Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

by David Maraniss

  Baseball was the dominant sport on the island, followed by boxing, horse racing, track and field, volleyball, and basketball. Soccer, by far the most popular sport elsewhere in Latin America, had not caught on in Puerto Rico, another sign of how it was influenced by the United States. The mainland seemed remote to young Clemente, and baseball there even more unreachable, but he followed winter league baseball in Puerto Rico religiously. In the San Juan area, loyalties were divided between the San Juan Senadores (Senators) and Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers), a split that in many ways mirrored the one between the Yankees and Dodgers in New York. The Cangrejeros were grittier, beloved by cabdrivers, hotel workers, factory hands, and much like the Dodgers, they had a strong black following. Josh Gibson, star of the Negro Leagues, played for Santurce in the early years, followed by Roy Campanella, Ray Dandridge, Willard Brown, and Junior Gilliam, whose range at second prompted Cangrejeros fans to call him the Black Sea. But Clemente grew up rooting for the San Juan Senadores. His loyalties were shaped by his idolizing of Monte Irvin, San Juan’s graceful outfielder. Irvin’s color kept him out of the majors for most of his career, until 1949, when the Giants brought him up, but he was a star for the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues for a decade before that, and tore up the Puerto Rican winter league for several seasons in the mid-forties, when Clemente was eleven to fifteen, formative years for any baseball fan.

  The Senadores and Cangrejeros played in the same stadium, Sixto Escobar (named for a bantamweight boxing champ), just off the ocean on Puerta de Tierra, the long finger of land leading to Old San Juan. The way the winter league worked, there were only three games a week, one on Saturday and a doubleheader on Sunday. Irvin said later that he enjoyed playing there because of the beauty of the island, the leisurely schedule, the excitement of the fans, the first-rate competition, and above all, the fact that “we were treated much better there than in the States.” If a black American hit an important home run, fans might pass a hat through the stands to collect an impromptu bonus for the player. When they went out to eat in Old San Juan or the restaurant strip in Condado, they were treated as celebrities and offered meals on the house.

  When he could, Momen caught the bus from Carolina on weekends to hang out at Sixto Escobar with swarms of other kids. Juan Pizarro, who lived much closer, near Loiza Avenue in Santurce, never had money to get inside, but shimmied up a palm tree to watch the games. Clemente sometimes had a quarter from his father. He used a dime for the bus and fifteen cents for a ticket. His goal was to get there early enough to watch Monte Irvin glide through the throng outside on the way to play. “I never had enough nerve, I didn’t want to even look at him straight in the face,” Clemente remembered. “But when he passed by I would turn around and look at him because I idolized him.” Just by being there, hanging around, as shy as he was, Clemente eventually struck up a friendship with Irvin. And Irvin made sure that his young fan got in to watch the game, even without a ticket. “I used to give him my suit bag to carry into the stadium so he could get in for free,” Irvin recalled. From a seat in the bleachers, Clemente studied everything about his hero: how he looked in a uniform, how he walked, how he ran, how he hit, and especially how he threw. More than half a century later, still trim, dignified, white-haired, Irvin could bring back that mentoring relationship in his mind’s eye. “Yeah, I taught Roberto how to throw,” Irvin said. “Of course, he quickly surpassed me.”

  By the time he was fifteen, Clemente was starring at shortstop in a softball league on a team sponsored by Sello Rojo, a rice-packaging firm. He was fast, had a gun for an arm, and surprising power for a lanky teenager. Sello Rojo (Red Seal) was coached by Roberto Marín, a rice salesman who became his baseball guardian. By the next year Clemente was also playing hardball, mostly outfield, for the Juncos Mules, a top amateur team in Carolina, and occasionally participated in track and field events at Julio Vizcarrando Coronado High School, running the 440 meters and throwing the javelin. The javelin, though he threw it only a few times, became an iconic symbol in the mythology of Clemente. It represented his heroic nature, since the javelin is associated with Olympian feats. On a more practical level it served to further explain his strong throwing arm.

