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

by David Maraniss

  That was not the first time Olmo felt discriminated against for being Puerto Rican. In 1942, playing for Richmond in Triple-A, his manager, Ben Chapman, constantly made bed checks but only checked on Olmo. It seemed to Olmo that Chapman was determined to catch him with a woman, though it never happened. When the season was over, even though Olmo led the team in most offensive categories and excelled as an outfielder, Chapman gave the team’s most valuable player award to someone else—himself. A few years later, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line and Chapman proved to be among the most virulent racists in major league baseball, Olmo was not surprised.

  In a touch of irony, it was Jackie Robinson’s benefactor, Branch Rickey, who caused Olmo the most grief after his breakthrough season in 1945. His salary that year was $6,000, and after his stellar play he asked for a $3,000 raise. Rickey, then Brooklyn’s general manager, offered him an extra $500, but this was not a raise at all but rather the equivalent of the $500 bonus that had been handed out to every player on the team except Olmo. Take it or leave it, said Rickey, who was known as both the wisest and perhaps the cheapest man in baseball. Olmo left it. He decided to play in a new league that had begun in Mexico in direct competition with the majors. “They were paying good money in Mexico,” Olmo recalled. “They paid me $20,000—more than three times as much as Rickey offered.”

  Induced by the higher salaries, and with no bargaining power of their own in that era, more than two dozen ballplayers left the States to play in Mexico. For their brazen act of independence, they were all suspended from baseball for five years. The winter leagues in Puerto Rico and Cuba had agreements with the majors, so the players were banned from those leagues as well. When the Mexican league folded in 1947, the vagabond players were left to scrounge in Venezuela, Canada, and an alternative league in Cuba. The suspensions were lifted after three years, and Olmo returned to the majors, along with Sal Maglie. He rejoined the Dodgers in time to play in the 1949 World Series against the Yankees, where he became the first Puerto Rican to hit a World Series home run. It came in the ninth inning against Joe Page, and was followed shortly by another homer by the great black catcher, Roy Campanella, his old teammate in San Juan. After the season, Olmo was traded to the Boston Braves. He played two years in Boston, then one in Triple-A in Milwaukee, and his career in the States was over.

  Olmo was hailed as another legend of baseball when he returned to Puerto Rico. He stayed with the game deep into middle age, joining Momen Clemente in the Santurce outfield one winter and also managing several teams and scouting for the Braves, who had moved to Milwaukee in 1953. He was a top-notch scout, bringing the Braves two talented young Puerto Ricans, Juan Pizarro and Felix Mantilla, and just missing on a third, Clemente.

  When Puerto Ricans reenact the story of the Three Kings, one king is portrayed with dark skin. In the baseball story, this would be Victor Pellot Power. Seven years older than Clemente, Power signed with a major league club several years before him, and became the first black Puerto Rican to play in the American League. Power grew up in Arecibo, to the west of San Juan, though his family history traces back to slaves on the nearby islands of St. Thomas and St. John. His father, like Melchor Clemente, knew little of baseball and tried to discourage him from playing, but died of tetanus when Victor was thirteen. Three years later, when he was barely sixteen, Power was hailed as a baseball prodigy, playing in the Puerto Rican winter league for the Caguas Criollos, a club that would be his winter home for decades.

  His name alone is a lesson in sociology. Pove was his mother’s original surname, but during her youth, in the early days of U.S. control, Puerto Rican schoolchildren were taught in English, and a teacher changed the v to a w and added an r at the end and made her name Power. At home, in any case, he would be known as Pellot, since that was his father’s surname, just as Roberto Clemente Walker was known as Roberto Clemente, not Roberto Walker. But during his first year north, playing in Canada, Power was introduced at a ballpark in French-speaking Quebec in a way that provoked laughter and some ridicule from the stands. He wondered whether fans were laughing because he was black, until someone told him that his name sounded like something bawdy in French slang—pelote means he who paws or pets women. From then on, when not in Puerto Rico, he went by the name Power. It was left to sportswriters to call him Vic, just as many called Roberto Bob or Bobby. And so the creation of Vic Power.

