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

by David Maraniss

  To call the IBL a minor league was somewhat misleading. It had been around for seventy-one seasons, going back to 1884, making it far older than the American League, which was established in 1900. And its talent pool, at a time when blacks and Latins were starting to get a chance, and when there were still only sixteen major league teams, was far deeper than minor leagues of later decades. The Toronto Maple Leafs alone boasted a roster that included twenty-two players with major league experience. Each of the eight teams had perhaps seven or eight players who would have been in the majors had they come up during the expansion era a generation later. The International League clubs had their own traditions and identities quite apart from their distant overlords. They played a schedule of 154 games, equal to the majors, and according to league secretary Harry Simmons, traveled by air 75 percent of the time. They even made personnel moves on their own now and then, but they were not independent. The daily reminder of that was the Montreal uniform, with the club name scrawled across the front in the cursive Dodger blue. The team’s condition was still determined in large part by the decisions of Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner, and his baseball men in Brooklyn.

  One of those men had just been promoted from Montreal after leading the Royals to the 1953 Little World Series championship. Walter Alston was now the rookie manager of the Dodgers. His third baseman, Don Hoak, also made the jump to Brooklyn, along with outfielder Sandy Amoros, who led the International League in hitting the previous year with a prodigious .353 average. Amoros, a Cuban, had continued his hot hitting with the Dodgers all spring, catching the attention of New York sportswriters. Dan Parker of the New York Mirror altered the pronunciation of his last name, moving the accent from the first syllable to the second (claiming “Poetic license No. 345-B”) to make it fit a parody of “That’s Amore.” “He’s a new Brooklyn star and he’s gonna go far, that’s Amoros! For the latest of Bums fans are beating their gums, that’s Amoros!”

  The one person not beating his gums happened to matter most—manager Alston. Dink Carroll, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, astutely noted that “Wally Alston isn’t particularly strong for Amoros, for one reason or another.” The reason, Carroll suspected, was that Alston thought he saw a fatal flaw in his hitting star during the 1953 season with the Royals: when he got knocked down by opposing pitchers, he seemed to back off the plate and was afraid of the ball the rest of the game. This led Carroll to conclude that no matter how well Amoros played, he would be back in Montreal soon, which was just what Royals fans selfishly wanted.

  Amoros was still in Brooklyn when the Royals, after a week of sloppy play and rain on the road, held their home opener against Syracuse on the last day of April at their bandbox stadium, Delormier Downs. It was a balmy spring day, with fans on the first-base side luxuriating in the afternoon sunshine. Montreal’s mayor, Camillien Houde, threw out the first ball, and the Fusiliers de Montreal played the anthems, and the largest crowd at a home opener since 1946 (Jackie Robinson’s brilliant debut) settled in for the game. The previous day’s paper had not listed Clemente in the projected starting lineup, but there he was, wearing No. 5, trotting out to center field. This was the Vero Beach opener revisited—Clemente at his best in an 8–7 Royals win. He batted fifth, went three for four, drove in a run, executed a pivotal sacrifice bunt to set up the winning run in the tenth, and “made some sparkling catches in centre-field,” reported Lou Miller, the Gazette writer.

  After the first four games, Clemente was leading the team in batting, going four for eight. Then he disappeared again. Amoros was shipped down from Brooklyn, just as Dink Carroll had predicted, and Gino Cimoli was battling for more playing time, and veterans Dick Whitman and Jack Dempsey Cassini elbowed for playing time—and suddenly the outfield was loaded and Clemente became the odd man out. There was talk then and later about the racial politics of the situation. Some have asserted that the reason the Dodgers refused to protect Clemente, the bonus baby, by keeping him on the major league club all year, was that the team already had reached its limit of black players. The Dodgers had Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Junior Gilliam starting in the field, and Don Newcombe and Joe Black on the mound. There was a large dose of truth to the suspicion that unstated quotas existed then, but another baseball reality had a bearing on the story. Sandy Amoros, the black Cuban, was indisputably ahead of Clemente on the Brooklyn ladder after his outstanding year in Triple-A ball. It was Amoros, more than Clemente, who suffered because of the implicit quota, since he was more likely to be the fourth black in the Dodgers lineup. The first injustice was his demotion, and from there followed the outfield shuffling in Montreal that made less room for Clemente.