  Marín’s former wife, Maria Isabel Cáceres, taught history and physical education at the high school and also watched out for Clemente. Cáceres developed a friendship with her student that deepened over the years, but her early impressions stayed with her. During the first day of class, when she invited students to choose seats, Roberto settled inconspicuously in the back row. He spoke quietly when called upon, not looking up. But “despite his shyness,” she later wrote, “and the sadness around his eyes, there was something poignantly appealing about him.”

  While Cáceres noticed the sadness in Roberto’s eyes, Marín focused on his baseball skills. As a bird-dog scout for Santurce, he passed the word to the owner of the Cangrejeros, Pedrin Zorrilla, known affectionately as the Big Crab. Zorrilla had grown up in Manatí, to the west of San Juan, and still spent much time there. He was always on the move around the island, looking for a ball game, searching for talent. In the fall of 1952, Marín told him that the next time the Juncos came to play Manatí, there was a kid that Zorrilla had to look at for his professional club. Zorrilla scribbled the name on a card and stuck it in his pocket. A few days later, he was in the stands watching a game. First he saw a Juncos player smack a line shot against the fence 345 feet away and fly around first and make a perfect slide into second. Later in the game, as he was talking with friends in the stands, he took notice when the same player sprinted back to the fence, grabbed a drive in deep center field, and made a perfect throw to second to double-up a runner.

  “That boy, I must have his name,” Zorrilla said.

  “Roberto Clemente,” came the answer.

  “Clemente?” Zorrilla fished into his shirt pocket and pulled out the card. It was the name he had written down at Roberto Marín’s suggestion.

  When the 1952 season began on October 15, the youngest Cangrejero, freshly signed by the Big Crab, was Roberto Clemente, barely eighteen and still in high school. He was signed for $40 a week, and all he had to do was learn how to hit the breaking ball, low and away.

  Less than a month later, on the Saturday of November 6, the Brooklyn Dodgers held a tryout at Sixto Escobar. On hand was one of Brooklyn’s top scouts, Al Campanis, who was managing the Cienfuegos Elephants in Cuba that winter. Clemente was one of about seventy players at the tryout, and the obvious standout, throwing bullets from center to third and displaying excellent time in the sixty-yard dash. “If the sonofagun can hold a bat in his hands, I’m gonna sign this guy,” Campanis said before Clemente stepped into the batter’s box. On the mound was one of Zorrilla’s crafty old pitchers, Pantalones Santiago. Clemente stroked line drives all over the field. When Campanis filled out the official Brooklyn scouting report, this is how it read:

  SCOUT REPORT

  Club SANTURCE

  League PORTO RICAN

  Pos. OF Age 18

  Hgt 5'11" Wgt 175

  Bats R Throws R

  Name

  CLEMENTE ROBERT

  Arm

  A+ GOOD CARRY

  Accuracy A

  Fielding

  A GOOD AT THIS STAGE

  Reactions A

  Hitting

  A TURNS HEAD BUT IMPROVING

  Power A+

  Running Speed

  +

  Base Running A

  Definite Prospect? YES Has Chance? ____ Fill-In? ____ Follow ____

  Physical Condition (Build, Size, Agility, etc.) WELL BUILT—FAIR SIZE—

  GOOD AGILITY

  Remarks:

  WILL MATURE INTO BIG MAN. ATTENDING HIGH SCHOOL BUT PLAYS WITH SANTURCE. HAS ALL THE TOOLS AND LIKES TO PLAY. A REAL GOOD LOOKING PROSPECT! HE HAS WRITTEN THE COMMISSIONER REQUESTING PERMISSION TO PLAY ORGANIZED BALL.

  Report By:

  AL CAMPANIS

  Clemente was “the best free a
gent athlete I’ve ever seen,” Campanis would say later. Baseball was everything to Roberto then, but even though he had asked for permission to play, he was not quite ready to be signed. The phenom was still in high school, though not at Julio Vizcarrando, which would not let him attend school and practice and play for Santurce at the same time. He had transferred to the Instituto Comercial de Puerto Rico in Hato Rey, a neighborhood between his home and the stadium. It would be fifteen months between the time Campanis first scouted him and when Clemente formally signed a contract with a major league organization. By then he had earned his diploma from the technical school, and was doing a little better with the curveball low and away. And he was still only nineteen. Life was all possibilities: the only sadness in his life involved a girlfriend who stopped seeing him because her family thought his skin was too dark.

