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

by David Maraniss

  There were wins and losses of other sorts when the games were done. After seven and a half seasons at the helm, with that one unforgettable 1960 season and fifty-eight more total wins than losses, but two final losing seasons, Danny Murtaugh stepped down as manager. He was replaced by Harry (the Hat) Walker, the old Cardinals outfielder from the Deep South city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, son and brother of ballplayers called Dixie. The Hat was known for his skills as a teacher and for having a mouth that would never shut.

  Luck is the residue of design, Branch Rickey once said. And now the Mahatma’s own grand design was nearing an end. After leaving the Pirates at the end of the fifties decade, he had found a sinecure with his first team, the Cardinals, as an adviser, and tried not very hard to repress the occasional feelings of envy or schadenfreude that seeped into his mind as he watched Joe L. Brown run his Pirates up to the heights of the World Championship and then slowly down the hill again. The Cardinals now had capped his long and eventful career by catching the Phillies and then outplaying the Yankees in a classic seven-game World Series, but in truth the old man had little to do with it.

  Rickey scouted for general manager Bing Devine (indeed considered himself still the boss and tried to tell Devine what to do) and wrote his acerbic memos to the end. (At a Minnesota Twins game with secretary Ken Blackburn at his side, he said of slugger Harmon Killebrew, who must have reminded him of Ralph Kiner: “The high hard inside pitch he misses . . . Strikes out a great deal. I would not be interested in obtaining his contract in any kind of a possible trade. I don’t want him at the price.” And of pitcher Jim Kaat: “Looks like an athlete and acts like one. He can throw hard and he has a good curve—a corker most of the time. Stress does not agree with him. He is a young chap and ought to become a fine pitcher.”) Rickey also entered the personnel fray during a crucial stretch of the season as an intermediary between Dick Groat, brought over from the Pirates a season earlier, and the laconic manager, Johnny Keane, for whom Groat had no baseball respect. At a private huddle in August, as the Cardinals were about to make their move, Rickey tried to persuade Groat to agree to a trade, to no avail. In fact, Rickey had opposed the acquisition of the quick but slow-footed shortstop in the first place. Groat was stunned by the trade attempt and said that he just wanted to win. He thought if Keane were replaced by Red Schoendienst, the talented Cards would find their way. Groat went on to hit .292 and play almost every day in his last fine season, and the Cards won everything despite Groat’s dismal assessment of Keane, who was appreciated by other Cardinals, especially black stars Bob Gibson and Bill White.

  During the World Series, Rickey cordially invited Brown, his disciple and successor, to breakfast. They had talked baseball, as always, including the future of the Pittsburgh club. Brown’s decision afterward to replace Murtaugh with Walker prompted one final polite memo from Rickey. “Dear Joe,” he wrote. “I think you have made the very best choice for your manager. I know that Danny had good reason for resigning and it was undoubtedly good judgment for him to do that. Harry is a student of baseball and he has had enough managing experience to keep him out of the experimental class. He knows how to handle his manpower. You will surely get good field results from him.”

  Brown responded with a handwritten note:

  Dear Mr. Rickey,

  Thank you for your thoughtful note about Harry Walker . . . I was certain Harry was a good choice at the time of his appointment, and after spending four days and nights with him in Florida, I am more positive than ever. [The new coaches] Hal Smith, Clyde King, John Pesky, and Alex Grammas, who have been added to Harry’s staff . . . are all personable, aggressive, intelligent, experienced, ambitious, comparatively young, and mindful of the necessity for continuing instruction.

  You were nice to have us for breakfast at your lovely home during the Series. It was good to see you, Mrs. Rickey and Auntie looking so well and in good health.

  Rickey was fired by the Cardinals soon after, and within a year he was dead. An irreplaceable if difficult baseball life extinguished at age eighty-three. As he would describe it, the laws of cause and effect worked this one last time with inexorable exactitude.

  Roberto Clemente’s season ended with another win. He finished the year with 211 hits and a batting average of .339, high enough to bring home his second Silver Bat as the league’s leading hitter.

