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

by David Maraniss

  Later, talking to Bill Mazeroski, his oldest teammate, Clemente confided that it hurt him to think the fans would boo him “after all this time.” But he would not criticize them in public. They had given him a lift so many times in his career. They were like his parents, always there for him. They were only judging his actions on the field, and hitting into three double plays and making an error were deeds that deserved boos. He would never play for any other fans, he said.

  There was a distinction in any case between rooting for Pittsburgh and being a Clemente fan. The real Clemente fans, many of them young people, never booed him. One such fan was Juliet Schor, a tenth-grade student at Winchester Thurston School in the Shadyside neighborhood, who described herself as such “an obsessive Roberto Clemente idolizer” that she took pictures of him on television and clipped every mention of him in the Pittsburgh papers. Schor also possessed a baseball that a friend of her father’s brought back from spring training and delivered to her at Children’s Hospital when she was undergoing preoperative treatments for scoliosis. It was a Wilson ball, Pony League, horsehide cover, signed in blue ink: “To Juley, I hope that when you get this you are feeling much better. I hope to see you when I get to Pittsburgh. Love, Roberto.”

  Schor’s attachment to Clemente eventually became so overwhelming that she rode a city bus across town early one morning just to stand in the parking lot of his apartment complex in hopes of seeing him. As luck would have it, he came out to his car carrying a basket of laundry. She worked up the nerve to approach him and blurted out exactly how she felt. “I am more in love with you than any person in the world!” Clemente smiled. She thought he must have heard this a million times. He said that he was going to the laundry. Did she want to come along? “I was totally undone by this, that I could just . . . go to the laundry with him,” she recalled. “What a mensch. He was so unbelievably sweet and kind and nice to me. And so matter of fact, too. He was talking to me like any other person . . . When it came down to it, it was too overwhelming and I said, ‘Oh no.’ And he left. He drove off to the laundry.” Schor never saw her hero again. She grew up to become a professor of sociology at Boston College. Among the clippings in her Clemente scrapbook was a story about people booing him that long ago April Sunday at Forbes Field. “I remember cutting out an article from the Post-Gazette,” she said later. “Clemente booed! I kept it for a long time, it was so upsetting to me that it happened.”

  Aside from that early double-play-and-error skein, Clemente gave fans little reason to boo the rest of 1969. The previous season’s .291 average was an aberration, not the typical slide of an aging ballplayer. Clemente began rapping the ball with his trademark ferocity again. No National League pitcher wanted to face him. Ferguson Jenkins, the ace of the Cubs, said that it seemed every time he looked over “there was No. 21 in the on-deck circle, scaring the hell out of me. I never liked seeing him there. Didn’t I just pitch to him? The lineup always seemed to come around to him too quickly.” The only way to pitch Clemente, Jenkins decided, was “right down the middle”—he could reach anything outside, even as far off the plate as he stood. That had been the shared wisdom of most National Leaguers throughout the sixties decade. When Larry Jackson pitched for the Phillies, he once became so frustrated trying to get Clemente out that in exasperation he decided to knock him down. Clemente got up and smacked the next pitch over the center-field fence. That is when Gene Mauch, then manager of the Phillies, established the Clemente rule. As second baseman Tony Taylor remembered: “Mauch would say, ‘Let him sleep. Don’t wake him up. Don’t pitch him inside, he’ll kill you. Just throw it right down the middle of the plate and let him hit it.’” But there was no way to get Clemente out, according to Taylor. “I would watch him hit and hit and hit. He was the best I’d ever seen at setting pitchers up. He’d look bad one at-bat and then kill them with the same pitch the next.”

  Don Drysdale, the fearsome Dodgers right-hander, acknowledged that his fear of a screaming line drive off Clemente’s bat helped drive him from the game. In a reflective conversation about retirement with Bill Curry, the former Green Bay Packers center, Drysdale said that he could not see Clemente making that slow walk to the plate without “thinking of that terrible thing that had happened to Herb Score, the Indians’ pitcher, when Gil McDougald hit the ball back into his face and almost blinded him.” Big D would “stand on the mound and look down at Clemente and the Score thing would pop into his mind and he’d give an involuntary shudder,” Curry remembered Drysdale telling him. “It got so bad . . . that when he delivered the ball, he flinched at his follow-through and tucked his head down a bit.”

  The moment that finished Drysdale’s career came on August 5, a Tuesday night in the dog days of the summer of 1969. He was on the mound at home at Chavez Ravine. Clemente came to the plate and smacked a line drive to center, the ball leaving the bat with such velocity that Drysdale could hear it buzz past him. As Curry described the scene later, Drysdale then “had the sensation of a bug crawling on his neck; he reached and flicked at it. Leaning down for the resin bag, he noticed a runny substance on his finger, and still feeling the irritation, he reached up and discovered his ear was bleeding. The ball had actually taken the skin off the top of his ear on its way out to center field.” He stayed in to pitch to one more batter, the young catcher, Manny Sanguillen, who was a Clemente disciple. The gopher ball that Drys-dale threw to Sanguillen was his last pitch in the major leagues.