  • • •

  It was Clemente’s way, throughout his life, to pay tribute to those who came before him. Blessings to his parents, he would say, and to his elders, and to his brothers. Along the path he took to northern baseball, several others went before him. The Three Kings, in a sense, were Hiram Bithorn, Luis Olmo, and Vic Power. Bithorn first, Olmo second, and Power down the line but before Clemente, and paving the way for him because of color distinctions that were made in the United States that had no bearing back on the island.

  Clemente was seven years old when Hiram Bithorn, a right-handed pitcher, became the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. Bithorn made his first start for the Chicago Cubs on April 21, 1942, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line. That Bithorn had white skin meant very little to fans in San Juan, where he had played with and against the Americans Josh Gibson, Monte Irvin, and Roy Campanella and the great Puerto Ricans Pedro Cepeda and Poncho Coimbre, all of whom had darker skin. But it meant everything to the men who ran organized baseball in the States. It was the only reason they let him play.

  Bithorn was big and burly, a jolly giant and three-sport star in his native Santurce, excelling in basketball and volleyball as well as on the mound. The first story on him in the Chicago Tribune called him an “intriguing rookie,” noting that his parents came from Denmark and that he liked pie and ice cream for breakfast. The sportswriters of San Juan thought he was “a little, if not wacky, okay, different,” according to Eduardo Valero, who covered Bithorn for El Imparcial. Valero remembered the time Bithorn emerged from the dugout with an umbrella when the umpires were slow to stop play for rain. Bill Sweeney, who had managed him on the Hollywood Stars in the Coast League before his call-up to the Cubs, said the key to making Bithorn win was to yell at him in Spanish whenever he tried to throw sliders and forkballs. “Tell him to stick the slow stuff in the ashcan and throw like everything. You’ll have to holler several times in every game, but he’ll win with the high hard one,” Sweeney advised. Bithorn’s pale appearance did nothing to protect him from ethnic stereotyping. A Chicago writer, making the same point as Sweeney, said the trouble with Bithorn was that “fast pitching apparently doesn’t appeal to his conception of Latin cunning.” The press Americanized his first name, pronounced ee-rum, to the familiar “Hi.”

  The Cubs also had a rookie catcher from Cuba that year, Chico Hernández, and together he and Bithorn formed the second all-Latino battery in major league history, a quarter-century after the first pitcher-catcher duo of Cubans Adolpho Luque and Miguel Gonzalez played for the Boston Braves. At one point during the season, Bithorn and Chico Hernández decided to dispense with hand signs and simply call and receive pitching signs aloud in Spanish, assuming that opposing batters would be none the wiser. That worked fine until the Giants figured it out and sent their bench coach, the same Adolpho Luque, out to the third-base coaching box to intercept the verbal signs; suddenly Giants batters began cracking base hits.

  The Cubs manager, Jimmy Wilson, was said to have a “soft spot” for Bithorn, fascinated equally by his attempts at English and his willingness to scrap with Leo Durocher of the Dodgers. During his sophomore season in 1943, the Cubs had more reason to be fond of Bithorn. He developed into a first-rate pitcher, one of the best in the National League. He pitched 249.2 innings that year, won eighteen games, fourth highest in the league, while losing only twelve, had an earned-run average of 2.60, and threw seven complete game shutouts. When the season ended and Bithorn returned to San Juan, he was greeted at the airport with a hero’s welcome, paraded through the streets in a convertible, and handed the keys to the city. Then, asked to say a few words, Bithorn balked, explaining that he would rather face Mel Ott. That moment of glory, on the afternoon of October 26, 1943, turned out to be the high point of his career.