  • • •

  Here, in Carolina, was a day to honor the meaning of home. All morning and into the slow, sweet Saturday afternoon, townspeople had celebrated like it was the festival of a local saint, and as evening approached on November 14, 1964, they congregated in the central plaza outside the San Fernando Church for a final act of worship. Thousands of carolinenses jammed the streets of the quadrangle plaza and elbowed for viewing position under rows of neatly pruned laurel trees. The evening light glowed soothingly on the church’s soft pastels. Inside, three hundred guests sat on hard pews, under the high dome, flowers everywhere. At age thirty, after a decade as a rising star in the major leagues up North, Momen Clemente was getting married. The weight of his achievements in Puerto Rico and the states was evident in the invitation list. There sat Luis Muñoz Marín, the longtime progressive governor of the island. Nearby were general manager Brown and Howie Haak, the brilliantly profane scout, a tobacco plug removed from his jowl for this special occasion. The Clemente family came in, parents Melchor and Luisa and brothers Matino, Osvaldo, and Andres, and various cousins, nieces, and nephews, along with the adopted Pittsburgh parents, the Garlands, Phil Dorsey, and what amounted to a couple of pickup teams of fellow ballplayers.

  Clemente looked as princely in his black tuxedo as he did in the cool white and black of his Pirates uniform. Before the service, as he stood in the sacristy fidgeting, someone approached and wondered whether he was nervous. That was never the right question to ask him. He might be quick to say what was nagging him, and something always was—lack of sleep, pain in the lower back, headache, sore leg—but very rarely would he confess to feeling nervous. “Never,” he said this time. “I feel great!”

  A friend seized the chance to needle the proud Clemente. “Then why don’t you spit out the gum you’re chewing?” he asked.

  Vera Christina Zabala, wearing a dress of Italian silk satin, the sleeves embroidered in white porcelain beads and diminutive pearls, was escorted down the aisle by her father, Flor Manuel Zabala. The matron of honor was Mercedes Velasquez, the neighbor and teacher who a year earlier had complained that Roberto had been driving her crazy by relentlessly trying to press her into service as a matchmaker. Myrna Luz Hernández was the maid of honor, and another Velasquez, Clemente’s friend Victor, stood as best man. When it was time for vows, the audience strained to hear. Tito Paniagua, covering the ceremony for the San Juan Star, noted that Clemente, though his voice was soft, said “acepto” just loud enough for Father Salvador Planas “who called the play, to make it official.”

  Joyous organ music filled the church as the wedding party spilled out to the plaza, where the outdoor crowd, still in the thousands, broke their silence with a thunderous roar as though El Magnífico’s magic arm had nailed another runner at third. The caravan of sedans, led by police escort, weaved through the streets of Carolina toward the reception at the clubhouse of the Phi Eta Mu fraternity in Cupey Bajo, which overflowed with more than eight hundred guests.

  A year earlier, when Vera’s father first met the famous ballplayer, he had wondered why someone who could choose from scores of women had settled on his daughter. The same question seemed to be on the minds of several women Clemente had befriended in Pittsburgh and other National League cities. One woman in New York, not realizing that the marriage had already taken place, sent Clemente a letter that he kept and later showed to Vera. “Dear Roberto,” it began. “What do I have to do to get you to write? I waited for you to come to New York and you didn’t even try to call me. I’m going mad not knowing what you’re doing or when you’re getting married. If there’s something I co
uld do to stop you I would. But you haven’t even given me the chance . . . You don’t understand what the whole thing is doing to me. I’ve never needed anything as much as I need you . . . Roberto, I love you as always. You know I’ll be yours no matter what happens.”

