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

by David Maraniss

  You cannot, even if there are facilities, take them to the town’s sprawling beaches or parks, unless, of course, they are designated as “Negro.”

  You cannot do anything that you would normally do in any of the major league cities where you make your living during the summer.

  You are quartered in a neighborhood that ordinarily you would be ashamed to be seen in.

  You are horribly embarrassed each day when the bus returning the players from the ball park stops on “this side of the railroad tracks” and deposits you in “Colored Town,” and then proceeds on to the plush hotel where your white teammates live in splendor and luxury.

  You suffered a bruised leg sliding into second base, but you cannot receive immediate treatment from the club trainer because he is living in the “white” hotel. If he can get away during the night and come to your segregated quarters, he will, of course; but for obvious reasons, he prefers to wait until daylight.

  Your wife cannot call you in case of emergency from your home because the place where you are incarcerated does not have phone facilities available at all times.

  That is what it is like to be a Negro big leaguer in Florida during spring training . . . And the story has been only half told.

  The spring training headquarters for the White Sox was the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, which banned journalist Smith and the black players. When Smith pressed the owner, a building contractor named James Ewell, to explain his policy, Ewell said he was following the social practices of the Sarasota community. Also, he claimed that if he opened his establishment to blacks he would lose contracting work: “My clients throughout Florida and other sections of the south would reject my business, I believe.” The White Sox situation was made more interesting by the fact that the team’s president, Bill Veeck, had been in the forefront of integrating baseball and was not oblivious to the plight of his black players. Veeck had found another place for them, the DeSoto Motel, which was run by Edward Wachtel and his wife, Lillian, a white Jewish couple from New York, who had retired to Florida and wanted in their own “quiet” way to break the segregation policies of their new home. For this gesture, the Wachtels received anonymous bomb threats, hate mail, and late-night telephone calls warning that crosses would be burned on their lawn. Their modest green-and-white one-story motel was located in a white neighborhood on Route 301 a mile or so from the rest of the team. The DeSoto was clean but modest, with far fewer services than the Sarasota Terrace. The neon sign out front boasted HEATED * AIR CONDITIONED * OVERNITES * EFFICIENCIES.

  Veeck had tried to balance the conditions by hiring a cook, maid service, and transportation to and from the ball park. On the road, he had made the bold stand of pulling the White Sox from a hotel in Miami because it rejected his black players. Still, it wasn’t until Wendell Smith began his incessant campaign that the White Sox took the final step of leasing their own hotel in Sarasota so the entire team could stay together.

  Down at the Pirates training camp in Fort Myers, where conditions were worse, Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr., a journalistic disciple of Smith, was determined to lend his voice to the integration campaign. From his first day in town, Nunn began interviewing players and club executives for a full-page story. There had been few advances since 1955, the first Pirates camp in Fort Myers, when young Clemente was sent off to a rooming house in the Dunbar Heights section of town where he had to eat and sleep apart from his teammates. Including top minor leaguers, there were now fifteen black players in the Pirates camp, led by Clemente and Gene Baker, a veteran infielder. In interviews with Nunn, both expressed their disgust. “We live in a world apart down here,” Baker told Nunn. “We don’t like it and we’ve voiced our objections. We only hope we get action.” At the ball park during the day, Baker said, he enjoyed talking to teammates Don Hoak and Gino Cimoli about their shared passion, greyhound racing. But when they went to the dog track at night, Baker had to go through the entrance marked “Colored” and sit apart from them.

  Clemente was described as “bitter” about the situation. Here he was, a star player on the world champions of baseball, a reservist in the U.S. Marine Corps, still treated like a second-class citizen. “There is nothing for us to do down here,” he told Nunn. “We go to the ball park, play cards, and watch television. In a way it’s like being in prison. Everybody else on the team has fun during spring training. They swim, play golf, and go to the beaches. The only thing we can do is put in time until we head North. It’s no fun.”