  The reasons Clemente would not get much playing time in Montreal were also a mix of baseball practicality on the field level and duplicity from above. Who knows how much he would have played had he been white and not a bonus baby? If they were not huge talents, Whitman and Cassini were seasoned vets with a little major league experience. Whitman, then thirty-three, had played for the Dodgers after the war, and spent four years with the 83rd Infantry Division, winning a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge. Nothing in the International League scared him. Cimoli could get hot for a few days and carry the club. Montreal had a first-place tradition, an expectation of success, and even if the Royals were a minor league team, winning was at least equal in priority to the development of raw prospects.

  Any urge the Brooklyn organization felt to develop Clemente was overtaken by two seemingly contradictory notions that nonetheless each worked against the young bonus baby. The Dodgers wanted to hide him, but they also sensed that hiding him was impossible and whatever they did with him would only be to the benefit of some other team that drafted him. Their reasoning was illogical, their actions halfhearted, but the orders were to play him only occasionally. Max Macon, the manager, denied that he was being told whom to play, but few took that claim at face value. Glenn Cox, a pitcher on the team, said players always know about other players, and it was obvious to all of them that Clemente was something special and deserved more time. “Macon had orders, and that was that,” said Bob Watt, who served as road secretary for the Royals. “Whenever we’d spot a scout in the stands, that would be the end of Clemente for that day. He never had the chance to show what he could do.” The thinking in Brooklyn, Buzzie Bavasi acknowledged later, went like this: “Since we were going to lose him anyhow in the draft, why should we spend so much time developing him for somebody else? We used other players and Clemente went in only on defense in the late innings or played sparingly.”

  • • •

  Clemente and Chico Fernández, the Cuban shortstop, lived in a rooming house a few blocks down Delormier Avenue from the stadium, the same place where Walter Alston had stayed the year before. Neither of them had a car, but they could walk to work, and got around town on the streetcar that ran up and down the avenue. Their rooms were in the French half of town, and the widow who ran the house spoke neither Spanish nor English. Her daughter was just starting to learn English and knew less than Clemente, who had studied English in high school but rarely used it in Puerto Rico. He could understand the language better than he spoke it. Fernández had picked up enough English phrases during his two years playing ball in the States to serve as a go-between. When Amoros joined them in May, the job more than doubled. Amoros barely tried to speak or understand English. If Max Macon, who knew a bit of Spanish from playing one year in the Cuban winter league, had something important to convey to Amoros, he went through his shortstop, as did the sportswriters. “Helluva ballplayer,” Fernández recalled of Amoros. “But he didn’t care that much” about communicating.

  The rooming house offered beds but no meals. From the time they awoke, the players were on their own for food. Every morning, they ended up at the same breakfast joint, and ordered the same meal. Ham and eggs, said Fernández. Ham and eggs, echoed Clemente. If there were Cuban or Mexican restaurants in Montreal, they never found t
hem. Now and then they made it downtown to clubs. On any scale measuring racial tolerance, Montreal in 1954 was closer to Puerto Rico than to Florida. With its cosmopolitan reputation, it had been the logical choice as the city where Jackie Robinson would break organized baseball’s color line. But it was by no means free from prejudice. Clemente made friends with a young French-Canadian woman and left tickets for her to come to a game, but didn’t leave them under his name because he wasn’t sure how she would be treated. After the game, when they were talking outside the stadium, an older woman criticized them for socializing. During Clemente’s first month in Montreal, several stories in the Gazette documented the frustrations of Charles Higgins, a thirty-one-year-old bricklayer, father of three, and World War II veteran of the Canadian Army, who was denied housing by forty landlords because he was black.

  Fernández had been around the cities of North America before, but for Clemente everything on the road was new. Old hotels, food, accents, what people laughed at, or took offense at, the awkwardness of being separated from teammates to sleep on the other side of town in Richmond. At the Powers Hotel in Rochester, Clemente approached the traveling secretary in the lobby and softly asked for a loan. Why do you need money? Bob Watt asked. Clemente said he wanted to buy a shaver, a Remington electric. Watt teased him, but gave him the money. Shy kid, Watt thought. Quiet. Never bothered anyone.