  The Puerto Rican winter league had begun, but Clemente was in no rush to get back to baseball. He and Vera took a honeymoon in the Virgin Islands, then spent the Christmas season between their parents’ houses and a three-acre farm he was renting in the countryside southwest of Carolina. Vera quickly discovered that Clemente was a home-body who was happiest when he was fiddling around the house. He liked to repair equipment, clear brush, and mow the lawn. In his role as a country squire, he proved both skilled and accident prone. One day that December while he was cutting grass, a rock flew up from his mower and struck him in his right thigh, causing a bruise so deep and persistent that by mid-January he was put in the hospital and Dr. Buso performed a minor operation to drain blood from the leg.

  As he was recovering from the operation in February, Clemente organized a group of Puerto Rican and Cuban all-stars to play a series against the best Dominicans. If nothing else, the three-game series played in Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, gave an indication of the progression of baseball hotspots in the Caribbean. First Cuba dominated, then Puerto Rico, and now the DR. Clemente put himself in center, and his team also included major leaguers Juan Pizarro, José Pagán, Cookie Rojas, and Sandy Alomar, but they were outmatched by a Dominican squad that had Juan Marichal on the mound and the three Alou brothers, Felipe, Mateo, and Jesus, in the field. For the third game, Clemente yanked himself from the starting lineup. He said that he felt tired. He entered the game in the seventh inning, only because the fans expected to see him play, and of course, as he usually did when he was feeling poorly, rapped out a hard single. That was the lone game the Puerto Ricans won. By the time they returned to San Juan, he was feeling even weaker.

  In sickness and in health; during her first three months as a bride, Vera saw the strength and vulnerability of her husband. He went to bed and stayed there, his fever rising every day. At times he appeared to be in a stupor, unable to talk. At other times he seemed on the verge of delirium. The nurses gave him sleeping pills, but no medicine short of general anesthesia seemed capable of getting him to sleep.

  What was wrong? At first the doctors suspected he might have picked up a paratyphoid infection from some hogs at his country farm. They put him in the hospital again. He became morbid. He would die young, he told Vera. She should remarry. God forbid, don’t talk about that. Don’t talk about sad things, she answered. His brothers Andres and Matino came to visit and tried to lighten his mood, mocking his fatalism. When your ass becomes so skinny that the back pockets of your pants come together, then you’re dead, Andres joked. The diagnosis remained uncertain, but now it was thought he had contacted malaria during his barnstorming tour in the Dominican Republic. This was not hypochondria, or Clemente just being sensitive. He lost five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-three pounds, until finally the fever broke. By the second week in March, he was out of the hospital. He changed his diet and started drinking fruit cocktail milkshakes made with egg yolks, banana ice cream, orange juice, a peach or pear, and crumbled ice.

  With the Pirates already training in Fort Myers, general manager Brown began calling Clemente every day to check on his condition and find out when he might report. Then, one evening, Brown and his wife, Virginia, who went by the nickname Din, were injured in a traffic accident as they were returning to Fort Myers from dinner in a nearby town. Din was badly hurt, with several broken bones. The next time Brown called Clemente it was from his wife’s bedside at the hospital. Din was crazy about Roberto, who always treated her with warmth and kindness.

  “Din is hurt but is anxious to know how you are doing and when you’ll be able to come,” Brown told Clemente.

  “I’m two or three days away, I think I can come Friday,” Clemente responded. “How is Din doing?”

  “She’s right here, would you like to talk to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you, Roberto?” Din said softly.

  “Din, so sorry you had this accident,” he said.

  “I’m doing better, how are you?” she answered, turning the attention away from her own battered body.

  “Well,” said Clemente, “I got this touch of diarrhea.”

  Din laughed when she recounted the conversation to her husband. Classic Clemente, Joe Brown thought.

  A few days later, Clemente was ready to return to Florida for his twelfth baseball spring. Andres and Matino drove him to the airport, as usual. Florida was still not the most inviting place for Clemente and his new bride, so Vera would join him later in Pittsburgh. As the boys walked toward the gate, Andres said that his little brother would be too puny to bring home another Silver Bat that year.

  Momen stopped, grabbed the back pockets of his pants, and squeezed them together, laughing at the sign of death.

