Giants’ all-Alou outfield made history 60 years ago. It almost didn’t happen

Easily, however, we wouldn’t be in position today to celebrate that historic feat. Easily, we could have been deprived of knowing about the Alou family royalty. Easily, none of the brothers could have played a single inning in the majors.

“It almost didn’t happen, the three brothers playing together,” Felipe Alou, 88, told the Chronicle this week. “I really wanted to go back home, back to the university that I was attending. I had a ticket back to the Dominican. If I went home that day in 1956, I wasn’t going to return.”

Alou seriously considered quitting baseball in his first professional season in the New York Giants’ farm system because of extreme racism surrounding his first farm team in Lake Charles, La., where he spent a month of the 1956 season in the Class C Evangeline League and appeared in only five games, getting nine at-bats.

Alou wasn’t allowed to play more because of the color of his skin. He couldn’t go to restaurants with teammates. For games at Baton Rouge, he and two African American teammates couldn’t even enter the clubhouse and had to sit in the bleachers with the Black fans. The language barrier was an issue for Felipe, too.

“First time I went on the field, beer bottles were thrown from the stands,” Alou said. “We were three Giants farmhands waiting for a referendum to let us play. The team itself was nice to me, nice people. But we had to get the hell out of that league.”