Giants icon Orlando Cepeda passes away at 80

Orlando Cepeda’s legacy in San Francisco was cemented merely by his beginning his major league career here. That’s the rule here – start your career here, you belong here forever.
 
But that was barely the start of it. He’d have been loved here forever just because of that, but he more than earned that love time and again when he returned, and stayed. He was a Puerto Rican by heritage, but just as much, he was a San Franciscan by choice and contribution.
 
Cepeda, who died today at age 80 after being taken to hospital late Monday night, was a Giant throughout his life because he did the one thing that can never be undone – he started here. He was part of the first real core of impact players when the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, and the impression he made was both immediate (he was voted National League Rookie of the Year and finished ninth in the voting for Most Valuable Player) and perpetual (the Giants went to great lengths to lobby for inclusion into the Hall of Fame, which finally happened in 1999).
 
And having felt that support throughout his baseball career and occasionally turbulent years thereafter, he became more than merely a fixture but also an enduring icon of the franchise itself. Indeed, a case can be fairly made that next to Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal, he embodies what the Giants were, and are, to the greater Bay Area.
 
He was born, raised, took up baseball and was scouted and eventually signed in Puerto Rico as part of a wave of prominent Latin American talents that included Marichal and the Alou brothers (all from the Dominican Republic) and Jose Pagan (a fellow Puerto Rican). They all converged upon San Francisco just as the franchise began its successful run in the 1960s, and set in cement the hold the Giants have maintained for most of the ensuing 60 years.
 
But Cepeda’s career, which earned him a World Series ring in St. Louis after he was traded in what remains one of the most lopsided deals in baseball history (the Giants got three years of pitcher Ray Sadecki), ended not in San Francisco but Kansas City, after stops in Atlanta, Oakland (for three games) and Boston. The Giants had decided to break up what they thought was a clique-ish clubhouse, and did not reach the same heights until the late ‘90s.
 
Cepeda, though, always considered himself a Giant at heart, and after bouts with the law that led to a drug possession charge in 1978 in Puerto Rico, he abandoned the criminal life, converted to Buddhism and then to baseball, which led him to a reunion in 1987 with the team that had launched his career. He was hired as a scout in 1987 by then-general manager Al Rosen through the intercession of local publisher Laurence Hyman and Giants publicity executive Pat Gallagher, and remained connected to the franchise thereafter.
 
Those who never saw him play got to see the reactions of those who did, and learned indirectly of his impact on the franchise and the area, and two generations after the end of his playing days, he remained known for the ballpark concessions staple, the Caribbean Cha Cha Bowl, an homage to the lesser of his two nicknames (he was better known as The Baby Bull).
 
He was named to 14 separate halls of fame and also received humanitarian awards for his work with pediatric cancer patients at UCSF Hospital, at-risk children, and with Athletes Against Aids. He won his fame as a new face for a new town, and reclaimed and burnished it when he came back, a changed man who changed others for the better.
 
In all, Orlando Cepeda was a Giant, became a Giant again, then he became a Bay Area icon, and ultimately a true giant. In all, a life more than merely well-lived -- a life saved, bettered and finally celebrated.