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

by David Maraniss

  In the Pirates’ dressing room before the game, Murtaugh adhered to his regular season routine, pulling out a scorecard and going over the Yankee lineup hitter by hitter. “Any questions?” he asked when he was done. His team had none. Then “go get ’em,” he said. No need for a pep talk, Captain Dick Groat thought. Everyone understood what this series meant. Writing a column for the Post-Gazette under the impressive byline . . .

  By Dick Groat

  PIRATE SHORTSTOP AND NL BATTING CHAMPION

  . . . Groat confessed that while he tried to tell himself it was just another game and that there was no reason to be nervous, he had “a peculiar feeling” in the pit of his stomach in his first at-bat and his nerves would not settle for the first few innings.

  Law and the Pirates had reason to be anxious in the top of the first when Maris, acting as though it were still batting practice, deposited a home run over the right-field fence, but they got out of the inning with no more damage and swiftly went at Ditmar. Bill Virdon walked and stole second. Groat, nerves and all, doubled him home. Bob Skinner singled in Groat and also stole second. Dick Stuart was retired for the first out, then up came Clemente, batting fifth instead of his usual third, because Murtaugh thought he might have trouble with the six-foot-two 195-pound right-hander. Here was Clemente’s first appearance on the World Series stage, the first by a Puerto Rican hitter since Luis Olmo played left field for the Dodgers in 1949 against the Yankees. Doña Luisa and brother Matino were watching from seats behind the screen. The old man was listening on the radio back in Carolina. With the count at two balls, two strikes, Ditmar came inside with a fastball and Clemente stroked it over second for a single, driving in Skinner with the third run. Ditmar was done for the day, yanked by Stengel after throwing only eighteen pitches and getting a lone out.

  The first-inning rally showed the Pirates would not be intimidated. It was Stengel who looked anxious, with his quick hook. This was not what most experts expected. Shirley Povich, the venerable sportswriter for the Washington Post, thought it was “like the patient examining the doctor for symptoms.” By the top of the second, with New York still trailing 3–1 and third baseman Clete Boyer coming to the plate with runners at first and second, the impatience bordered on panic. Boyer was called back to the dugout, and at first he assumed that Stengel had a tip for him on how to bat against Law, but the manager’s only instruction was for Clete to find a seat on the bench. Dale Long was sent up to pinch-hit. First game, second inning, Boyer pulled for a pinch hitter on his first at-bat—an uncommon baseball humiliation. Clemente, in right field, knew the feeling; long ago, he had been taken out for a pinch hitter in the first inning with the bases loaded, but that was during his first year in pro ball with the Montreal Royals, when the Dodgers were trying to hide him. As it turned out, Long hit a long fly to Clemente in right, who gathered it in and unloosed a bullet throw to second, nearly doubling Berra.

  Stengel’s desperation was for nothing. The game essentially was over after a brilliant defensive play by Virdon in the fourth inning. Law was struggling as he worked his way through the new Murderer’s Row. Maris walked, Mantle singled, and Yogi Berra, playing in his record eleventh World Series and still feared by the Pirates as the Yankees’ toughest clutch hitter, cracked a drive to the deepest expanse of right center. Clemente, racing over from right, and Virdon, at full sprint from center, simultaneously reached the spot where the drive was headed. Clemente, called for it, certain that he could make the catch, and so did Virdon, who “had a beam” on it all along. There was such a roar in the stadium that neither could hear. They brushed against each other, Virdon’s spikes cutting the back of Clemente’s right shoe, and just as Clemente pulled up, the No. 21 on his back facing the infield, Virdon leaped and snared the ball with his outstretched glove as he neared the light green wall. Writers who had not seen Virdon field were stunned. Murtaugh in the dugout, Law on the mound, and regular observers of the Pirates were elated but not the least surprised. They considered Virdon the nearest thing to Willie Mays in center, perhaps even his equal, and with Clemente patrolling beside him any ball hit to center or right might be caught if it stayed in the park. The Yankees were deflated, and even when Moose Skowron singled to drive in Maris, Murtaugh did not consider taking out Law, who got out of the inning maintaining the lead, which was soon extended in the bottom half when Bill Mazeroski hit a two-run homer for the Pirates.

