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

by David Maraniss

  At the same time, in the press box, the baseball writers had all quit, or were urging the Pirates to quit, hauling out their bag of death-knell clichés for Clemente’s club. It was always this way with the reporting tribe. They had done the same thing to the Pirates in 1960. Arthur Daley of The New York Times, who had declared Pittsburgh dead after three games in 1960, needed only two games this time to call for an executioner “to put the poor devils out of their misery.” David Condon, in his “In the Wake of the News” column for the Chicago Tribune, relied on his repartee with Earl Weaver to make the same point. He was just about to ask the Orioles manager whether there was even much sense in continuing the series, Condon wrote, when he heard Weaver say that he took Palmer out of the game near the end because he might need to use him again. “That’s what the Baltimore man said. Honest. Honest. Honest. After slaughtering the Pirates twice to take a 2 game to 0 lead. Weaver says he might need Palmer again. The laugh that greeted his remark was the loudest heard in Baltimore since H. L. Mencken used to rip off some rib-splitters. There was a report that Weaver’s jest, when repeated, even drew some grins in the Pirate locker room, which was no more lively than a funeral parlor.”

  At the head of the pack was Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. With Murray at least, it was as much about the way he made his points as the points he made. Murray was not one for understatement; his style was all metaphor all the time. “This World Series is no longer a contest,” he began. “It’s an atrocity. It’s the Germans marching through Belgium, the interrogation room of the Gestapo. It’s as one-sided as a Russian trial . . . The Pirates should ask where they go to surrender. It should rank with such other great contests of history as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the yellow fever epidemic, and the bombing of Rotterdam. To enjoy it, you’d have to be the kind of person who goes to orphanage fires or sits at washed-out railroad bridges with a camera . . . They’re taking the execution to Pittsburgh today. Unless the Red Cross intervenes.”

  At home in Pittsburgh on the night before Game 3, Clemente could not sleep. Vera stayed up with him until dawn, and they talked about everything but baseball. Then she made him breakfast: pork chops, three eggs, always sunny side up, fruit shake; it seemed like his breakfast feast would fill the entire table. After eating, he retreated again to the bedroom where they darkened the room by pinning the drapes to the walls with black rubber tape, and finally he got a few hours’ rest. Steve Blass, slated to pitch that day for the Pirates, had also stayed up all night, anxious about the game. He lay in bed thinking about the Orioles hitters, and what he would say to the press if he won, or what he would say if he lost. In Baltimore during the first two games, he had slipped into the clubhouse to study the Orioles batters on the television monitor and had taken copious notes, but left them in the hotel room so they were of no use to him now. He went out for breakfast with his father and thought he was starving but when the food came he couldn’t touch it. All he had was some “toast and a few pulmonary wheezes.”

  Before the game, as usual, Blass and Clemente met in the trainer’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Clemente was getting his neck massaged by Tony Bartirome. Blass sat nearby, trying to settle his nerves. Those two hours before walking out to the mound were the worst part of the day for him. He tried to take his mind off the game by leafing through Penthouse, a skin magazine. Bartirome looked over at Blass as he gazed at the photographs of nude women then turned to Clemente and said, “Well, Robby, look what we got our fuckin’ money on today, this pervert!” As for Blass, just being in the vicinity of Clemente was reassuring. Every time his turn came in the rotation, he’d look at the lineup, see the name Clemente, and say to himself, “Robby’s playing and there’s peace in right field.”

  It was Blass against Cuellar on the afternoon of October 12 as a sellout crowd of 50,403 filled Three Rivers. The Red Cross did not intervene, but Blass and Clemente did. In the first inning, Clemente knocked in a run to give the Pirates a lead they never relinquished. In the fifth, he singled to extend his World Series hitting streak to ten games. In the bottom of the seventh, with the Pirates leading 2–1 in a tight pitching duel, he took a fierce cut at a Cuellar screwball but failed to hit it squarely, chopping a high bouncer back toward the mound. Cuellar casually waited for it to come down, and when he turned to throw to first there was Clemente busting down the line as though he had a chance to beat it out. Cuellar hurried his throw and pulled Boog Powell off the bag, allowing Clemente to reach safely on the error. Of all the plays before and after, this is the one that would haunt Orioles manager Earl Weaver—not a home run or great catch or throw, but the sight of thirty-seven-year-old Roberto Clemente making a mad dash to first on a routine ground ball back to the pitcher. “The most memorable play of the series,” Weaver said decades later. “The one that I think turned it around, the key to the series, when [Clemente] ran hard after tapping the ball back to Cuellar on the mound. Cuellar took his time, looked up, and Clemente was charging to first, and it surprised him and he threw it off target . . .” As it turned out, this was the equivalent of the little dribbler Clemente had hit in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series off Jim Coates in the bottom of the eighth, the ball that Skowron had fielded down the first-base line but could not make a play on, setting the stage for Hal Smith’s dramatic three-run home run.

