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

by David Maraniss

  In the locker room afterward, reporters jostled around him as Bartirome worked on a cut on his knee. What was going through your mind as you stood out there during the ceremonies? he was asked. Sometimes, the honest answer is, nothing. This time, for Clemente, the heartfelt answer was, everything.

  His whole life raced through his mind, he said, going back to the old house in Carolina on Road 887 and his first baseballs made of socks and bottle caps, and taking the bus to Sixto Escobar to watch Monte Irvin play, and how Roberto Marín believed in him when no one else did, and how Pancho Coimbre and other great Puerto Ricans never got the chance, and how hard he had fought over the years to be understood and recognized for who and what he was, a proud Puerto Rican. Maybe he cried, he was not ashamed to cry, he said. He was not crying from pain or disappointment. But if you knew the history of his island, the way he was brought up, the Puerto Ricans were a sentimental people, and his feelings now were about his island and all of Latin America, and how proud he felt when he stepped on the field knowing that so many people were behind him, and how lucky he was to be born twice, in a way, once in Carolina in 1934 and again in Pittsburgh when he arrived in 1955. “In a moment like this, your mind is a circular stage,” he said. “You can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear.”

  11

  El Día Más Grande

  IN BALTIMORE ON THE EVE OF THE 1971 WORLD SERIES, Vera Clemente was deeply concerned about her husband. She had seen Roberto this sick only once before, when he was bedridden, delirious, and losing weight in the spring of 1965. Then it had taken his doctors in Puerto Rico several days to determine that he had malaria. Now the cause was obvious: food poisoning. Earlier that night, Vera, Roberto, and two of his teammates, José Antonio Pagán and Vic Davalillo, had joined a festive party of family and friends for dinner at a restaurant in nearby Fort Meade, where Vera’s brother, U.S. Army Captain Orlando Zabala, was stationed. Roberto had ordered clams, and by the time they returned downtown to the Lord Baltimore Hotel he was so sick the team doctor had the dehydrated star hooked up to an IV at his hotel bed. “I was so worried,” Vera said later. “Tomorrow is the first game of the World Series. He was so weak. I said, ‘Oh, my God, maybe he cannot play.’”

  The next morning, after a troubled night, the thirty-seven-year-old Clemente was still weak but determined to play. Only his wife and a few others knew of his illness. The press was preoccupied with the latest discomforts of another Pirate, Dock Ellis, a nineteen-game winner with a sore arm but indefatigable mouth who was scheduled to start the series opener.

  During the National League playoffs against the Giants, Ellis had reaffirmed his freewheeling reputation by carping about his hotel bed in San Francisco. Now, before throwing his first pitch in Baltimore, he had switched rooms three times and made headlines by saying whatever entered his mind. He had always been a free-talker, Ellis said, it was just that no one listened until he started winning. “I’m never sorry for anything I say,” he explained. “If you don’t say what you want in so-called America, I might as well go to Russia.” This riff was tame for Ellis, whose eccentricity was amplified by his counterculture predilections for Jimi Hendrix, greenies, dope, and acid, which he once dropped before pitching a no-hitter against San Diego. (The ball appeared to have comet tailings as it soared toward the plate, he said.) None of his beefs about hotel rooms compared with his declaration at mid-season, after he was named to the All-Star team, that he would not be chosen to start because another black pitcher, Vida Blue, was starting for the other league. (In fact, Ellis did start, and was on the mound when Oakland’s Reggie Jackson cracked a memorable early career home run off the right-field light tower at Tiger Stadium.) But in the so-called America of 1971, Dock Ellis was a kaleidoscope of color in what many thought would be a monochromatic World Series.