  Later, when asked to list his heroes, Clemente would place Martin Luther King Jr. at the top of the list. He supported integration, the norm in Puerto Rico, and believed in King’s philosophy of nonviolence. Yet in some ways his sensibility brought him closer to Malcolm X. He detested any response to Jim Crow segregation that made him seem to beg. In his early years with the Pirates, whenever the team stopped at a roadside restaurant on the way to or from a spring training away game, the black players would remain on the bus, waiting for white teammates to bring out food for them. Clemente put a stop to it by telling his black teammates that anyone who begged for food would have to fight him to get it. As he recalled the scene later, he went to Joe L. Brown, the Pirates general manager, and said the situation was demeaning. “So I say to Joe Brown, ‘We won’t travel anymore with the bus. If we can’t eat where the white players eat I don’t want to go with the bus.’ So Joe Brown said, ‘Well, we’re going to get a station wagon for you fellows to travel in.’ And [now] we’re traveling in a station wagon.” That still left a long way to go to reach equality.

  During the first week of exhibition games, Nunn interviewed Brown and asked him why he allowed the team to be divided by segregation. The general manager said that he had met with the Fort Myers town fathers, who told him local law prohibited the mingling of races in hotels or motels, but that he felt he was making progress in getting them to change their practices. “I talked to all of the city officials about this situation of separate quarters for our players this year. I didn’t go to these men to make demands,” Brown said. “I explained our problem to them and told them we wanted integration at all levels for our players. I was pleased with the reception I received. The city officials listened to my complaints and appeared receptive. They didn’t make any promises but I believe they are just as eager to have this problem solved as we are.” Integration would take time, Brown told Nunn. He considered it a step forward that city officials even agreed to talk about it. Brown was a Californian who had no use for segregation, but he also was a businessman who did not want to alienate the Fort Myers establishment. “Frankly, we have no real complaints against the city of Fort Myers,” he concluded. “We have been treated wonderfully since coming here. The facilities are good and I’ve heard no objections from the Negro members of our club on the segregation issue.”

  That last comment reflected a common attitude among baseball executives, and many sportswriters, who were so lulled by their own comfortable situations and the lazy ease of their sport in springtime that it was difficult for them to see the reality. When the Fort Myers Boosters Club held a Pirates Welcome Luncheon at the Hideaway, the guest list included Brown and manager Danny Murtaugh, Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence, Ford Frick, the baseball commissioner, Warren Giles, the president of the National League, and several heroes of the World Series, but not Clemente, who could not get into the building unless he worked as a waiter or dishwasher. That same day, at ten in the morning, a forty-three-minute highlight film of the World Series was shown at the Edison Theater downtown, and notices announced there was no charge and “the public is invited—men, women and children.” As long as they were white. When the Fort Myers Country Club sponsored its annual Pirates Golf Tourney, the News-Press listed the foursomes, comprised of players, coaches, businessmen, and sportswriters. Brown and Murtaugh played, along with Groat and Friend and Schofield and Stuart and twenty more members of the Pirates organization. The Pirates were described as acting “like boys let out of school.�
� When the golfing was done, they were all served “a bountiful buffet dinner.” Clemente and his black teammates were back in Dunbar Heights.

  In the bonhomie of the occasion, no one noticed who wasn’t there. Ducky Schofield, the utility infielder, was perhaps typical of white Pirates who were not racist but also did not seem to take into account how social conditions might have deeper effects on black teammates. When asked later whether Clemente was disliked by some of the Pirates of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Schofield said: “I’m sure there were some who didn’t like him. . . . Maybe it was because he didn’t put forth a whole lot of energy as far as being one of the guys. I think he pretty much stuck to himself quite a bit. In those days, guys ran in groups. Guys would eat together, have a couple of beers. Not that he had to do it, but I never saw him do it.”

