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

by David Maraniss

  The season was scheduled to open April 5, but there were no games that day, and none for the next nine days. On a vote of 663 to 10, the players had voted to strike until the owners agreed to improvements in the health and pension plans. It was the first full strike in major league history, and reflected the transformation of the players association in the more than five years since labor experts Marvin Miller and Richard Moss were hired. Earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had once again upheld baseball’s antitrust exemption, deciding the Curt Flood case against the player, but the struggle for player freedom was not over, and the court had directed organized baseball to resolve the issue on its own. Clemente strongly supported the strike, though he had passed along the job of Pirates’ player representative to Dave Giusti, the relief pitcher. The strike ended abruptly in a victory for the players, and the Pirates opened the season in New York against Seaver and the Mets on April 15. Clemente’s spring training pantomime proved of no help as he went hitless in four at-bats.

  As loose as the 1971 Pirates were, the 1972 team was even looser. It was virtually the same squad, but more confident and comfortable after winning the championship, and the culture was becoming more informal year by year. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when goatees seemed to come with the issuance of a major league uniform on some teams, it is difficult to imagine that Reggie Jackson and his Oakland A’s were breaking with more than a half-century of tradition that spring by daring to sport facial hair. The Pirates were still clean-shaven, but the irrepressible Dock Ellis had a vibrant Afro in the works, and the prevailing antiestablishment mood meant that everything was fair game in the clubhouse, including old man Clemente. Ellis and Sanguillen mimicked “Grandpa” by limping and moaning when they saw him heading to the trainer’s room. Clemente had his own antics; he enjoyed holding his nose to mimic the nasal drone of the team physician, Dr. Finegold. (This routine was a surefire hit at home, where little Robertito would say “Do Dr. Fine-gold” and then fall on the floor laughing to the point of tears.) Giusti and Clemente were constantly yapping at one another. “The byplay between them became almost a ritual for us,” recalled Steve Blass. “Any subject and suddenly they’d be hollering and insulting each other. Robby was our player rep before Dave and when something would come up, he’d say, ‘When I was the player rep we never had these kinds of problems, but you give an Italian a little responsibility and look what happens!’”

  His confidence boosted by his flawless World Series performances, Blass got off to a brilliant start in 1972 and remained strong all year, leading one of the deepest staffs in Pittsburgh history. There were no weak spots in the rotation: Blass would win nineteen games with a 2.49 earned-run average, followed by Ellis with fifteen wins and 2.70, Briles, fourteen and 3.08, Moose, thirteen and 2.91, and Kison, nine and 3.26. From the bullpen Virdon turned to an effective right-left duo of Giusti, who had twenty-two saves, and Ramon Hernández, who had fourteen. Clemente naturally thought he could pitch better than any of them. “Come here, Blass, I gonna tell you one fucking thing,” he would say, warming up before a game. “Look at this fucking breaking ball”—and he would uncork what Blass regarded as a pathetic attempt at a curve. “Robby,” Blass would say, “you couldn’t get anybody out with that if your life depended on it.”

  Among the many characters in the clubhouse, third baseman Richie Hebner stood out because of his off-season job as a gravedigger in Massachusetts. When opposing players slid into third, Hebner would joke that he gave discounts to major leaguers. Clemente felt a bond with Hebner since they had both served in the Marines Corps, but he was spooked by his teammate’s occupation. “He’d say, ‘You dig graves?’ I’d say, Yeah, somebody’s got to dig them,” Hebner remembered. Clemente, he said, seemed skeptical. “ ‘You bury people?’ he’d ask. I’d say, ‘Come up in the middle of winter and you can dig one yourself, then you can tell me if I’m full of shit.’” One day, Clemente had been taking a nap in the trainer’s room with a towel over his head and awoke to find Hebner hovering over him. “What are you doing?” Clemente asked. “I thought you were dead,” Hebner said, deadpan. “I’m measuring you up to see what size casket I got to get you, buddy.”

  Although he went hitless the first two games, Clemente quickly came alive in the batter’s box that season and began rapping out his usual rataplan of base hits. The better the pitcher, the better Clemente hit. Bob Gibson, homer; Don Sutton, homer; Ferguson Jenkins, triple. Through early July, he was playing five or six times a week, with Virdon resting him on day games after night games or part of a doubleheader. His stomach was still hurting, and he kept losing weight until finally a sore heel took him out of the lineup altogether. He missed twelve consecutive games until July 23, when he started and drove in two runs, but left in pain and was out again through the first half of August. He was selected to the July 25 All-Star game in Atlanta, which was held later than usual because of the April strike, but withdrew from the contest because of injuries.