  One month later, while managing in the winter league for San Juan, Bithorn received a draft notice and decided to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He served not quite two years, and came out a different man. When he arrived back in Chicago for the final weeks of the 1945 season, he was described as out of shape with “a sore arm and an unduly expansive waistline.” He also was mentally troubled. His brother, Waldemor Bithorn, said that Hiram had suffered a nervous breakdown. In any case, his skills had vanished, and soon enough his major league career was gone, too. The Cubs cut him in 1946, after which he was picked up and released by the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Chicago White Sox. Bithorn scuffled through the minors, in Oakland and Nashville, and his prospects deteriorated from there. By 1951 he was umpiring in the Class-C Pioneer League on the West Coast, then went south to try a pitching comeback in Mexico.

  Four days after Christmas 1951, Bithorn checked into a hotel in El Mante in northeastern Mexico. According to his family, he was on his way south to Mexico City to pick up his mother. The manager of the hotel, W. A. Smith, recalled that Bithorn arrived at three in the morning, and that when he checked out the next day he told Smith that he only had a single dollar. Smith told Bithorn to forget the charge, but instead Bithorn went out on the streets and tried to sell his car. He was stopped for questioning by a local cop, Ambrosio Castillo, who acted as though he were trying to inspect the car’s registration but probably wanted to confiscate it for himself. The encounter ended, in any case, in violence. Castillo fired several shots into Bithorn, who was seriously wounded and died after being driven eighty-four miles over rough roads to a hospital in Ciudad Victoria. Doctors there issued a statement saying that he might have lived had he been treated earlier. Castillo claimed that he acted in self-defense, that Bithorn struck him and tried to escape. He also claimed that Bithorn’s last words to him, after being shot, were “I am a member of a Communist cell on an important mission!” But Castillo’s story eventually collapsed and he was sent to prison on a homicide conviction.

  News of Hiram Bithorn’s death reached home on New Year’s Eve, 1951. December 31 . . . Then and later, in the history of Puerto Rico and baseball, it would be the darkest day. The Mexicans had buried him in an open grave, until Bithorn’s family and all of Puerto Rico expressed outrage at his treatment. They had his body exhumed and placed in a double-sealed casket for the trip back to Puerto Rico. Before he was reburied on January 13, 1952, his funeral bier was placed on the field at Sixto Escobar and thousands of fans filed past to pay their last respects, including members of his old team, the San Juan Senadores, who played the rest of the season with black patches on their sleeves. Bithorn had died alone and destitute, an unknown stranger in a strange land, but his forlorn ending was transformed once his body reached Puerto Rican soil. He became a legend, a king in the mythology of baseball on the island—and all who came after him to play in the States, including Roberto Clemente, who began his professional career at Sixto Escobar the same year that Bithorn was buried, knew his story as the first among them.

  One year after Bithorn made his debut with the Cubs, Luis Olmo was called up from the Triple-A Montreal Royals to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the second king on the northern pilgrimage, his experiences, too, served as context for the later coming of Clemente. Olmo joined a crowded outf
ield in Brooklyn, with Augie Galan, Paul Waner, Dixie Walker, Joe Medwick, and Frenchy Bordagaray, but the Puerto Rican’s talent won him more and more playing time, until by 1945 he was a team star, batting .313, leading the National League in triples with thirteen, and driving in 110 runs. Like Bithorn, Olmo grew up playing baseball in a place where skin color did not matter. But although he was considered white in the United States, and was allowed to play there before the race barrier was lifted, he was not free from the sting of prejudice. Something strange happened during the 1945 season that he would never forget. As he remembered it sixty years later, he was hitting well over .350 in July, using a heavy black bat. He considered the bat his magic wand, even though it was nothing special. He had bought it at a pharmacy near the apartment that he and his wife, Emma, rented at 55 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. One day in the dugout at Ebbets Field, manager Leo Durocher picked up the black bat, said that it was too damn heavy, and broke it in two. Why? Durocher could be volatile but he was far from racist and was obsessed with doing whatever it took to win. Yet in retrospect Olmo could think of only one reason that made sense to him: “They didn’t want me to have a good season. They wanted Dixie Walker to beat me out and I was playing more than Dixie Walker.”