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

by David Maraniss

  Havana was not home for Momen, but it was close enough. There was even a Morro Castle, jutting into the sea, a fortress much like El Morro at the tip of Old San Juan. Clemente made friends with the jack-of-all-trades for the Sugar Kings (publicist, radio announcer, promotions director, and road secretary), the gregarious Ramiro Martínez. It was Martínez who branded the logo for the Sugar Kings, a cartoon character shaped like a baseball named Beisbolito. He also came up with the idea of publicizing the new team by flying a plane over Havana and dropping thousands of matchbook sewing kits that featured Beisbolito on the cover. Years later, after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and the baseball franchise fled to New Jersey, Martínez would settle in Puerto Rico and remain close to Clemente, whom he called “the top personality I ever met in my life.” At first, he knew him only as a talented, lonely young man. The highlight of the trip for Clemente came when Chico Fernández picked him up at the hotel and drove him over to the Fernández house: the big family, the teasing and laughing, the mother making a home-cooked meal—it reminded him of Carolina.

  In the six-game series, the Royals won three, lost two, and tied one. The final game was scoreless in the tenth inning when they had to call it so the Royals could catch their plane back to Montreal. Joe Black had pitched nine more shutout innings. Over the entire series, Clemente never played. Too many scouts in Havana was the word.

  • • •

  Scouts and baseball officials were always roaming the International League circuit. A week after the Royals returned home from Havana, Dodgers personnel man Andy High visited Montreal to assess the talent. Rumors were going around that another organization had offered the Dodgers $150,000 for Amoros. “It isn’t hard to believe,” High told the Montreal press. The baseball men in Brooklyn hadn’t given up on Amoros, he insisted. They didn’t think he was much of a fielder, and his arm was weak, but he sure could hit the ball hard. It took Duke Snider a few times to make the big club, too, High pointed out.

  The writers asked him about Don Hoak, the former Royal who was starting at third for the Dodgers in place of the injured Billy Cox. High had nothing but praise. “Hoak is a dynamic type of player,” he said, and would stay in the lineup as long as he was hitting. They also loved the way he charged slow-hit grounders and fielded them with his “meat hand.” Still, Cox remained the best-fielding third baseman in the league, even if he was colorless and backed up on hard-hit ground balls.

  What about Chico Fernández? Would he ever hit big-league pitching?

  “Chico doesn’t have to hit too much,” High said. “I guess you’ve noticed that he’s changed his stance this year. He’s crouching. That’s something he developed in the winter league in Cuba. I remember I was watching him with Fresco Thompson this spring training in Vero Beach. The first time he came to the plate and went into that crouch, Fresco said, ‘Ho, ho, take a look at this! We’ve got a new hitter.’ But he makes some great plays in the field. We don’t teach young ball players to go after a ball with one hand; they do that by themselves. But they’re apt to make those seemingly impossible plays because they practice that way.”

  There was more talk about Don Zimmer and Moose Moryn, Dodgers prospects in St. Paul. Not a word about Roberto Clemente. Better not to put his name in the papers.

  A month later, after a long road trip, the Royals came back to town and found Dodgers front-office men Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis waiting for them. During the final road stop in Toronto, Max Macon had been kicked out of a game for the third time that year, and was about to be suspended and fined for almost coming to blows with home-plate umpire Carlisle Burch. But Bavasi and Campanis had other concerns. The Dodgers were going nowhere, lost in the whirlwind of Willie Mays and his Giants. Tommy Lasorda had just been recalled to help the pitching, and they were looking again at Joe Black. They were also worried about the frustrations of their Latin players. Amoros was discouraged. Fernández wondered whether he would ever get a chance. And Clemente wanted to go home.

  It was Campanis who had first seen his uncommon talent during that tryout at Sixto Escobar two years earlier and had stamped Clemente for greatness. How could he be great if he didn’t play? Don’t leave, Campanis urged him. Trust us. You’ll get your chance. The next night, in a mess of a game that the Royals lost 22–4, Clemente was inserted into the lineup in the second inning, replacing Whitman, and got two hits in three at-bats. He played some more during that series against the Maple Leafs, but then, with Bavasi and Campanis gone, it was back to the bench.