  Cuellar, flustered, now walked Willie Stargell on four pitches, bringing up first baseman Bob Robertson with runners on first and second. Robertson to that point was hitless in the series and had lined out and struck out twice in three previous at-bats against Cuellar. He took the first pitch for a ball, then fouled off the next. From the Pirates dugout, Danny Murtaugh noticed that Brooks Robinson was cheating by two or three steps, as he had said he would against the big right-handed pull hitter, playing deep and close to the line. Murtaugh gestured to third-base coach Frank Oceak, who flashed a sign down to the plate. Robertson gave no recognition that he received the sign, so Oceak went through the motions again. From second base, Clemente sensed the confusion and raised his hands over his head, attempting to call time. But it was too late; Cuellar was in his windup. In came a screwball, a few inches outside, and out it went, soaring into the seats in right center. Only as Robertson touched home plate and Stargell congratulated him with the words “That’s the way to bunt the ball!” did he realize what he had done. “Guess I missed a sign,” he said sheepishly when he reached the dugout. “Possibly,” responded Murtaugh, smiling.

  That was the game, the Pirates winning 5–1. Blass went the distance and gave up only three hits, including a solo home run to Frank Robinson. He said it was the best game he had ever pitched.

  • • •

  Few spans in American history involved more cultural change than the eleven years between the Pirates’ World Series appearances of 1960 and 1971. The social revolutions of the 1960s were trivial and profound, obvious and complex, in baseball as in society at large. It is a long way from Deacon Law to Dock Ellis. The Pirates club of 1960 was still rooted in the old school. Ten players on that roster had been born in the 1920s and a few were veterans of World War II. They were crew-cut white guys, mostly, with nicknames like Tiger and Rocky and Vinegar Bend and Smoky. From that squad, only two players were still around when the Pirates returned to baseball glory in 1971—Bill Mazeroski, hero of the 1960 series with his dramatic bottom-of-the-ninth seventh-game home run, and Roberto Clemente. Maz, now thirty-five and approaching retirement, was cut from the old school mold, with his square jaw and West Virginia coal miner heritage, but he had adjusted comfortably to the new. He sat on the bench, mostly, and tutored young Dave Cash and Rennie Stennett, and joked with the youngsters about Clemente and the old days. When the proud Clemente, sensitive about his modest home run totals, tried to tell the kids about one of his old tape-measure shots, Maz responded, “Nah, he didn’t hit that one very good”—sending Clemente into a playful funk about the “dumb Polack.” Manny Sanguillen, the ebullient Panamanian catcher, worshipped Clement
e, but turned to him in the clubhouse once and announced that Maz was his hero. “Okay, Polack,” Clemente responded.

  There were many reasons why Clemente felt more at ease with the 1971 Pirates than the earlier team. Much of it was him—he was older, wiser, more established and secure. But much of it was the composition of the team. On the 1960 roster, there were only four players of color during the season—Clemente, Gene Baker, Joe Christopher, and Roman Mejias, and only Clemente got much playing time. The 1971 squad was dominated by blacks and Latins: Dave Cash, Roberto Clemente, Gene Clines, Vic Davalillo, Dock Ellis, Mudcat Grant, Jackie Hernández, Al Oliver, José Pagán, Manny Sanguillen, Willie Stargell, Rennie Stennett, and Bob Veale. Late in the season, in a September 1 game against the Phillies, without fanfare and little notice beyond the clubhouse, the Pirates in fact had fielded the first all-black and Latin lineup in major league history—Stennett at second, Clines in center, Clemente in right, Stargell in left, Sanguillen catching, Cash at third, Oliver at first, Hernández at short, and Ellis on the mound. Hebner, the normal third baseman, was out with a minor injury, and Bob Robertson, who usually played first against lefties (southpaw Woody Fryman was on the mound for the Phillies), was being rested by Danny Murtaugh.