  With Stargell, Oliver, Hebner, Robertson, Sanguillen, Cash, Davalillo, Clines, and Stennett all clubbing the ball, the Pirates were so loaded that they kept winning without Clemente, and by August 20 they were thirty games over .500 with a 72–42 record. Clemente returned to the lineup during the final West Coast trip of the season and slowly got back into his hitting groove. Fernando González, the young Puerto Rican, had joined the team after a stint in the minors, and quickly became Manny Sanguillen’s foil. “Hey, Roberto,” Sanguillen called out in Spanish during a flight from Pittsburgh to Montreal in September. “Fernando says you are not a good ballplayer. He has been here watching you play and you are no good.” González was terribly embarrassed. He had adored Clemente since he was a kid, and now here he was on the same plane with him, and it seemed that Clemente was taking Sanguillen seriously. “I know, I know,” Clemente said. “I don’t get the recognition I deserve!” The next day, in the visitors clubhouse, González approached Clemente and apologized. “I didn’t say anything like that,” he said of Sanguillen’s claim. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” Clemente assured him. “They like to get on me,”

  González would sit on the bench next to Clemente after that, trying to learn as much as he could. After Montreal, the Pirates reached Chicago on September 12, and by then no one could get Clemente out. He went three for four in the first game, then three for three with a homer and triple and game-winning home run against Ferguson Jenkins the next day. In an early inning, González watched Clemente take a strike on the right-hand corner of the plate. “I know you can hit that ball good,” González said to him the next inning on the bench. “You’ll see why I took it later in the game,” Clemente said. In the seventh, he was up with a man on and Jenkins threw the same pitch to the same spot and Clemente knocked it over the fence in right-center. “When he came to the bench, he said, “ ‘That’s why I gave him that pitch in the first at-bat,’” González recalled. “He was doing things by that time that I never saw anyone do and I haven’t seen anyone do since. He was like a computer. He was set to play baseball. He always knew what he had to do.”

  What he had to do that year was collect 118 hits to reach three thousand, a mark reached then by only ten players in major league history: Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Hank Aaron, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, Willie Mays, Paul Waner, and Cap Anson. After going eight for twelve in Chicago, Clemente was within fourteen hits of the magic number. Four hits against the Cardinals, three against the Mets, one against Montreal, and he was down to six as the Pirates made their final visit of the year to Philadelphia. By then the team had clinched the National League’s Eastern Division title on its way to a 96–59 record.

  Before the series against the Phillies, Clemente had called his friends Carolyn and Nevin Rauch in Kutztown and asked them to meet him in Philadelphia. When they arrived at the Pirates’ hotel, they realized that they had not made reservations, but Clemente insisted that they stay in his suite with him. “We stayed and we tal
ked and talked and talked,” Carolyn Rauch said later. “And then he stood up, and we were getting ready to go to the game, and he said, ‘I want to talk to you, Carolina.’ You never knew what to expect next. He said, ‘I want you and your family to come to Puerto Rico for the [New Year’s] holidays.’ I thought, yeah, sure, we can make it. Plenty of time to make arrangements. And he said, ‘But promise me right here, right now, that you will come and you will bring [daughters] Carol and Sharon.’”

  Recalling the scene more than three decades later, Carolyn Rauch said she still got chills thinking about it. “I said, ‘Okay, Roberto, we will gladly come.’ He said, ‘I’m telling you why. I’m not going to be there. Something’s going to happen and I want you to be with my family.’”

  At the ballpark that night, the Rauches asked themselves what he meant. Why did he want them to come to Puerto Rico if he wasn’t going to be there? What did he mean something was going to happen to him? Did he already know about a trip? Did it have to do with baseball?