  Exclusive events like the Fort Myers welcome luncheon and golf outing were held in spring-training towns throughout Florida. But unlike previous springs, this time they were loudly criticized. The most attention was drawn to St. Petersburg, which called itself the capital of the Grapefruit League as home to the Yankees and Cardinals. Both teams had been staying at segregated hotels, the Cardinals at the Vinoy Park and the Yankees at the Soreno, but under pressure from the local NAACP and black players, the system was finally being cracked. When Soreno’s management refused to change its policy, the Yankees picked up and moved across the state to Fort Lauderdale, and in the aftermath, St. Pete officials were so worried about losing baseball entirely that the Cardinals were finally allowed to house their entire team in the same hotel. Small victories of that sort were being won here and there, rivulets in the mighty stream of civil rights. On March 13, in Miami Beach, Floyd Patterson defended his heavyweight boxing crown in a title match with Ingemar Johansson, and along with Patterson’s victory the most newsworthy aspect of the fight was that, at the champ’s insistence, the color bar was lifted in the Convention Hall. “Negroes were spotted freely among the predominantly white crowd in all sections,” the New York Times reported, and “so far as could be noted, no incidents arose from the integrated set-up.” It was an off-day for the Pirates, and third-baseman Don Hoak, who had been a decent amateur boxer, covered the event for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Yet in Sarasota and other spring-training cities, black ballplayers wanting to watch Patterson were not allowed into the whites-only theaters.

  Change was slow, and did not occur unprovoked. One of the pivotal events that spring came when the chamber of commerce held a Salute to Baseball at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. Bill White, the Cardinals first baseman, blasted the lily-white event as a symbol of baseball’s capitulation to Southern racism. His words echoed across the state and nation. “I think about this every minute of the day,” White told Joe Reichler of United Press International. “This thing keeps gnawing at my heart. When will we be made to feel human?”

  For Clemente, already simmering over the personal slight of the MVP vote, the second-class treatment he encountered in Florida as a star player on a World Championship team only stoked his fire. He was a baseball player, not a journalist or politician, and it was on the baseball diamond that he expressed himself most often. In his first batting drill of the spring, he cracked a relentless volley of blistering line drives and then slammed two balls out of the park, and it seemed that he never stopped hitting from there. The most anticipated exhibition contest of the spring was a rematch with the Yankees, a game that drew a standing-room-only crowd of 5,351 to Terry Park. In the second inning of a game the Pirates won 9–2, Clemente started the scoring with a towering home run to left. It was just a solo homer in a meaningless spring game, but it was also a statement: Clemente was not to be ignored. Several factors were coming together to transform him from a dangerous hitter with weaknesses into a great hitter who was essentially unpitchable.

  George H. Sisler, the sweet-swinging Hall of Fame first baseman, deserved a generous share of credit. Gorgeous George, who hit for a .340 career average from 1915 to 1930 and twice batted over .400, had been working as a special assistant with the Pirates throughout Clemente’s first six seasons. Even now, as he was turning sixty-eight, he still knew how to help good hitters improve, and he thought Clemente was on the verge of becoming the best hitter in the National League. Sisler’s first breakthrough with Clemente had been teaching him to stop lifting his head, or bobbing it, as he strode into the swing. By holding his head still, and keeping it down, Clemente could train his eye on curveballs as they broke down and away, pitches that gave him trouble earlier. As a slashing line-drive hitter himself, Sisler also helped Clemente work on staying back on the ball and keeping his hands in, close to the chest, a technique known as swinging from the inside out. Sisler had no problem with another aspect of Clemente’s hitting that others criticized, a tendency to swing at bad balls; what was important, he thought, was having an idea of what pitches you could hit, and in that regard he considered Clemente uncommonly intelligent at the plate.

  Paradoxical as it sounds, another factor in Clemente’s development as a hitter was his aching back, which had bothered him off and on since the December 30 traffic accident in Caguas in 1954. There were times when the injury was debilitating, particularly during the 1956 season, when he developed a pinched nerve, but most of the time he could play through it. In a sense, it proved to be long-term pain for long-term gain. The pain that occasionally knifed into the lower left side of his back forced him to slow his swing—perhaps a mere nanosecond slower, but enough to prevent him from trying to pull every pitch—again, the weakness that Branch Rickey at first feared would be his undoing. Instead, he started hitting the ball more to center and right. “I learned to go with the pitch,” Clemente said later, out of physical necessity. That might explain why at times during his career when he was feeling free and easy, without pain, he might end up swinging so violently his head would bob and he would lose his balance and virtually whirling-dervish his way to the ground; but conversely, whenever his teammates heard him moaning about a bad back, they joked to themselves that the opposing pitcher was in trouble and a four-hit day was in the offing.