  The social transition from Puerto Rico to the mainland was more difficult for Power than it had been for Bithorn or Olmo. “Here we were all together,” he reminisced later in San Juan, speaking of people of different colors. “We went to school together. We danced together. A lot of black Puerto Ricans marry white women. When I get there—the States—I don’t know what to do.” What he did, often, was use humor as a shield to protect himself from deadly serious discrimination. His stories about how he confronted racism in the South have become a part of baseball lore, accurately reflecting social conditions in 1950s America even if some might shade into apocrypha. When a waitress told him that her restaurant did not serve Negroes, Power replied, “That’s okay, I don’t eat Negroes. I just want some rice and beans.” Stopped by a policeman for crossing a street against the “Don’t Walk” sign, Power explained that he thought street signs were for whites only, like all the other signs. There was nothing funny about the segregation that forced Power to sleep in a room above a black funeral parlor during spring training in Plant City, Florida, because he was not allowed to stay in the same hotel as his white teammates. But at least in retrospect, he transformed the scene into dark comedy. “People ask me what I learned from that experience and I say two things: that dead people don’t snore, and that they don’t get out of there. Because I was waiting for them upstairs with a bat, ohhh, baby. In Puerto Rico we believe that dead people might get you. I was a little bit afraid.”

  Along with Jim Crow segregation in the South, Power dealt with a more subtle form of prejudice during his baseball rise: the subjective standards of the New York Yankees. From 1951 to 1953, playing for Yankee farm clubs in Syracuse and Kansas City, Power was one of the best all-around players in the minor leagues. For two years, he was the lone black player on his team, and for the third he was joined by catcher Elston Howard. But Power was ready for the majors before the Yankees were ready for him. Word was that he was considered too flashy and socially daring to become the first black in pinstripes. Yankee officials were reluctant to call up a player who drove a Cadillac, listened to jazz, dated white women, and was unafraid to show his vibrant personality.

  Power was the same man off the field as on. His style at first base was free and easy. He played far from the bag, always got there on time, and snatched the ball into his glove with a one-handed snap. It was a method that he had used effectively since his days in winter ball at Caguas, when his manager, none other than Luis Olmo, suspended him for ten days for refusing to follow instructions and catch with two hands. Olmo eventually relented, and so did all coaches thereafter, but not without some complaints. “They called me a showboat, but it was just the way I did it,” Power recalled. “I told them, ‘The guys who invented the game, if they wanted you to catch with two hands they would have given you two gloves, and I only had one glove.” His trademark pendulum swing as he awaited a pitch was also as much about substance as style. “I had a weakness, and the weakness was I cannot hit the inside low ball,” he later explained. “Now how am I going to manage that? What I would do was, I would keep the bat there, low and inside, and swing it back and forth, and people would say, be careful, he’s a low-ball hitter, and they would pitch me high. Oh, baby. That was psychology.”

  After a third stellar season in the minors, when Power batted .331 and drove in 109 runs for the top farm club, the Yankees ran out of rationalizations for keeping him in the minors. But they chose instead to promote Elston Howard, reserved and unassuming, more the Yankee style—or at least more of what they seemed to want from a non-white player. Although the organizatio
n projected a public image of dignity and class, the Yankees of that era had their share of hard-partying roustabouts. With his deadpan sarcastic wit, Power took note of the contradiction: “They say they didn’t call me up because I was going out with white women. And I told them, ‘Jeez, I didn’t know white women were that bad. If I knew that, I wouldn’t go out with them.’ I told them that they had a ballplayer in the organization, a white ballplayer, who would go out with black women. And they asked me who that guy was. It was Billy Martin. He was white. He was Italian. He was going out with black women. When they ask why I would say that, I say, ‘Because I trade two of my black women for one of his white ones.’” On December 16, 1953, before he got a chance to play first base in Yankee Stadium, Power was traded to the Philadelphia Athletics.

  Hiram Bithorn was dead by then. Luis Olmo, his major league career over, was back in Puerto Rico and scouting for Milwaukee. The Braves hoped Olmo could help them sign a nineteen-year-old kid from Carolina who was playing outfield for the Santurce Cangrejeros.