  Against the Phillies, Clemente rapped out two hits on September 26, two on September 27, and one the next day, reaching 2,999 hits after two at-bats, when Virdon pulled him so that he could reach the milestone before the hometown fans in Pittsburgh. What did three thousand hits mean to Clemente? “To get three thousand hits means you’ve got to play a lot,” he told reporters in Philadelphia. “To me it means more. I know how I am and what I’ve been through. I don’t want to get three thousand hits to pound my chest and holler, ‘Hey, I got it!’ What it means is I didn’t fail with the ability I had. I’ve seen lots of players come and leave. Some failed because they didn’t have the ability. And some failed because they didn’t have the desire.”

  • • •

  For baseball games, a capacity crowd at Three Rivers Stadium was 47,971. Barely half that many people came to the stadium on the night of September 29 to see Clemente seek his three-thousandth hit against the Mets and Tom Seaver. Clemente versus Seaver was an even match of two talented, intelligent, strong-willed players. Seaver was in awe of Clemente’s powerful hands and how he could stand there “far away from the plate, with that great big long bat, and those strong hands and control it like crazy, hitting pitches on the side of the plate.” There was one spot, outside at the knees, where Seaver thought Clemente was vulnerable. If you hit that spot, he would just look at the pitch and walk away. But if you missed it, the ball would go screaming to right.

  The drama this time almost came to a quick and unsatisfactory close. Clemente strode to the plate in the first inning, acknowledged a standing ovation from the crowd, and then took a mighty cut at a Seaver fast ball. He barely topped the ball. This had happened before in Clemente’s career. Though this time the ball bounced a little higher and went a little further, the play was reminiscent of the dribbling hit between the mound and first in the eighth inning of game seven of the 1960 World Series, and the topper back to Mike Cuellar in the third game of the 1971 series. After the ball bounded high past Seaver, second baseman Ken Boswell moved over to make the play, but it skipped off his glove and Clemente reached first. The scoreboard light immediately flashed H for hit. A roar went up, and toilet paper streamers unfurled from the stands.

  Would the quest for three thousand end with a meager infield hit? First baseman Ed Kranepool flipped the ball to the umpire, who handed it to first base coach Don Leppert, who patted Clemente on the rear. But in the press box, Luke Quay of the McKeesport Daily News, the official scorer for the game, jumped up in alarm. The scoreboard had it wrong; he had not ruled it a hit. “Error, second baseman. Error, Boswell,” Quay announced on the press box microphone. The lights went off the H on the scoreboard and the E lit up for error. More toilet paper, followed by a round of boos. This was no day for hitting in any case. Seaver and Nelson Briles locked up in a pitcher’s duel, with Seaver prevailing 1–0, striking out thirteen and allowing only two hits, to Oliver and Hebner. Clemente had one other chance at a hit. Seaver came in with a slider low and away—the very pitch he had envisioned in his preseason pantomime—and Clemente sliced it deep down the line to right, but Rusty Staub had been playing him toward the line and made the play.

  After the game, Clemente was at his most churlish, feeling wronged again. Even now, with another World Series championship ring and a milestone unavoidably within reach, anger could be the fuel that drove him, as Roy McHugh had earlier observed. But was he really peeved, or was it just a show? When Dick Young of the New York Daily News reached the Pirates locker room, Clemente was in the whirlpool, his neck sticking out of the water, a sardonic grin on his face. He said he was celebrating being robbed of his three-thousandth hit by “the assholes in the press box.”

  So you think it was a hit? someone asked.

  “Think? I know it was a hit. Everybody knew it was a hit.”

  But Boswell himself said it was an error, Clemente was told.

  “He’s full of shit. Anyway, I’m glad they didn’t call it a hit. They’ve been fucking me all my life, and this shows it.”

  Then it was pointed out to Clemente that Luke Quay was the official scorer. Clemente liked Quay immensely and thought he had always been fair to him. So much for the they’re-out-to-get-me routine. Abruptly, Clemente’s mood changed. This was something that all the sportswriters had known about Clemente for years. He would erupt, but his anger would pass, and if he was proved to be wrong, he would apologize. When the postgame show was over he got a baseball and wrote on it . . . It was a hit. No it was an error. No it was superman Luke Quay. To my friend Luke with best wishes, Roberto Clemente.

