part of the reason we divorced. It''s amazing the Dodgers don''t have this written down. They never documented what happened to him. We didn''t know these things.
In your twenties, you''re living a fabulous life, you think nothing bad will happen. We were young and naive."When the stitches were taken out, he was back on the field like in two weeks. It was his decision. He was the decision-maker. His hair hadn''t even grown back on that side. The doctors had shaved his head. He was at the top of his game when that happened.
"Ron Brand of the Expos had a close-up view at Davis when he was plunked and what Brand saw wasn''t pretty. He said McGinn could throw heat in the low-to-mid-nineties. "I was behind the plate," Brand said on May 19, 2024. "I was the catcher. I actually thought he was dead. It was very scary. Dan hit him square. I can''t remember anything as bad as that.
That was a scary one. He didn''t lose consciousness, but he was shaking. His body was shaking. "I said, ''Oh, my gosh.'' What time did he miss? When he came back, he seemed to be okay when we saw him again. His whole thing was his speed. He might have been the fastest player in the game at the time. When he hit a ground ball, he could fly.
He would run the 100 in 10.3 seconds." Larry Jaster was thinking along the same lines as Brand, saying McGinn was known to pitch inside. Interestingly enough, Davis batted .400 lifetime against McGinn. "The pitch must have gotten away on McGinn," Jaster told me in 2024. "He was a likeable teammate. I don''t think he was throwing at him.
It wasn''t on purpose." Mauch was lamenting the loss of his team''s 19th consecutive defeat but also dwelled on the beaning by McGinn. "He didn''t want to hit Davis," Mauch said after the game. "He only tried to move him off the plate. Anyone who doesn''t pitch Willie tight is crazy. He leans over the plate like that." Davis was back playing after missing nine games as I found out on Retrosheet, coming in as a pinch runner late in a game on June 17. He didn''t play June 18 but was in the starting lineup and went 1-for-4 on June 20.
Nowadays, there''s no way Davis would have returned to the lineup so quickly. He would have missed at least a month. If that incident wasn''t enough to knock his noggin and brain around, Davis was beaned again a few weeks later on July 19 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco by Juan Marichal, the dazzling, high-kicking right hander and future Hall of Famer.Years earlier, on August 22, 1965, Marichal had taken a bat and clubbed Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro over the head at the height of the heated Cold War between the California teams, one from the north, the other from the south.It might have been the ugliest incident in the annals of Major League Baseball. Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax and Marichal had thrown chin music to opposing players during the early going of the game. Roseboro took a ball and whizzed it by one of Marichal''s ears back to Koufax. Marichal took exception, hit Roseboro with his bat, and the brawl was on.
Umpire Shag Crawford, who had warned both teams that if there was another chin-music pitch there would be ejections, tackled the enraged Marichal from behind.The Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles for the 1958 season, leaving behind a rivalry with the New York Giants, only to resume it that same year in San Francisco when the Giants also relocated to California. The Cold War kept simmering. It''s still going strong to this day. Marichal''s actions precipitated a brawl. He was fined $1,7501 and suspended for eight game days, the equivalent of two starts. By today''s standards, that suspension was paltry and laughable. If this happened today, his suspension would have been much more severe.
You hit a guy over the head and you only get an eight-day suspension? The Dodgers and owner Walter O''Malley were in the back pocket of admiring MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In the game in 1969, Marichal hit Davis behind the right ear. The feud, the rhetoric, kicked into high gear -- again. "Michelangelo [Marichal] became a finger painter, Wiebusch wrote in the Los Angeles Times . "Marichal allowed nine hits and 13 baserunners and one of the baserunners spent Saturday night in the hospital. Marichal''s first pitch was a fastball high and tight. It struck Davis behind the right ear and he dropped like a man caught by a sniper. Davis walked from the field after a five-minute delay, but the ball came perilously close to shattering his mastoid bone.
" Marichal had dominated Davis in face-to-face matchups over the years. According to stathead.com, Davis batted only .181 against Marichal with 35 hits in 193 at-bats, but he did produce seven homers and 24 runs batted in (RBI). The situation was eerily similar to the game when McGinn beaned him -- Davis was taken to St. Luke''s Hospital in San Francisco for observation. This beaning only aggravated the affected areas of his head in the operation by Jobe and Watsonaga. Marichal told reporters the beaning was unintentional, but the enemy wasn''t taking any of that to heart.
"The man has marvellous control, just marvellous," Alston told reporters. "But it appears that the control somehow seems to get bad, just after a couple of hits. I think he knows where every pitch he throws is going. He wasn''t near anyone. He brushed Willie back in the first and then hit him. Don''t let him kid you." This was the game Davis''s wife thought was the one that took place in Los Angeles, but all these decades later, she still knew the gravity of the situation. She''d been talking all along about Marichal in many of our conversations.
"Willie got hit in the head by a 150-mile-an-hour pitch from Marichal," she said. "Marichal was an excellent pitcher. He was going for some record during that time. He did that on purpose? I don''t know that. Willie was a left-handed batter. I guess Marichal was trying to get him off the plate and intimidate him. "The Dodgers had put that down [two beanings] real quiet because I don''t think anybody wanted to be sued. He had several hits in the head.
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