  • • •

  Five major league teams expressed some interest in Roberto Clemente: the Braves, Dodgers, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Giants. It was unlikely that Boston really wanted him, considering that they had no black players (and in fact were the last American League team to integrate in 1959 with Pumpsie Green). St. Louis was also an outside possibility, but New York, Brooklyn, and Milwaukee were serious suitors. All had connections. The Braves were represented by Olmo, who would play on the Cangrejeros with Clemente and had been one of the stars of his childhood. The Giants enjoyed a close relationship with Pedrin Zorrilla, the Santurce owner, and their major league roster included Clemente’s childhood idol, Monte Irvin, as well as Ruben Gomez, a right-handed pitcher from Puerto Rico. The Dodgers claimed perhaps the closest connection to Santurce—Al Campanis was a frequent visitor to the Zorrilla home—and beyond that they were known in Puerto Rico for fair treatment of black players, many of whom had been playing winter ball on the island. When it came to bidding, the Braves offered Clemente the largest bonus. Most accounts say $25,000 to $35,000, although Olmo later claimed it was even more. But money alone was not enough. “He was very loyal to Pedrin and he wouldn’t take it,” Olmo recalled. If loyalty was a factor, of equal importance was Clemente’s desire to play in New York, where he had friends and relatives in the large Puerto Rican community who could make him feel more at home.

  That left the Giants and Dodgers. Any signing over $6,000 would designate Clemente as a bonus player, meaning a team would have to protect him on the major league roster or face losing him in a supplemental draft after his first year in the minors. The Giants, apparently concluding that Clemente needed at least a year of seasoning, kept their offer below the bonus line. Their scout, Tom Sheehan, hoped that Clemente would sign for a $4,000 bonus and begin in Class-A ball in Sioux City, Iowa. Leo Durocher, the Giants’ manager, later rationalized the low bid this way: “We offered him under the $6,000 bonus limit so he could go to the minors and mature there. We tried to do what was best for Clemente, but the Dodgers . . . dangled more money in front of him and you know what a kid his age does when money becomes a factor.”

  What the Dodgers dangled—a $10,000 bonus and $5,000 first-year salary—was far less than the Braves but enough to close the deal. Clemente wanted to play for the Dodgers. He had no way of knowing that they, on the other hand, had a covert motive in signing him. In their private calculations, even though their scouting reports on Clemente were great, they shared the Giants’ assessment that he was not ready for the majors. Their plan was to send him to their top farm club in Montreal. As much as they coveted Clemente, part of their mission was simply to keep him away from the Giants. “We didn’t want the Giants to have Willie Mays and Clemente in the same outfield and be the big attraction in New York,” Dodgers executive Buzzie Bavasi said later. “It was a cheap deal for us any way you figure it.” A cheap deal that was cheapened even more by the racial practices of that era. White bonus babies were being signed for an average of six times as much as their black and Latin counterparts.

  On February 19, 1954, with his sons Roberto and Matino (just back from the Army), and Pedrin Zorrilla at his side, Melchor Clemente sent a telegram to Matt Burns, Brooklyn Baseball Club, 215 Montague Street, Brooklyn, New York:

  I WILL SIGN A CONTRACT ON BEHALF OF MY SON ROBERTO CLEMENTE FOR THE SEASON 1954 FOR THE SALARY OF $5,000 FOR THE SEASON PLUS A BONUS OF $10,000 PAYABLE ON APPROVAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION. I WILL SIGN THE CONTRACT WITH THE MONTREAL CLUB OF THE INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE. SIGNED, MELCHOR CLEMENTE, FATHER, ROBERTO CLEMENTE, SON

  One week later the signing was made public in a UP wire service report: “The Montreal Royals have signed Roberto Clemente, a Negro bonus player from Puerto Rico, General Manager Guy Moreau said today.” Clemente would play center field for the Royals, the report added, “if Sandy Amoros, the league’s leading hitter in 1953, moves up to the Dodgers.” But more than the telegram or the public announcement, the true marker of Clemente’s new status came when Hillerich & Bradsby, makers of Louisville Slugger bats for organized baseball, took note of the bonus baby and contacted him about his equipment needs.

  His first bats were variations of a Stan Musial model, classified at headquarters in Louisville as M-117. The signature engraved on them read Momen Clemente.