  A third element in Clemente’s refinement as a hitter involved his selection of bats. Early in his career with the Pirates, he used thirty-two and thirty-three-ounce M117 (Stan Musial) model Louisville Sluggers, and then S-2s, which were first made for Vern Stephens, the power-hitting shortstop who played most of his career with the St. Louis Browns and Red Sox in the 1940s and early fifties. But by 1961 he was using much bigger and heavier bats, mostly thirty-six inches and thirty-four to thirty-five ounces. The models were U1s, named for one Bernard Bartholomew Uhalt, known to his friends as Frenchy. The major league career of Frenchy Uhalt amounted to fifty-seven games with the Chicago White Sox in 1934. His bat seemed to have very few hits in it—five doubles, one triple, thirty-four singles—yet it made a significant contribution to the history of baseball as the model favored by Roberto Clemente. What was most notable about the U1 was that it didn’t have a knob, but instead tapered out at the bottom. It felt exactly right in Clemente’s sensitive hands, and the extra weight, like his bad back, had the effect of forcing him to hit more straightaway and to right.

  To Clemente, a bat was not just a bat, it was an instrument that had to meet his exacting standards. “He probably knew as much about timber as anyone,” recalled Rex Bradley, the Hillerich & Bradsby executive in charge of Louisville Slugger bat sales to major leaguers. “He knew if he had a good piece of bat. He would bang them together and see if they sounded good. He could tell from the sound.” Wood was not only essential to Clemente’s profession, it was also his hobby. During the off-season in Puerto Rico, he loved nothing more than combing the Atlantic beach from Punta Cangrejos to Punta Maldonado in search of driftwood he could use to make lamps and furniture. As an amateur carpenter, he studied the hardness and grains of different woods. He once sent a note to Bradley stating that he wanted “no red wood”—which meant no wood from the heart of the ash tree, which was a darker
color. “He wanted the widest grains, always,” according to Bradley. “And he knew the wide grains came in the summer growth, he was that precise.”

  With all this—with pure talent, with pride and will fueled by the need to prove his doubters wrong, with the expert instruction of Hall of Famer George Sisler, with the beneficial swing adjustments arising from his bad back, and with the comfort of the heavier, knobless Frenchy Uhalt bats, Clemente came blasting into the prime of his career.

  • • •

  In baseball, as in so many other ways, 1961 launched the sixties decade on its stunning trajectory. Life reinvented, and seeming so much larger. Two more teams were added to the American League: in Washington (again, a reborn version of the old last-place Senators) and Los Angeles. The National League had the Mets and Colt .45s in gestation, a year from taking the field. In persuading major league owners to grant Houston a franchise, Judge Roy Hofheinz had already wowed them with a model he had built of the world’s first domed stadium. With its expansion teams, the American League had scheduled the longest regular season in major league history, extended to 162 games. Was it a prefiguring of the antiestablishment mood that emerged later in the decade, or just plain madcap hopelessness, that found the Chicago Cubs that year rejecting the concept of a single manager and instead delegating authority to a succession of feeble coaches? The Yankees still wore pinstripes, but Casey Stengel, the Ol’ Perfessor, was gone, Mickey Mantle told the press he would assume a stronger leadership role, and the new boss, Ralph Houk, said his team looked lean and mean. The big bats started booming in April. By the end of the month, Mantle had fourteen home runs and his outfield mate, Roger Maris, had twelve, and the pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record was on. Six months later, Maris held the record, sixty-one, ahead of Mantle’s fifty-four, and four other Yankees, Moose Skowron, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, and Johnny Blanchard, finished with more than twenty home runs each. Even taking into account the two additional teams, 1961 was prodigious, the year of the homer. The 2,730 total home runs in the two leagues were nearly five-hundred more than any previous year.