Orlando Cepeda, the legendary Hall of Fame slugger for the San Francisco Giants who died Friday night at the age of 86, was a man of many nicknames and many different facets of life.

“Our beloved Orlando passed away peacefully at home tonight while listening to his favorite music and surrounded by his loved ones,” his wife Nydia said in a statement released by the Giants. “It is a comfort to us that he rests in peace.”

“We have lost a true gentleman and a legend,” said Giants chairman Greg Johnson.

He arrived in the major leagues in 1958, the Giants' first season in San Francisco, and his bubbly personality and flashy style made him an instant hero – bigger than Willie Mays – in the City by the Bay, while earning National League Rookie of the Year honors with a .312 average, 25 home runs, 96 RBIs, a league-leading 38 doubles and 15 stolen bases. “Cha-Cha” was the centerpiece of the Giants' locker room.

In the years that followed, his temper — which first reared its ugly head after a 1958 knockdown incident involving teammate and Puerto Rican boyhood idol Ruben Gomez, when he had to be restrained by Mays from attacking Pittsburgh Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh with a bat — took on a different light. In his 1958 autobiography, retired umpire Babe Pinelli referred to Cepeda as a “powder keg,” and that nickname caught on as well, especially among his Giant teammates, who sometimes teased him mercilessly about it.

And finally, as he developed into one of the best hitters in the game and combined that with daring, aggressive (and sometimes reckless) baserunning that belied his massive 6-foot-2, 215-pound frame, he became, quite simply, “Baby Bull” – a power and speed force to be reckoned with in the middle of the Giants' lineup from 1958 to 1965, who led the NL in home runs (42) and RBI (142) in 1961, had 130 home runs and 308 RBI over the next three years, and later won the NL Most Valuable Player Award when he led the St. Louis Cardinals to the 1967 World Series with a .325 average, 25 home runs and 111 RBI and his inspiration in the locker room.

After his playing days, however, Cepeda was long considered an outsider in baseball and was disgraced in his native Puerto Rico, where he had once been accorded the same deity status as Roberto Clemente after being arrested at San Juan International Airport on December 12, 1975, for claiming two packages containing 170 pounds of marijuana sent to him from Colombia. He was later sentenced to five years in prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He later said, “The best thing that ever happened to me was going to prison,” but the next 12 years, which included broken marriages, bankruptcy and repeated rejections by the Baseball Writers Association during its 15-year Hall of Fame ballot, made his life hell.

Cepeda's father, Perucho, is still considered the greatest baseball player Puerto Rico ever played. Orlando idolized his father, who, had he not been black, would have been the first great Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. In an interview I conducted with him in 2013, Cepeda said ruefully, “My father never knew why he wasn't allowed to play in the major leagues. He just couldn't, and I always wondered, 'Who were these people who decided that players like my father weren't allowed to play? How did they make these distinctions about who was white enough and who wasn't white enough to play in major league baseball?'”

On his deathbed in 1955, days after Orlando signed with the Giants following a tryout camp, Perucho told his son, “You're going to be bigger than me.” And while he certainly was, there's no telling how great he would have been had he not suffered a knee injury in the 1962-63 Puerto Rican Winter League that hampered him for the rest of his career. Cepeda played with it for the next two seasons, claiming, “If I had said it hurt, they would have said I was just faking it.”

He missed most of the 1965 season after undergoing knee surgery, and on May 8, 1966, the Giants sent him to the Cardinals in one of the worst trades in baseball history for veteran pitcher Ray Sadecki. Their reasoning for the deal was that Cepeda's knee problem had become a hindrance to his play in the outfield and they wanted to keep Willie McCovey at first base.

After his MVP season in 1967, in which he assumed the role of the Cardinals' inspirational leader, Cepeda spent two more years in St. Louis before being traded to the Atlanta Braves in spring training in 1969 for Joe Torre. Of the trade, Torre said, “'Cha-Cha was a tough act in St. Louis, and if he hadn't hurt his knee, he would have put up numbers that no one could have predicted from the Hall of Fame.”

In fact, Cepeda finished with a .297 average, 379 home runs, 1,365 RBI and an OPS of .849.

“I have to say I lost about 3,000 at-bats, 200 home runs and 300 RBIs because of the knee,” Cepeda said when he was voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in March 1999. “When I missed seven votes on the writers' ballot in my senior year, I asked myself, 'What do I need to do to become a better person and get into the Hall of Fame?'”

He was a very humble man at that point. Cepeda will be remembered for many things – his batting legend, his infectious personality, his defiant temper and his flamboyant lifestyle. But for me, he will be remembered as a good and often misunderstood, generous man who more than made up for his sins of foolishness and managed to restore his place alongside Clemente as the pride of Puerto Rico.