  3

  Dream of Deeds

  BEFORE MOMEN LEFT HOME TO PLAY BASEBALL IN THE North, Melchor presented him with a going-away gift. It was a fine brimmed hat, and the son thanked his father for it, not having the stomach to say that he hated gentlemen’s hats. His older brothers Andres and Matino knew how he felt and teased him about the hat as they drove him to the airport in San Juan, where he would catch a flight to Florida, the first stop on his baseball migration. As they were making their way from Carolina to the airfield, Roberto fidgeted with the hat and then flung it out an open window. His brothers were shocked. Even knowing how much he disliked it, they asked him why he threw it away instead of just giving it to someone who needed it. This was not like him; he was not wasteful or thoughtless. Roberto explained that he did not want to get in trouble with his father. “Just imagine that I become famous and the person that I give the hat to tells everybody that it was my hat,” he said. “Father will kill me.” And that is how he left the island: hatless, thinking of fame.

  It is hard to imagine a more dazzling debut than his first game a few weeks later as a Brooklyn Dodgers farmhand. CLEMENTE PACES ROYALS TO WIN ran the headline after the opening day of spring training for the Montreal Royals of the Triple-A International League. The wire service account from Vero Beach on April 1, 1954, described Clemente as an “18-year-old Puerto Rican bonus baby”—close, he was nine-teen—and noted that along with two singles he pulled off one of the rarest and most stirring feats in baseball, hitting and running his way to an inside-the-park home run. From the box score in the Montreal Gazette, the numbers indicated that he batted fifth, went three for four, drove in two runs, made one outfield putout, was the only Royals starter to play nine innings, and moved defensively from center to left late in the 12–2 rout of the Civilians.

  The opposing team, comprised of ex-servicemen awaiting assignments to Dodger farm clubs, was certainly below International League caliber. And this was, after all, April Fool’s Day. How else to explain that Clemente’s auspicious opener was less a foreshadowing of things to come that year than a cruel bit of false hope? Only three more times all season would he be featured in headlines or photographs of Royals games, and one of those was a picture of him twisting his ankle. He was treated more like baby than bonus, protected from the world, often hidden away in the dugout. Eight years earlier, Jackie Robinson had joined these same Royals in Montreal on his path to Brooklyn, and his every move was analyzed and recorded by the sporting press as he changed baseball forever. Clemente’s coming was virtually ignored. His manager, Max Macon, assessed the team and its shortcomings almost daily in public, co
mplaining about the first baseman’s inept fielding, the overall lack of power, his hopes that the big club would send down some real talent, but he was mum on the potential of Clemente.

  Momen was the youngest player on the Royals. He was the only Puerto Rican, and at season’s start one of two blacks and two Spanish speakers. The other was Chico Fernández, a twenty-two-year-old shortstop from Havana. On top of that, during spring training in Florida, he found himself, for the first time, dealing with Jim Crow segregation whenever he left Dodgertown, where he was given a room and three meals a day. Even within the Vero Beach compound, he noticed how the black service workers were boarded onto buses and driven out of Dodgertown before sundown. Separated from the warm fold of his family in Carolina, Clemente felt isolated in an alien and at times malignant environment, a condition that accentuated his shyness. On the playing field, given a chance, he was daring, fierce, memorable, but now on most days he was tucked away, and what people saw was more like the reticent youngster with sadness around the eyes who sat in the back of Mrs. Cáceres’s room, looking down, on the first day of history class.

  • • •

  The International Baseball League lived up to its name in 1954. Unlike the major league World Series, limited to one country in the world, this league was undeniably international. “There’s never been such a league as this one,” declared the writer Tom Meany in Collier’s after spending the early part of the season traveling with the Royals and some of the other clubs. “All a ballplayer needs to get by in the International League is the ability to hit the curveball and to go without sleep. It also helps if he has a smattering of Spanish, a soupcon of French, a fondness for plane rides and the digestive processes of an anaconda.” The eight teams included three in Canada: Montreal, the Ottawa Athletics, and the Jack Kent Cooke–owned Toronto Maple Leafs; as well as the Rochester Red Wings, Syracuse Chiefs, and Buffalo Bison of New York State, and two expansion franchises brought in that season, the Richmond Virginians and Havana Sugar Kings. The inclusion of a team from Cuba, where baseball was as much a national pastime as it claimed to be in the States, created a buzz in sporting circles, with some writers looking toward the day when Havana would field a team in the majors. Although that day did not come, the presence of the Sugar Kings in the International League served as an early landmark in the Latinization of North American baseball, a trend that would become more pronounced decade by decade for the rest of the twentieth century.