  Pittsburgh and Baltimore were solid baseball towns, but there were no teams from New York or Los Angeles for the media machines to hype, and baseball seemed on a downward trend in any case. A Louis Harris survey released that week showed that among the major American sports, football and basketball were rising in popularity while only baseball had declined from the previous year. Baseball games took too long, people complained, and there was not enough action. The consensus in the sporting press was that Orioles versus Pirates was a one-sided matchup that would do nothing to reverse the trend. The O’s came into the series as defending champions, winners of 101 games, riding a fourteen-game winning streak that included four shutouts in the waning days of the regular season and a sweep of Oakland for the American League pennant. The Pirates, after losing to Cincinnati in the playoffs a year earlier, had finally captured the National League pennant this time by defeating the Giants, and had run up a respectable ninety-seven wins during the regular season, yet few gave them a chance against Baltimore. In place of the Murderers’ Row that the Pirates had faced in their last World Series against the slugging Yankees in 1960, this time they were going up against a fearsome quartet on the mound. Good pitching beats good hitting is the first truism of baseball, and Baltimore had superlative pitching, with four twenty-game winners: Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson.

  “Now they’ll learn about agony,” a San Francisco writer, reflecting the common wisdom, said of the Pirates after they had defeated the Giants. “Now they have to play the reigning champions of the Universe and the light and dark sides of the moon.”

  Clemente entered the World Series overshadowed again. His magnificent talents as a hitter and fielder were duly acknowledged (Right Field: Roberto is there, and what do you say about a player who can do it all? read a position report in the Baltimore Sun), yet he was not at the center of the discussion. While writers quoted Dock Ellis, many Orioles talked about how much they feared Willie Stargell, who was coming off a career year of forty-eight home runs and 125 runs batted in. That Stargell had gone hitless in the playoffs against the Giants only made Baltimore fear him more. “Willie scares the hell out of me,” said catcher Elrod Hendricks. “Hitters like him don’t stay in a slump very long.” Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore third baseman who had made a lifetime’s worth of spectacular plays against Cincinnati in the last World Series, said he had watched the Pirates on television several times and was impressed by the power of Bob Robertson. He would “cheat a little,” Robinson said, and move a step or two closer to the line when the strapping young infielder came to the plate, since he tended to pull everything.

  This lack of attention was exactly what Clemente needed to prepare himself for the occasion. Phil Musick, a Pittsburgh writer who had endured Clemente’s wrath and come out on the other side, respecting him, considered him “headstrong and prouder than a lion,” and always thought that his enemies “real or imagined, weren’t worth the passion he invested in them.” Perhaps they weren’t, but the key phrase was “real or imagined.” The truth is they were mostly imagined, and they were imagined for the very purpose of stirring passion. Roy McHugh, the Pittsburgh Press columnist, had studied Clemente for years and struggled to understand him, and concluded that he used every perceived slight to his psychological advantage. “Anger, for Roberto Clemente, is the fuel that makes the wheels turn in his never-ending pursuit of excellence,” he reasoned. “When the supply runs low, Clemente manufactures some more.” And so, offered another chance to show his genius to the world, here came Clemente, at age thirty-seven the oldest player in the World Series, fueling himself with the anger of an underappreciated artist. Hours before the first game, even as he recovered from food poisoning, he told some teammates not to worry, this was his moment, and he was ready for it, and he would not let them down. José Pagán heard him recite precisely what he would do to win the championship for Pittsburgh.

  • • •

  In the final days of the season, Orioles scouts Jim Russo and Walter Youse tailed the Pirates. They traveled on the National League club’s plane and stayed at the same hotel. If an opposing pla
yer were caught stealing signs from second base, or a team hid someone behind a center-field scoreboard hole for the same purpose, all hell could break loose. But scouts were allowed to infiltrate the very bloodstream of another team. It was part of the code of baseball. The Orioles gave the same courteous treatment to Howie Haak and Harding Peterson of the Pirates organization.

  Russo and Youse returned from their scouting mission with several tips for Orioles manager Earl Weaver and his staff. One strong recommendation was that the Orioles throw lefties at the Pirates, even though Pittsburgh had a 29–19 record against left-handed pitchers during the regular season. They felt that lefthanders might handcuff Stargell and encourage Danny Murtaugh to keep two tough young Pirates hitters, Richie Hebner and Al Oliver, on the bench. And no NL team had a pair of southpaws the quality of Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar. Weaver tabbed McNally to start games 1 and 4 or 5, and Cuellar to pitch Game 3 and be ready if necessary to pitch Game 7. Among the Orioles aces, young Jim Palmer, who would pitch games 2 and 6, had the most flash and brilliance, but McNally indisputably was the leader of the staff. Over the past four years he had been the best lefthander in baseball, winning nearly three of every four decisions. He had won twenty or more games each of those years; this year, a McNally classic, he had finished with twenty-one wins and only five losses.