  During the early innings, Elroy Face and his teammates in the Pirates relief corps, unable to get a clear view of home from the bullpen, had raced into the clubhouse when the Yankees were up so they could scout the hitters on television. Everything about the five-foot-eight, 155-pound Face was compact and efficient, including his preparations. He needed only three to four throws to get loose, and rarely bothered to warm up until he saw his manager ambling toward the mound in a late inning. In the eighth, with Law holding a 6–2 lead but looking tired and feeling soreness in his right ankle, Murtaugh made his move. Two gestures signified that he wanted Face. One was simply to hold his hand up to his face; the other was to stick out his right hand, palm down, waist high. Face had a rubber arm and could relieve for two and occasionally three innings, day after day, relying on his specialty pitch, a forkball. Thrown with two fingers spread like fork prongs wide apart over the top of the ball, the forkball was an early variation of the split-fingered fastball that became popular four decades later. (When Steve Blass, a latter-day Pirate pitcher and announcer, asked him to describe the difference between the two pitches, Face replied, “Oh, about four million dollars.”) When Face came in, it was a done deal. No trouble in the eighth. In the ninth, he gave up a two-run homer to Elston Howard, but got left-fielder Hector Lopez to ground into a game-ending double-play, Maz to Groat to Stuart, and the Pirates, 6–4 winners, hollered and whooped as they bounded up the underground ramp to their dusty old dressing room.

  The Yankees were grouches after the game. They had banged out thirteen hits, more than they had in any game during their season-ending fifteen-game winning streak, yet lost. How could this happen? Boyer made no effort to hide his rage over being yanked before his first chance to bat. Ditmar was despairing over not finishing the first. Mantle, called out on strikes twice, thought one of them was a bad call. Second baseman Bobby Richardson criticized the Pirates infield, notorious for its concrete-like hardness. And Stengel, in his inimitable way, lodged the same complaint. “If they want to I guess they could have the groundskeeper plow it up pretty good because he could get a plow here where they have all the steel to make one but they don’t want it,” he said. Stengel also took a shot at Clemente, who had grounded into a fielder’s choice in the fifth but stayed on first while second baseman Bobby Richardson chased after Skinner on a rundown between second and third. Was this the lack of adventure that Branch Rickey had mentioned during his first scouting report on Clemente in San Juan in January 1955? “Where was the man who hit the ball?” Stengel asked. “He’s the fastest man, ain’t he? Now if that play had decided the game, they’d all be asking why he didn’t go to second. And if I was the manager I wouldn’t have an answer.” No one asked Clemente about it. In the locker room, he sat alone while the writers gathered around Virdon, Maz, Law, Face, and Bob Friend, who would be starting the next day.

  • • •

  It rained all that night in Pittsburgh and into the next day. By 12:26 P.M., only thirty-four minutes before Game 2 was to begin, the skies were dark, a tarp covered the infield, the players were lounging and playing quick rounds of gin in the clubhouse, and fans were taking shelter under the overhang. But Commissioner Frick, protected by raincoat and hat and working a walkie-talkie with his staff, said the weathermen promised him that sunshine was coming, and within twenty minutes his confidence was rewarded. Stengel presented a starting lineup with veteran catcher Berra playing left field for the first time in his World Series career. His pal Joe Garagiola, who grew up with Berra in St. Louis and had dinner with him in Pittsburgh the night before, thoug
ht the talkative Yogi, so accustomed to conducting a running commentary with the home plate umpire and opposing batters, would be “lonely out there with no one to talk to.”

  Bob Friend, the eighteen-game winner, who threw what was known as a heavy ball, with a fastball reaching ninety-two miles an hour, took the mound for the Pirates, and the home crowd settled in feeling optimistic. Warming up, Friend realized that he had “tremendous stuff,” and he felt powerful and in the groove through the opening innings. “The ball was moving all over the place.” He had six strikeouts in four innings and it seemed only accidental that he was trailing 3–0. One Yankee run was unearned and another came on a bounding double by Gil McDougald that third baseman Hoak insisted was foul. Fans and writers second-guessed Murtaugh after he removed Friend in the bottom of the fourth for pinch hitter Gene Baker, who rapped into a sharp double play, and at the time Friend himself was distraught. The Yankees weren’t really hitting anything, he thought, and he was just getting warmed up. But decades later, the event distanced by time, Friend gave his manager a reprieve. “I don’t blame Danny for taking me out,” he said. “Danny did the right thing.”

  There could be no right thing for the Pirates in this game. The Yankees went on a tear after that, pounding out nineteen hits, one short of the World Series record of twenty by the 1921 Yankees and 1946 Cardinals; and sixteen runs, only two less than the record set by the Yankees against the Giants in 1936. They turned the game into a romp in the sixth, sending twelve batters to the plate and scoring seven runs on the way to a 16–3 victory.