  The next morning at eleven, fourteen-year-old Ann Ranalli and two friends from St. Bernard’s parochial school in Mount Lebanon caught a streetcar into downtown Pittsburgh, got off near Grant Street, and walked over the bridge to Three Rivers Stadium. The girls carried brown paper bags of confetti they had created from strips of the Pittsburgh Press the night before. Ranalli loved baseball, and loved Clemente even more. There was something unusual about him, she thought. “He was quirky . . . He always seemed to be his own person, on and off the field.” She wanted to be there cheering him on when he got his three-thousandth hit. On this misty, overcast day, they entered the stadium and went up to the right-field bleachers to find seats. No problem. Ranalli was disappointed when she looked around and saw such a measly crowd. Where is everybody? she thought. How could you not be out here for this? The official attendance was 13,117. Clemente’s teammates were equally distraught to see the virtually empty stadium as they warmed up. But it was a college football Saturday. “Pittsburgh was such a football town, even with the good teams we had,” recalled Richie Hebner. “It was a shitty, overcast day. Saturday afternoon. Only thirteen thousand in the stands. There should have been more. Here a guy who had played there eighteen seasons. [But] college football was on TV, money was tight, steel mills struggling . . .”

  Those who were at the stadium that day, like Ranalli and her friends, were mostly die-hard Clemente fans, including a few dozen who had flown up from Puerto Rico. From the moment Roberto emerged from the dugout, he was hailed with shouts and greetings, and his every move was tracked by Luis Ramos, a photographer for the San Juan newspaper, El Nuevo Día. Ramos later estimated that he took twenty-five rolls of 300 millimeter film on his Nikon camera with a 4.5 lens. “I had to shoot from a distance of a hundred feet,” he remembered. “Every time he picked up a bat, I shot. And I kept doing it when he was in the on-deck circle, in the dugout, when he was here, there, I didn’t miss a single step.” Up in the press box, along with the voice of Pittsburgh, Bob Prince, the game was being called for Puerto Rico by the Spanish-language broadcasters Felo Ramírez and Carlos DeJesus. It was Dock Ellis against the lefthander for the Mets, Jon Matlack, who after going 0–3 in a brief call-up the year before had blossomed in 1972 with fifteen wins. In the first inning, Chuck Goggin, just called up from the minors to play second for the Pirates, got his first major league hit. Doug Harvey, the second base umpire, stopped th
e game and gave him the ball. One down, two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to go to match the great Clemente, Goggin would say later. At the rate he was going it would take three thousand years. No more magic that inning; Clemente struck out.

  Ramírez, the Vin Scully of Latin broadcasters, was at the microphone when Clemente stepped to the plate for the second time. “The audience is concentrated on the boricua behind home plate,” Ramírez began. Boricua is how Puerto Ricans often identify themselves; it comes from the Taino Indian name for the island. “They are waiting for the pitch from Jon Matlack. The fourth inning, bottom of the fourth inning. And the windup and it’s a fastball strike. The pitch was at the knees. Matlack ready again. Clemente ready at the plate . . . as always, very far away from the plate. And the windup, bye bye, he throws.” Crack of the bat. Ramirez’s voice rises and soars with the flight of the ball. “A double for Roberto Clemente against the wall! No-no-no! No-no-no! A double for Roberto Clemente! Completely clean double against the wall. On the pitch from Jon Matlack. Ladies and gentlemen, the fans are going crazy here in Three Rivers Stadium! Everyone is on their feet. Great emotion. They are giving Roberto Clemente the ball. He takes off his hat. He greets the public and receives the congratulations of the shortstop, Jim Fregosi. By his action, the shortstop is greeting him as the best. The fans are on their feet. The enthusiasm is huge here in Three Rivers. We are seeing a historic event, a historic event in baseball.”

  It was an outside curve going just where Matlack wanted it to go until Clemente thwacked it against the left-field wall. The umpires called time after the play to allow the scene to play out properly. In the excitement of the moment, Don Leppert, the first base coach, took out a package of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and was about to stuff a wad into his mouth when Clemente came over and gave him the ball. Leppert stuck the piece of history in his back pocket for safekeeping. In the dugout, looking out at the regal Clemente standing on second base, Al Oliver was overcome by emotion. “It gave me a serious charge to see a guy who I know, who didn’t get the credit he truly deserved, but to see him standing on second base, it meant a lot to me as a young player coming up. And I will never forget how it made me think, you know, here’s a guy who’s taking care of himself, and I said, that will be a good goal for me. I felt better about it than he did. He seemed nonchalant.”