  The effort to hide Clemente from the world, or more specifically from the last place Pittsburgh Pirates, who would have the first selection in the supplemental draft at season’s end, was ineffective. Branch Rickey, who ran the Dodgers organization for most of the 1940s, had moved on to Pittsburgh at the start of the fifties, where he had struggled to lift a pathetic Pirates club out of the National League cellar. Although there had been no notable success at the big-league level to show for it, Rickey was starting to accumulate talent, with the help of two superb scouts who had come with him from Brooklyn, Clyde Sukeforth and Howie Haak. They were opposites in personality: Suke-forth a modest, efficient, polite New Englander, Haak (pronounced Hake) a prodigiously profane baseball addict who chewed tobacco from the moment he got up and could keep a wad going in his mouth while eating scrambled eggs. But they were two of the best talent evaluators in the game. With Rickey’s intimate knowledge of the Dodgers and their system, and with his scouts at his call to go wherever he needed them, there was no way a prospect like Roberto Clemente, dangling out there, ready to be drafted at the end of the year, was going to escape their notice. At various times during the summer, Rickey dispatched Sukeforth and then Haak out to report on Montreal’s bonus baby.

  As Sukeforth later told the story, he checked on the Royals during a series against Richmond. Just observing Clemente in outfield practice, when he unloosed one stunning throw after another, and at the plate during batting practice, when he kept drilling shots back through the box, was enough. It hardly mattered that Macon kept Clemente on the bench.

  Before he left town, Sukeforth approached the Montreal manager and said, “Take care of our boy!”

  “You’re kidding. You don’t want that kid,” Macon answered.

  “Now, Max. I’ve known you for a good many years,” the scout said, softly chiding Macon. “We’re a cinch to finish last and get first draft choice. Don’t let our boy get in trouble.”

  Not long thereafter, Rickey sent Haak up to Montreal to double-check. Haak, with his belly paunch, slicked-back gray hair, and pants that constantly drooped down a flat rear, drove to Montreal nonstop in his beat-up old car with a spittoon next to the driver’s seat. He would drive anywhere to see anyone, and was known for being able to size up a player in a minute or two, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. As Haak later recounted the scene in writer Kevin Kerrane’s delicious book of interviews with baseball scouts, Dollar Sign on the Muscle, Rickey instructed him to watch the Royals without specifically stating what player to scout. “I knew who it was, though. Another Pirate scout [Sukeforth] had already been up to Montreal and he’d raved to me about this kid the Dodgers had hid out there. . . . When I walked into the Montreal clubhouse, I said hello to Max Macon, the manager, and he said, ‘You son of a bitch, what’re you doing here?’ I said, ‘I came to talk to you.’ He said, ‘You’re fulla shit. You’re here to look at Clemente. Well, you aren’t going to see him play!’”

  Macon kept Clemente in the dugout again, but Haak outmaneuvered him. He met Clemente after the game and found the young outfielder in a perplexed mood, steamed again about being consigned to the bench. With that psychological opening, Haak told Clemente that he should bleeping stay where he bleeping was and keep bleeping quiet, because the bleeping Pirates bleeping wanted him. The Dodgers might not bleeping appreciate him, Haak said, but Mr. Rickey and the Pirates sure as bleeping did. And if they drafted him, he’d be playing in bleeping Forbes Field next bleeping year.

 
For a few weeks after Haak’s visit, Clemente found more playing time in left, center, and right. On August 14, his picture made the papers, but not the way he would have wished. The photograph showed No. 5 being lifted to a stretcher and carried off the field after he twisted his ankle stepping in a hole near the pitcher’s mound as he ran in from left at the end of the sixth inning. It turned out to be a minor sprain, and he was eager to show his manager that he could run without trouble. Two days later, on the road, he was back in the starting lineup, and his throwing arm was the headline after a game against the Maple Leafs: CLEMENTE’S TOSS HELPS ROYALS DEFEAT TORONTO. Here was the true harbinger of things to come, the thrill of a pure Clemente moment. He was playing right field that night, where he belonged. Bottom of the ninth, two out, Toronto’s Connie Johnson on second base, Ed Stevens raps a single to right, Clemente charges hard (he said he was always blessed with the ability to run fast in a crouching position), scoops the ball on the run, and catapults himself into the air as he unleashes a perfect overhand peg to the plate. Game over.