  9

  Passion

  EVERY MOVE CLEMENTE MADE WAS STUDIED BY HIS admiring fans at Forbes Field. Bruce Laurie, who landed in Pittsburgh in 1965 as a graduate student in history, might show up at the stadium in the fifth inning and take a freebie seat in the right-field stands, sharing his beers with the usher. For his baseball satisfaction, all Laurie needed was to observe Clemente up close, all “bone and sinew with long arms that looked longer still because of the Pirates’ sleeveless shirts.” And then, at some point, the thrill of the throw—with a motion faster than any Laurie had ever seen “and overhand, with an exaggerated follow-through, so that when he wound up . . . he looked like a dervish expelling a cannonball.” Many players have one memorable trait; Clemente’s every action on the diamond had its own singular style. The writer Michael Chabon, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said it was hard not to look at Clemente; he attracted one’s attention like a glint on a telephone wire. Howard Fineman, another denizen of the right-field stands, memorized his hero’s intricate routine at the plate until it was etched into his teenage brain as surely as the capitals of the fifty states or the chronological order of the Presidents. In retrospect, Fineman would think of Clemente taking a turn at-bat as “positively Iberian, a bullfighter, the great test of wills,” so serious in every detail that it was thrilling yet almost comic. And here it was:

  Clemente would never smile preparing for a plate appearance. When he approached the rack inside the dugout, his attitude was that of a surgeon toward his instruments or a toreador toward his swords. He knew these bats, these Frenchy Uhalt models. He had studied them from the moment a new shipment came in during spring training. He was as tuned to them as he was to his body, and his choice might depend on his mood, or the fitness of his lower back, or the pitcher on the mound, or something he saw in the grain of wood. Not ready yet to decide, he would haul two or three bats out to the on-deck circle, carrying them all in one hand. Then he would kneel, left knee bent at ninety degrees, right knee touching the ground, posture erect, the bats draped elegantly against his thigh. One by one, he would pick them up, heft them, as he stared at the pitcher, and wipe them with his rag. Here was the serenity of Clemente, before the storm. From his right-field perch, Fineman relished this moment, knowing what was to follow. At last it was Clemente’s turn to hit, and he would now make his final selection ceremoniously, this piece of wood, of the three, had made the cut; the others, unlucky, left behind as orphan scraps to be retrieved by the batboy. Then the famed dead man’s walk to the batter’s box.

  On the way, as he approached the plate, he would rotate his neck from side to side, then twist it back, so many kinks to unloosen. Of all the sequences in the ritual, the neck move was the most regal. The poet Tom Clark would draw upon this memory above all others:

  won’t forget

  his nervous

  habit of

  rearing his

  head back

  on his neck

  like a

  pro
ud horse

  And now the care of his habitat. Like an animal preparing his ground. Or maybe fortifications, that is the metaphor that popped into one observer’s head—a French general preparing his fort. He would hold his bat with his left hand and raise the other toward the ump—momentito, momentito for Momen—as he rearranged dirt and dust with his polished leather shoes, spikes gleaming, until it was just right. By now the pitcher was ticked. But there was little in the way of filibustering from then on, no constant stepping out of the box and repeating a superstitious ritual after every pitch, aside from the occasional revolving of the neck. When his workplace was ready, he would take his stance, left leg coiled, hands back, stance way off the plate, back near the line, beseeching the ball, bring it on. He would take the first pitch, almost always, in order to calculate the timing and motion, but then let it rip. And for someone not known as a slugger, what a rip it was. Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times sports columnist who made his living off metaphors, wrote that Clemente “had a batting style like a man falling down a fire escape.” His swing, Bruce Laurie thought, was the mirror image of the throw—“a great swirling motion in blinding speed that routinely dislodged his batting helmet.” Both Laurie and Fineman felt this odd sensation, a ripple of joy even in a Clemente swing and miss. There was such pent-up intensity in the moment that it seemed to Fineman that Clemente’s “entire being was at stake with every pitch.” One image that stuck was of him flinging himself and the bat toward a high-outside pitch and literally leaving his feet altogether to make contact, stroking a shot down the right-field line.