  It only lasted an inning—the Phils knocked Ellis out in the second by scoring four runs—but it was another marker in the long road traveled since Jackie Robinson came up with the Dodgers in 1947, and Curt Roberts broke the color line with the Pirates in 1954, and Clemente played as the team’s lone black starter through the remainder of the 1950s. Just as sports were a step ahead of society on civil rights matters, the racial transformation of the Pirates moved more quickly than the attitudes of Pittsburgh fans. The correlation was anecdotal, not methodologically established, but fan fervor in Pittsburgh, a predominantly white blue-collar city, seemed to decline as the team’s racial composition changed. Bruce Laurie, who attended graduate school in Pittsburgh during that era, lived in an apartment on North Dithridge Street and often encountered “a beefy big-boned guy named Jim” on the first floor, who would “sit on a beach chair at night in the warm months with a couple of quarts of Iron City beer and a radio”—but never listened to a ball game. As Laurie, who became a history professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, later recounted the scene, whenever Jim was asked the score of a Pirates game, he would never answer—“until one day when I asked him why he didn’t follow the Pirates. ‘Too dark,’ he snorted. ‘Too many niggers.’ I think the feeling was widely shared.”

  On Wednesday, October 13, Game 4 of the 1971 series made baseball history for a more prosaic but nonetheless sport-changing reason. There had been 397 World Series games staged over nearly seventy years, and this was the first one held at night. The dominance of black and Latin players made the Pirates no less popular on this night. The prime-time weekday game drew the largest crowd in Pittsburgh history—51,378, and the largest national television audience in history, more than 61 million. The hurler-rich Orioles brought out their fourth-best pitcher for the occasion, Pat Dobson, who sported a mere 20–8 record with eighteen complete games and a 2.90 earned-run average, all of which would have made him the ace of the Pittsburgh staff. The Pirates countered with Luke Walker, who won ten games that year on his way to a 45–47 career. A pitcher turned out to be the story of the game, but it was neither Dobson nor Walker, but Bruce Kison, a twenty-one-year-old sidearmer for the Pirates who entered with two outs in the first inning and threw six and a third innings of shutout ball, giving up only one hit and walking none, though it would be hard to say he had pinpoint control, since he hit three batters. He seemed less nervous about facing the veteran Orioles hitters than he was about getting married at the end of the week. After jumping to a 3–0 lead in the first off Walker, the Orioles never threatened again and lost the lead for good in the bottom of the seventh on a game-winning pinch-hit single by another kiddie corps Pirate, twenty-one-year-old catcher Milt May.

  Clemente shone again, rapping out three hits. He was so hot that the Three Rivers organist played “Jesus Christ Superstar” every time he strolled to the plate. The Baltimore scouts, in going over Pirates hitters before the series, had no clue how to pitch to Clemente. Try low and away, they said, and if that doesn’t work try something else. “How to pitch Clemente? There was no way,” Earl Weaver observed later. “But we tried to pitch him inside. Jam him. But he’d hit anything. We couldn’t get him out.” The best play against Clemente on this night was made by the umpire down the right-field line, John Rice. In the third inning, with the Pirates still trailing 3–2, Dobson tried to pitch Clemente outside, but Clemente went with the pitch, slashing the ball straight down the right-field line. It cleared the ten-foot fence at the corner, but the question was whether it was fair or foul. Rice called it foul. Don Leppert, the first base coach, insisted that it was fair, and raced out toward Rice to argue, joined quickly by a furious Clemente. From most vantage points it looked like a fair ball, a home run. Leppert insisted then and decades later that he saw the ball hit fair. The problem was that there was a gap between the fence and the stands of about twenty inches, and that gap made it difficult to follow the white stripe that was painted below the foul pole to serve as the demarcation between fair and foul. According to a few Pirates relief pitchers who had a fairly close perspective on the ball, it was indeed foul by no more than an inch or two.