  At year’s end, his statistics were meager. Games Played: 87. At-bats: 148. Home Runs: 2. RBI: 12. Batting Average: .257. But all the numbers said less than that single throw from right ending an otherwise routine game in the middle of August.

  • • •

  Clemente played on several winning baseball teams during his career, but none with more appeal than the team he joined when he came back to Puerto Rico after that frustrating 1954 season in Montreal. Even the batboy on that year’s winter league edition of the Santurce Cangrejeros had enormous talent. He was a gangly, bowlegged teenager named Orlando Cepeda, son of the legendary Pedro Cepeda. Orlando, known later as the Baby Bull, would go on to a Hall of Fame career himself, but now he was just glad to be rubbing shoulders with his elders. During practice every morning at Sixto Escobar, when the Santurce outfielders practiced charging the ball and throwing it in, Cepeda stationed himself near the pitcher’s mound to take their throws. Who was out there throwing to him? Fifty years later, in a deadpan voice, he brought back the names. “Oh, couple guys. Willie Mays in center and Roberto Clemente in left or right.”

  Mays and Clemente, side by side, roaming the same outfield. That possibility was what drove the Dodgers to sign Clemente in the first place, at least in part—to keep him away from Mays and the New York Giants. But it was no problem in Puerto Rico, no nightmare for the Dodgers, only a baseball fan’s delight. Clemente was all fire when he got home, not so much rusty from disuse in Montreal as raging to play and to overcome the injustice of his lost, lonely season. If Mays drew most of the attention, Clemente would make it impossible for people not to notice that he was out there, too.

  This marked Santurce’s seventeenth season, and for Pedrin Zorrilla, the founder and owner, in many ways it was the culmination of a life’s work. Pedrin was the son of a poet, the impassioned romantic Enrique Zorrilla of Manatí, who loved his country and its people.

  Foreigners: make space

  Because here, the Puerto Rican troubadour

  Will sing with noble valor

  Land, blood, name and race.

  But he had no time for baseball and wanted his son to have nothing to do with it, either. The old poet even sent Pedrin off to boarding school in the States with the intent of keeping him away from the dissolute life of an athlete, but it was of no use. Manatí was a place for intellectuals, proud of its reputation as the Athens of Puerto Rico. People there lived for their juegos florales, poetry pageants. But when Pedrin had his own Dream of Deeds (the title of his father’s most famous poem), he dreamed only of baseball. He started the Cangrejeros with no money, rounded up a first team that included many of his friends, and from there built a dynasty.

  Over the years, Zorrilla had lured many great players from the North, but none with the major league glamour of Willie Mays, who less than a month before his arrival had led the New York Giants to victory in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians—and had imprinted his image into the American sporting consciousness forever with his dashing over-the-head catch of Vic Wertz’s drive into deepest center field. In baseball-mad San Juan, Mays was embraced joyously. More than a thousand fans waited in the rain on the gray Saturday morning of October 16 when he arrived at Isla Grande airport, many disbelieving that he was coming, and once he truly arrived, uncertain that he would stay. They quickly took up chants of his trademark greeting, “Say, Hey!” and developed their own Spanish variation, “Ole, Mira!” Like Clemente in Montreal, Mays felt lonesome in San Juan, hating the empty feeling of returning to his spare apartment near the stadium. But he was not among strangers. The manager, Herman Franks, was the third-base coach for the Giants. Santurce’s star pitcher, Puerto Rican Ruben Gomez, was also a Giants teammate, and several American blacks on the team—pitcher Sam Jones, outfielder Bob Thurman, and third baseman Buster Clarkson—knew Mays from the barnstorming circuit.