  Game 1, on the Saturday afternoon of October 9, followed predictable form. Clemente doubled in the first off McNally—had he recovered fully from the food poisoning or was he just once again reinforcing the belief that he played best when sick? In either case, Stargell stranded him by striking out, and the Pirates were able to scratch out only two more hits off McNally all day, another by Clemente and a run-scoring single from Dave Cash, the young second baseman whose stellar play had relegated Maz to the bench. Stargell was now 0–17 in the postseason; Clemente had extended his World Series hitting streak to eight games. Aside from a few uncharacteristic blunders in the second inning that allowed the Pirates to score three runs, the Orioles looked smart and dominant. Ellis, his arm as zipless as the double-knit uniforms, failed to survive the third, giving up two home runs and four runs before being yanked. Fans at Memorial Stadium, remembering his insults of their town’s hotels, showered him with boos, which Ellis said was nothing because he had once played winter ball in the Dominican Republic.

  The key hit came in the third with Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger on second, left fielder Don Buford on first, and center fielder Merv Rettenmund at the plate. At breakfast that morning, kidding around with his nervous father, who supervised a body shop in Flint, Michigan, Rettenmund had boasted that he would hit a home run. Steady rains and football games had made such a mess of the stadium recently that groundskeeper Pat Santarone resorted to dyeing barren spots in the outfield. Now, as Buford led off first and studied Ellis on the mound, he detected a wide splotch of dark green on the baseball and shouted down to the plate urging Rettenmund to ask for a new ball. Rettenmund did, and the bright white replacement never touched dyed ground, flying from Ellis’s right hand to Rettenmund’s bat and over the fence for a three-run homer.

  Solo homers by Buford and Frank Robinson, the great Orioles right fielder, made the final score 5–3. Ellis, the loser, was out for the rest of the series, his sore arm beyond the help of the finest bed in Baltimore. The star was McNally, with his three-hit complete game. Only three days earlier, his eight-year-old son Jeff had been injured in a bike accident near their home in Lutherville. Once McNally was assured that his son had not suffered brain damage, he had been able to focus on the Pirates, his powers of concentration aided on this day by the best fastball he had shown all year.

  In the locker room after the game, reporters asked Clemente whether he had ever faced such a pitcher as McNally. Given his competitive nature, his determination to show the world his greatness once and for all, this was not a question he wanted to hear. His answer sounded ungracious if not egotistical, with a touch of Muhammad Ali or Dock Ellis to it. It was not so much a boast as an assertion of will. “I faced lots of good pitchers,” he said. “Another good one don’t mean anything to me. Ask him what he thought about me. I got two hits off him so I say we’re even.”

  Eleven years earlier, before the second game of the 1960 World Series, it had rained all night and kept raining until an hour before the first pitch, but the bad weather system rumbled past Pittsburgh just in time and the game was played as scheduled. Pittsburgh surely would have preferred a rainout—the Pirates got clobbered by the Yankees that day, 16–3. Now, for the second game of the 1971 series in Baltimore on Sunday, October 10, the rains would not stop and the game was postponed for a day. Orioles ownership urged Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, to reschedule the second game for 7 Monday night, so that ticket-holders from the rainout would have a better chance of attending, but Kuhn rejected that request and made it a Monday day game. Night baseball was coming to the World Series all too soon, but Kuhn wanted to hold fast to his plan to hold the historic first night game in Pittsburgh a few days later.

  After the Sunday game was called, the Clementes returned to Fort Meade to have dinner again with Orlando Zabala and his wife, Norma. No bad clams at the restaurant this time. They ate at home and Roberto invited more teammates and friends to join them. Carol Brezovec’s mother, Carolyn, now married to Nevin Rauch, came down from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and brought several blueberry cheese pies, Roberto’s favorite. After dinner, the men played cards and little children ran around and Nevin Rauch taught Clemente how to play his Horner harmonicas. “It was wonderful, just wonderful,” Carolyn Rauch remembered.