  In the mess of this slaughter, one sportswriter shouted from the press box, “Bring in Yellowhorse!”—a lament so evocative that several colleagues stole the quote and attributed it to an anonymous fan. Mose J. Yellowhorse, a full-blooded American Indian from Pawnee, Oklahoma, known affectionately as Chief, possessed the most felicitous name in Pittsburgh Pirate history, if not the best record. He pitched two seasons, 1921 and 1922, and won a total of eight games. Perhaps his best move in the majors, according to baseball historian Ralph Berger, came when he and shortstop Rabbit Maranville made some barehanded grabs of pigeons fluttering outside the sixteenth-story window of their road-trip hotel. Bring in Yellowhorse! The Chief was sixty-two years old in 1960 and fishing in retirement back in Pawnee, but certainly could have fared no worse that day than the relief quintet of Green, Labine, Witt, Gibbon, and Cheney. Once his sluggers gave him an edge, Stengel became a relentless bench jockey from the shadows of the visitors’ dugout, directing a nasal torrent of sarcastic jibes at Smoky Burgess and the procession of hapless Pittsburgh firemen. When Hoak, from his position at third, would shoot a stern look at him, Stengel would “just look at me,” Hoak recalled, “throw his hands in the air, and shrug, as if to say, ‘What’s going on? Why the dirty look, Hoak?’”

  Clemente, batting third for the Pirates, had two hits, as did each of the next four men in the lineup (Nelson, Cimoli, Burgess, and Hoak), but Bob Turley, the Yankees starter, was able to scatter thirteen hits and allow only three runs from the losing side. The batting star of the game was Mickey Mantle, who drove in five and clouted two homers, including a tape-measure blast that he hit right-handed. The ball landed in an area over the right-center field vines that had been reached only by lefty sluggers Stan Musial, Duke Snider, and Dale Long. A city policeman who happened to be standing near where the ball came down helped estimate its distance at 478 feet. Handsome Mick was an irresistible story line in the press box. Stengel talked about how he played on one leg and about how he laboriously taped his aching legs for an hour before each game. “He’ll always be a hero in our book,” wrote David Condon of the Chicago Tribune. “He had human faults, but he has super human courage.”

  Mantle also had more baseball common sense than most sportswriters. Arthur Daley of the Times, in prose only slightly more dismissive than his peers, wrote that “the Pirates may never recover from the humiliation of their horrendous rout. It was one that didn’t just jar them to their shoe tops. It had to penetrate deeper, all the way to the subconscious, and create a fear complex that could destroy morale.” The Mick would have none of that. He understood the rhythms of the game, and the dangers of depleting energy in a one-sided contest. To Mantle, the home runs were a waste, since they came in a blowout. “I wish I could have saved them for a time when they meant something,” he said.

  With the series now moving to New York, the Pirates left Pittsburgh at six o’clock that night, flying the same United Airlines charter they had used all season. The pilot, Captain Joe Magnano, was from Long Island and had grown up a Yankees fan, but came to identify with the Pirates. Law, Burgess, and Cimoli were interested in flying and were always hanging around the cockpit. Clemente was among those who hated to fly and tried, usually in vain, to sleep on the plane so he wouldn’t have to brood about every thump or bump. The Yankees, at Stengel’s insistence (he wanted to “ride herd” on them, it was said), traveled by train, reserving five Pullman cars in the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Pittsburgher express. The sportswriting tribe tagged along, as did a few hundred boisterous Pirates fans, who upon arrival in New York found themselves virtually alone in the belief that the series would last enough games for a return to Forbes Field. Al Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, strolled into the lobby of the Commodore Hotel to see a tabloid headline about Game 2—MURDER IN PITTSBURGH. “Every time I go outside the hotel,” he noted, “I hear dire consequences for the Pirates.” When the teams worked out at Yankee Stadium on Friday, the off-day, there was no front-page headline, though Red Smith might have appreciated this priority: Khrushchev moved out of the Waldorf-Astoria, making room for the World Series headquarters. There was no citywide delirium like in Pittsburgh; a World Series was considered an annual event in New York, but still by eight on the morning of game day there were three thousand people waiting in line for bleacher seats, and five hours later the stadium was filling with seventy thousand fans.