  For the most part, Clemente and Fernández were achingly lonesome for home, wherever they were: for chicken and plantains and black beans and sofrito and spiced pork, but only one of them was frustrated. Fernández was playing shortstop every day, making the plays. “Max was crazy about me,” he said of the manager, who had coached him in Miami two years earlier. If Macon was crazy about Clemente, he never showed it. Not playing and not earning praise were as new to him as the language and the setting. “He was good, but, like me, desperate to play,” Fernández said later. “And since he didn’t play, he was real upset about it. It is lonely. When you are in some place for six months and not playing, that is bad. And he wasn’t playing.”

  At night, Clemente would pour out his frustrations. It seemed that whenever he got a chance and played well, Macon benched him. Once they pinch hit for him with the bases loaded in the first inning. He got so disgusted he threw a bat onto the field. Fernández tried to explain. First of all, he said, there were so many good players in the Brooklyn system that it was hard for everyone. Rocky Nelson, Norm Larker, Jim Gentile, they all had been stacking up at first base because the Dodgers had Gil Hodges. At short, Fernández knew he had Pee Wee Reese blocking the way, and there was this phenom Don Zimmer out in St. Paul. Same way in the outfield, Momen, he said. And it was obvious that someone in Brooklyn didn’t want him to play. Max has gotta do what the big club tells him. Clemente talked about going back to Puerto Rico. Fernández said it would be a big mistake. Neither of them could sleep much. They were both consumed by baseball. If Fernández wasn’t hitting, his mind raced with worries about his slump. If he was hitting, he stayed awake yearning for his next time at bat. In his mind’s eye, he practiced swinging from his new stance, over and over, the low crouch he had developed during the winter in Cuba. Clemente just wanted to get in the lineup.

  After a mediocre first month, the Royals started to look formidable again by late May. A full complement of veterans bolstered the lineup, led at the plate by Amoros and slugger Rocky Nelson, who had been dropped by the Cleveland Indians. Delormier Downs, with its short porch in right, was made for the stocky left-handed slugger, who had cracked a record thirty-four homers in 1953. To strengthen the pitching staff, Ed Roebuck and Tom Lasorda had been sent down from Brooklyn, and Joe Black, struggling with the Dodgers, was also on his way. Lasorda had lost his spot on the big club when the Dodgers activated another bonus baby who, unlike Clemente, they kept on the twenty-five-man major league roster and did not try to hide in Canada. He was a left-handed pitcher named Sandy Koufax. Clemente was the team ghost, so deep in the dugout that he couldn’t even get in a good scrap when the Sugar Kings arrived in Montreal for their first five-game visit.

  Havana was stocked with Cuban players and managed by the Cuban Regie Otero. They had a fine time during the series razzing the two Cubans on the Royals, Fernández and Amoros, who played with many of them back home during the winter. A constant stream of profanity flew back and forth in Spanish, all of it beyond the comprehension of the International League umpires. Midway through the game on Thursday, May 27, Amoros was at the plate and made a half-swing at a pitch, which the umpire called a ball. Otero rushed from his dugout, furious, claiming that Amoros had gone around far enough for a swinging strike. After what was described as a “far from complimentary” exchange of suggestions between the batter and opposing manager, tempers remained edgy the rest of the game.

  When it was over, according to Dink Carroll’s reconstruction of the confrontation in his Gazette column, the Sugar Kings had to walk through the Royals dugout on their way to the clubhouse. As Mike Guerra, Havana’s catcher, passed the Royals, he noticed that Macon and Rocky Nelson were standing sentinel in front of Amoros.

  “What are you doing, trying to protect him?” Guerra asked.

  “Why don’t you mind your own business,” Macon responded.

  Guerra answered with a kick to Macon’s shins.