  After the argument, Clemente strolled back to the plate and thwacked another hit, a single. Kison was the main story, but the rumble in the press box was starting to grow louder about the wonders of the oldest man on the field. Not only was he hitting everything the Orioles threw at him, and making great throws from right, but he also was running superbly on the base paths, taking an extra base that night on Paul Blair, just as the day before he had raced down the line to beat a double-play throw, along with the hustle he showed on the dribbler that flustered Cuellar. “The best damn ballplayer in the World Series, maybe in the whole world, is Roberto Clemente,” wrote Dick Young. “And as far as I’m concerned they can give him the automobile [as the outstanding player] right now.”

  In Game 5, the Orioles returned to Dave McNally, but the Pirates sent out their fifth different starter in five games. This time it was Nelson Briles, who was the 1971 team’s version of Vinegar Bend Mizell—a veteran who came over from the St. Louis Cardinals to stabilize the rotation. Briles had pitched six seasons for the Cards, and had won nineteen games in 1968, his best season. Then major league officials, reacting to the utter dominance of pitching that year and the resultant lack of scoring, lowered the pitching mound. Briles suffered more than most from the change, until he altered his pitching motion in an effort to replicate the action of his old overhand curveball. His new motion left him off-balance, tumbling from the mound. In one game he fell down eleven times. Against the Orioles on Thursday, October 14, he fell down three times—which was one more than the number of hits he gave up to Baltimore’s hitters. Briles was virtually unhittable. He allowed only singles to Brooks Robinson in the second and Boog Powell in the seventh, and left only two runners on base in pitching a 4–0 shutout. When he came to bat in the eighth, Pittsburgh fans rose for a thunderous ovation and Briles was overcome by emotion. Among his many talents, Briles was an actor who could draw on his emotions to appreciate a scene. In college at Chico State in California, he had even played the lead character, Joe Hardy, in Damn Yankees, and now, though not selling his soul, he was living out his own Joe Hardy moment. The fans could not see it, but Briles was crying as he stood at the plate and thought about the struggles of the last two years and all the people who had helped him reach this point, back to his high school coach.

  Clemente singled up the middle in the fifth, driving in a key run and extending his World Series hitting streak to twelve straight games. “He’s showing the others how to play the game, isn’t he?” longtime baseball executive Lee McPhail said in the press box after the game. There was something about Clemente that surpassed statist
ics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a box score and of a year’s worth of statistics and calculate the case for players they consider underrated or overrated and declare who has the most real value to a team. To some skilled practitioners of this science, Clemente comes out very good but not the greatest; he walks too seldom, has too few home runs, steals too few bases. Their perspective is legitimate, but to people who appreciate Clemente this is like chemists trying to explain Van Gogh by analyzing the ingredients of his paint. Clemente was art, not science. Every time he strolled slowly to the batter’s box or trotted out to right field, he seized the scene like a great actor. It was hard to take one’s eyes off him, because he could do anything on a baseball field and carried himself with such nobility. “The rest of us were just players,” Steve Blass would say. “Clemente was a prince.”

  The prince was a pip in the locker room after the game, with the Pirates now holding a three games to two lead in the series. “I’ve always felt I’ve been left behind,” Clemente told the national press corps gathered around him. And then came his long lament—how he was tired of reading that he was second best, and hearing that he had one of the best arms, instead of the best arm; and that he was a hypochondriac, when in truth he would soon pass Honus Wagner for most games played in a Pirates uniform; how some players would only dive headfirst for a ball in the World Series but he always played that way, the Clemente you saw in this series was the Clemente who played every day; how he never got enough endorsement offers because he was black and Puerto Rican; and how he is really a happy person, not some sourpuss, but only smiles when the occasion calls for smiling. Roy McHugh took it all in with some bemusement. He had heard this many times before. McHugh thought the Pittsburgh press gave Clemente a better accounting than it got credit for, and that it was disingenuous of big-city writers to swoop in and pretend they understood him in a way the locals did not—but it was all part of the sportswriting dodge. And Clemente knew precisely what he was doing. His passion play had become an act, a ritual, part of what it meant to be Clemente. “When he was younger, Clemente reached passionate heights of eloquence on the subject” of his being misunderstood, McHugh thought. “Dark eyes ablaze, his voice would rise to a shout. Now he is just a trooper going through a performance, dressing it up with subtle touches of humor and not unaware of the effect he is having on his audience.”