  With Clemente on the Pirates and countryman Luis (Tite) Arroyo pitching in relief for the Yankees, the series was drawing great interest in Puerto Rico and all of the Caribbean. The North American press tended to treat the Latin contingent as fodder for lighthearted comedy. There was nothing malevolent about this, but it reflected the attitudes of the time and the fact that Spanish-speaking players and their culture were still regarded as oddities. Clemente was quoted in the locker room before the third game telling his teammates how thrilled he was that his family and friends in Puerto Rico could see him play on television for the first time. “I shave, put on cologne and powder so I smell good for television,” he reportedly said. As the game was getting under way, with Vinegar Bend Mizell starting for the Pirates, there was guffawing in the press box about what Al Abrams called a “crisis” faced by Latin American journalists, who struggled with the pronunciation of Mizell’s colorful appellation. Vinegar Bend was the name of the hamlet where he grew up in rural Alabama. “So they just called him Wilmer,” Abrams reported.

  The pronunciation problem was resolved soon enough in any case, since Mizell lasted only a third of an inning. He gave up four runs on three hits before Murtaugh replaced him with Clem Labine, who proved no more effective than he had been in Game 2. It was 6–0 at the end of one, and 10–0 by the end of four. Pirates pitchers consistently fell behind in the count and ended up grooving fastballs for the Yankees to feast on. Gino Cimoli, playing left, tried Ring Lardner’s favorite Alibi Ike complaint, that the sun was in his eyes, but teammate Rocky Nelson shut him up by noting that Cimoli had no excuses since he was usually turned away from the sun looking at balls soar over his head. By the middle innings, binoculars turned from the field to the stands for celebrity spotting. Herbert Hoover, the former President, showed up in the fourth wearing a gray fedora, taking his seat in time for another Mantle home run. He was barely noticed, which someone noted was an improvement on his World Series appearance at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park during the depths of the Depression in 1931, when he was roundly booed
. Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, appeared in the sixth. It was appropriate, Red Smith observed, that a “man of peace” would not arrive until the “carnage was over.” One fan supposedly mistook Nehru for a hot dog vendor in his white cap. Mildred McGuire, a fan from Wayne, New Jersey, seated nearby, reported that he spoke perfect English. Though Mantle had four hits including the home run, the stars for the Yankees this time were Whitey Ford, who tossed a complete game shutout, and second baseman Bobby Richardson, who drove in six runs, four of them on a fly ball that reached the close, cozy corner of the left-field stands for a grand slam.

  Clemente kept his hitting streak alive by singling with two out in the ninth, and flashed his fielding brilliance a few times with rocket throws from right and a difficult catch of a Maris line shot to right center. All piddling and forgettable when your team gets drubbed 10 to zip. “That game didn’t make me feel any younger,” said Danny Murtaugh, who had turned forty-three that day. In the press box, there was a rush to bury the Pirates. The lone writer who thought Pittsburgh still had a chance was Don Hoak, who in his column after the game declared: “If you quit on the Pirates now there’s a very good chance you’ll have to eat your words in a few days.”

  For the critical fourth game on Sunday, October 9, the Pirates were able to turn again to Vernon Law. The Deacon and Mrs. Law had been unable to attend church that morning, much to his dismay, but they prayed in their hotel room at the Commodore. For all of his devotion, Law was not the proselytizing sort, never bugged his teammates to stop doing this or that, and never tried to pretend the Lord was on his side, or taking any side at all in a sporting event. “We prayed that no one on either side would get hurt and that everyone would do as well as they possibly could,” he reported. “We did not pray for victory because that would be a selfish prayer.”

  The way the first inning started, it looked as though Law could have tried some selfish prayer. Bob Cerv cracked an inside pitch to left for a single and Tony Kubek followed by doubling a low, outside pitch to left, the forty-ninth and fiftieth Yankee hits of the series. Hoak approached the mound from third and said, “Deacon, we’ve been pitching that Kubek wrong. The reports on him are wrong. Let’s pitch him up and in instead of down and away.” Law was so accustomed to Hoak’s yammering that he paid little attention. But he nodded and registered the suggestion, which was what he was thinking anyway. And he “wasn’t too worried,” he reported later, about having runners on second and third, because he knew that if he got Maris out he could walk Mantle and try for a double play. That was precisely what happened, with Berra grounding to Hoak for an around-the-horn twin-killing that ended the inning. Law coasted until the fourth, when Moose Skowron homered to give the Yankees a 1–0 lead.