  Macon smacked Guerra in the nose, and they wrestled until they were separated. Later, as the Sugar Kings were loading for the trip back to their hotel, Guerra and manager Otero stood outside the bus, waiting to confront Macon again, but he slipped out a stadium door.

  Ten days later, the Royals undertook their first trip to Havana. As part of the agreement that Sugar Kings owner Roberto Maduro had struck to gain his franchise, the seven other teams paid their own way to Richmond, the league’s southernmost city on the mainland, and the Sugar Kings subsidized their flights from there. The schedule was drawn so that teams played a series against the Virginians on the way to Cuba. Late on the Saturday night of June 5, tired and famished, the Royals caught a bus from Parker Field out to the airport in Richmond. Frustrated to discover that the airport restaurant was already closed, Macon divided the team into two groups to scrounge for food at nearby roadside diners. But the four Royals with dark skin, Clemente, Amoros, Fernández, and Joe Black (he had joined the team that week), were denied service at the diners, so Macon picked up sandwiches and milk for them. After several delays, the charter flight left for Miami at 1:45 in the morning. It landed at dawn, and there was another three-hour delay before the fifty-eight-minute skip to Rancho Boyeros airport in Havana. When Clemente and his exhausted teammates slogged to the registration desk at the Hotel Nacional at 9:30, Macon informed them that they had three hours to rest before the bus left for the stadium and a Sunday doubleheader. Not that it mattered much to Clemente. He couldn’t sleep anyway, and he was unlikely to play.

  “They’ll be calling us the Montreal Somnambulists,” said Dixie Howell, the Royals veteran catcher and coach. Somehow, the zombies from the North managed a split, winning the second game behind the two-hit pitching of Joe Black. Amoros, Cimoli, Whitman, and Cassini shared outfield duties, and the bonus baby never got off the bench. The crowd at Gran Stadium was large and buoyant: twenty thousand fans whistling, jeering the umpires, chanting “Sol! Sol! Sol! Sol! Baby!” to the insistent rhythm of conga drums and marimbas. In the press box, writers sipped espresso cups of Cuban coffee and downed bottles of “one-eyed Indian” (Hatuey) beer as they looked down on the field and beyond to the old city washed in faded yellow and ivory. Nothing unusual for Clemente and the Latin players, or for Anglo teammates who had played in the winter leagues. Tommy Lasorda, a born ham, would even delight the crowd by doing a little wriggle to the rhythm before he went into his windup on the mound. But for those experiencing baseball in the Caribbean for the first time, it all seemed exotic and a bit dangerous, reinforcing stereotypes. “The Cuban fan is a complete extrovert and does everything but get right into the ball game,” Dink Carroll observe
d after his first day at the park. “After watching them for a while, it’s easy to believe a paragraph we read in a local publication: ‘In Cuba people talk about two things: politics and baseball. These are passionate topics leading often to violent discussions.’”

  Butch Bouchard, a former Canadiens hockey player and Montreal restaurateur who came South with the team for a vacation, joked that if Cubans got into hockey “There’d be nobody alive when the game ended.”

  When Mickey McGowan, a writer for the Montreal Star, noticed a stirring in the crowd after a loudspeaker announcement, he blurted out, “What is it? A call for the militia?”

  Collier’s Tom Meany had to explain that it was merely notice of a gift giveaway for kids who attended the doubleheader the following Sunday.

  Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, was also on the scene. After taking in Joe Black’s impressive performance, he skipped the rest of the games to go deep-sea fishing in the Gulf with Bud Holman, his pal from Eastern Airlines. Not a bad place to hang out for a few days. The Hotel Nacional, sitting on a hill overlooking the blue-green Caribbean, was all comfort and ease, the good life, with two swimming pools, sweet flowering bushes, a putting green, high-ceilinged rooms with fans and air-conditioning, rum, beer, and beautiful women. One night, after the game, Rocky Nelson strolled through the lobby chomping a Cuban cigar, rounding up teammates for poker. They hooked Max Macon and drained his wallet until he was almost broke. According to Glenn Cox, the manager pushed back from his seat at the table, held up his last $10 bill, shouted “You guys aren’t gonna get this!” and went over to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Then he said: No more high-stakes poker on the road.