  Clemente admired Mays, but did not worship him. He preferred the other black Giants outfielder, Monte Irvin, his childhood hero. Some observers would later assume that Clemente learned his basket catch from Mays when they played together that winter. Not so. Clemente had been making basket catches, with the web facing up instead of forward, since his softball days, a style common among Puerto Rican outfielders. Luis Olmo was making basket catches years before Mays came along. Olmo held his basket near his navel; Mays at his hips, and Clemente drooped the glove even lower. On days when Olmo started for the Cangrejeros that winter, they had perhaps baseball’s one and only all-basket outfield. Pete Burnside, a pitcher on the team, later told baseball historian Thomas E. Van Hyning that he sensed “a friendly rivalry” between Mays and Clemente, who were “trying to outdo each other on the field.” Mays and Gomez, the Giants teammates, also had a bit of a rivalry, apparently, and got into a fairly heated shoving match one day during practice, an incident that Zorrilla desperately tried to downplay for fear that apoplectic Giants officials might spirit Mays off the island before he got injured.

  At eleven on the Monday morning of November 22, while the front-running Cangrejeros were practicing on an off-day in Puerto Rico, representatives of the sixteen major league teams gathered in Room 135 of the Biltmore Hotel in New York for what was known formally as the Major-Minor League Rule 5 Selection Meeting. This was the draft of minor league players who had not been protected by the big clubs. The order of selection for two rounds ran from worst record to best, starting with the worst team in the National League, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and ending with the best team in the American League, the Cleveland Indians. Branch Rickey’s son, Branch Rickey Jr., a club vice president, was there representing the Pirates. He carried in his briefcase scouting reports from Sukeforth and Haak, as well as detailed instructions from his father.

  Ford Frick, commissioner of baseball, began the proceedings and called on the Pirates for their selection. What was described as “a gasp of surprise” swept through the room when Rickey Jr. announced the first choice: Roberto Clemente. It might have been a surprise to major league sportswriters, who knew nothing about him and quickly looked up his modest statistics in Montreal, but it was an obvious choice to baseball men in the room. Many of them acknowledged afterward that the young Puerto Rican was the top name on their lists. It is always interesting, in retrospect, to examine a group of names from the past, at a moment of hope and promise, and see if any survived the fate of athletic oblivion. The other ballplayers picked that day included Mickey Grasso, Art Ceccarelli, Parke Carroll, Bob Spicer, Jim King, Vicente Amor, Glenn Gorbous, Jerry Dean, John Robert Kline, Joe Trimble, Roberto Vargas, and Ben Flowers. Some of them can be found in the Baseball Encyclopedia. And then there was Clemente, who came to the Pirates for a mere $4,000 drafting fee. “He can run and throw—and we think he can hit,” Rickey Jr. told the press.

  • • •

  Herman Franks’s lineup card for Santurce was packed with five fearsome hitters: Mays, Clemente, Thurman (known as “Big Swish”), Clarkson (te
am RBI leader with sixty-one), and George Crowe (first baseman who would make it to the majors in 1956)—a group that came to be called “The Panic Squad.” He also had scrappy young Don Zimmer at shortstop, Valmy Thomas and Harry Chiti behind the plate, and aging local stars Olmo and Pepe Lucas St. Clair coming off the bench. “I always said that was the greatest winter league team ever assembled,” Zimmer recalled a half-century later. “Can you imagine Mays, Clemente, and Thurman in the outfield? And Orlando Cepeda just hanging around, a big kid stumbling all over himself because he was growing so fast.” As they ran away with the winter league pennant, Mays, with a .395 average, was the most valuable player and star, but Clemente shone nearly as bright. He hit .344 and led the league in hits (ninety-four) and runs scored (sixty-five). The Crabbers ended the season in mid-February by winning the Caribbean World Series, which was held that year in Caracas. Zimmer, Mays, and Clemente were the stars in Venezuela, with Clemente rapping two triples, his specialty, and scoring eight runs, including one dash from first to home on a single by Mays to win the fifth game. Zorrilla, the Big Crab, said the fury and pride with which Clemente ran the bases was something that he would never forget.