  But it was of no help to the Pirates. The next day, in keeping with second game tradition, they got slaughtered again, losing 11–3. First Lady Pat Nixon threw out the first ball and had as much stuff as the six Pirate pitchers who followed in pathetic procession, from Johnson to Kison to Moose to Veale to Miller to Giusti. Veale replacing Moose at least provided the press box material for carnivore jokes. Instead of the monstrous Mickey Mantle home runs that destroyed them in 1960, this time the Pirates were done in by fourteen well-placed singles. The M and M boys of Mantle and Maris were replaced by the R and R boys of Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson. Frank Robinson led off three innings with hits and left the game in the eighth to a standing ovation. Jim Palmer continued the O’s pitching mastery, holding the Pirates scoreless until he tired in the eighth and gave up a three-run homer to Hebner. The loss showed how difficult it is for a lone outfielder to control a game, yet it also revealed Clemente’s transcendence.

  In the midst of the carnage, he got two more hits and made a throw from right that did nothing overtly to change the course of that particular game, and indeed did not even result in an out, yet became the most remembered play of the entire series. In the fifth inning, as the Orioles were pounding out six runs, Rettenmund was on second when Frank Robinson looped a ball deep down the right-field line into the swirling winds. Clemente raced over and grabbed it with one hand. Rettenmund tagged and advanced to third, certain that no human, not even Clemente, could make this a close play. But Clemente caught the ball, swirled, and fired toward third and—¡Arriba!—the ball arrived on a perfect line at the same time as Rettenmund. Decades later, Hebner could still see the play unfold in front of him, and remain amazed by it. “He was in another zip code in right field,” Hebner said. “He turned around and this ball got to me pretty damn quick. Usually a ball would take three or four hops from that spot in the outfield. He threw an absolute cannon. Rettenmund tagging up on a ball like that was probably saying, ‘This is a piece of cake.’ I had the ball and he was sliding. I said, ‘Wow, this is close!’ When I look at it now—I see the 1971 Series on TV a lot—I think he was probably safe. At the time, I thought he was out. Of course [Clemente] had the same uniform on. But to make a play that good . . . if I’m an umpire and somebody throws it that good from that far, I might bang him out. After the play was over, I was like, wow, If somebody got my ass at third base like that I would have b
een embarrassed. The ball got there like it had some hair on it when it came in. And he was like thirty-seven when he did it!”

  Andy Etchebarren, watching from the Orioles dugout, said it was the best throw he had ever seen. Danny Murtaugh, in the Pirates dugout, had witnessed too many impossible deeds by Clemente over seventeen seasons to go that far. He and other Pirates had their own collection of greatest-ever Clemente throws, most involving some variation of the time he let loose a bullet from the deepest corner of old Forbes Field and the ball zipped just over the heads of relief pitchers in the bullpen down the right-field line and stayed no more than seven feet off the ground—easy to cut off, but what infielder would dare?—all the way until it smacked into the catcher’s mitt at home plate knee-high, without a bounce. Clemente, when asked about the Rettenmund throw, did not feign modesty. “Ask the other players,” he said. “They remember a few years ago when my arm was really strong. No one can compare with my arm when it feels right. I’m not bragging. That is a fact.” Dick Young, the columnist for the New York Daily News, had become a great admirer of Clemente, yet chose to quote him in phonetic English on the same subject: “Eef I have my good arm thee ball gets there a leetle quicker than he gets there.”

  The 1971 Pirates were a boisterous lot: Blass, Dave Giusti, Sanguillen, Veale, Nellie Briles, Stargell—Dock Ellis wasn’t the only one who said what he wanted to say. But after Game 2 no one was saying much of anything. Clemente looked around the locker room and saw all the heads hanging low. Not good, he thought, and he decided to speak. “I just say some things in the clubhouse when they have their heads down,” he explained later. “I tell them not to worry about it. We’re going to Pittsburgh and that’s our ballpark. When fellows have their heads down, you have to pep them up. If I put my head down they’ll say, ‘Why try?’ A man they trust, if he quits, everyone quits . . . I said, ‘Hold on, we’re gonna do it.’”