  On that same West Coast trip, Clemente had another of his occasional power surges, rapping home runs in three consecutive at-bats against the Giants in San Francisco. (That game, which the Pirates won 10–5, marked the second three-home-run game of his career, the first coming in May 1967 against the Reds when he drove in seven runs but the Pirates still lost, 8–7.) Clemente ended the 1969 season with a .345 average, nineteen home runs, twelve triples (his eighth season of ten or more of those rare but beautiful hits), and ninety-one runs batted in. He lost another Silver Bat on the final day of the season to Pete Rose, who bunted for a base hit in his final at-bat to overtake Clemente for the batting title. At the end of the 1960s, a brilliant era of National League baseball illuminated by Mays, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Banks, Cepeda, McCovey, Koufax, Drysdale, Marichal, and Gibson, Clemente finished at the top of the game, with the highest batting average of any player over the entire decade. His Pirates, who started the sixties as champions, spent the decade futilely trying to return to those heights, but appeared at least to be on a winning track again. With a crew of young players including Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Dave Cash, Bob Robertson, Gene Alley, and Al Oliver supplementing steady old Mazeroski and the hitting machine trio of Clemente, Matty Alou (231 hits), and slugger Willie Stargell, the Pirates finished 1969 fourteen games over .500, in third place of the newly created NL East behind the Mets and Cubs.

  One other event that season was kept quiet at the time but eventually became part of Clemente lore. Aside from a crew of brutes who for obvious reasons never came forward to talk about it, he was the sole witness to the incident, so history has only his version, as passed down to Vera, José Pagán, Post-Gazette writer Bill Christine, and eventually the San Diego police. It happened during a West Coast road trip after a game in San Diego. As Clemente told the story, he saw Willie Stargell coming back to the Town and Country Motel with a box of take-out chicken, and asked him where he got it. Stargell directed him to a nearby restaurant on the other side of an eight-lane highway. A short time later, as Clemente was walking home with his dinner, he noticed a man walking toward him. A car suddenly swerved onto the sidewalk, a door opened, and the man rushed toward Clemente and pushed him inside. He had been kidnapped by four men: two Mexican nationals and two Mexican-Americans. One was driving, one put a gun to Clemente’s mouth, a third held a knife at his back, and a fourth sat on his legs so that he couldn’t move. According to Vera’s account, which correlates with what Clemente later told Christine, the kidnappers drove Clemente to an isolated park above
Mission Valley and ordered him to take off his clothes.

  “Once they arrived at the park, they took his wallet and divided up the money,” Vera recounted. “They took his clothing, his tie, and he was only left with his pants and one shoe. Roberto was silent at first . . . anesthetized by fear. But he thought he ought to do something. When he said, ‘I am Roberto Clemente and if you kill me the FBI will find you,’ they didn’t believe him.” Clemente told a slightly different version to Christine, saying that he informed the men that he played for the San Diego Padres (figuring they had never heard of the Pirates). In both versions, he urged them to look at the ring they had taken from his finger. It was from an All-Star game and had his name on it. And look at the cards in his wallet, he said. When the robbers realized that they had in fact chosen the famous baseball player as their prey, everything changed. “They returned everything to him,” Vera remembered him telling her. “They put together the money they had divvied up and put it in his wallet, which they gave to him. They gave him back his shirt . . . and told him to put on his tie so that he would look normal. They took him back to the place where they had swiped him from . . . and his heart jumped again when he saw they were returning. One of the thieves told him, ‘Here, you left your food.’”

  It would not be unusual if this story, like many stories, became more dramatic with every retelling. Whatever the hidden reality, it fit perfectly into the mythology of Roberto Clemente as a man of the people, respected even by urban desperados.

  • • •

  Nineteen sixty-nine is remembered in baseball as the year of the Miracle Mets. In their eighth season, the Mets overtook the Cubs in August, defeated the Braves in the divisional playoffs, and then shocked the favored Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series. Their championship was a perfect bookend to the upset victory of the Pirates in 1960, two scrappy underdog teams beating the establishment. From a long-term perspective, the Mets accomplished something even more unlikely than the Pirates did in defeating the Yankees. The expansion Mets became the best club in baseball in 1969 following seven straight sad-sack seasons during which they lost 737 games—an average of more than one hundred defeats a year—and won only 394. Their stunning rise has taken its justifiable place among the great stories of modern baseball. Yet one could argue that in terms of baseball history it was the second most important story of the year. The most significant event in baseball in 1969, and perhaps of the entire decade, might have taken place after the season, on December 13 and 14, inside a conference room at the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players Association held its annual winter meeting. There professional athletes took the first step toward freedom.

  At ten on the morning of the thirteenth, Marvin Miller, executive director of the players association, called the meeting to order. Seated next to him was Richard Moss, a Pittsburgh native who served as legal counsel. Miller, an economist, and Moss, a lawyer, were skilled organizers who had come to the players association from the steelworkers union in 1966. At the table around them were representatives from each team: Bernie Allen of the Senators, Max Alvis of the Indians, and Ron Brand of the new Montreal Expos; Moe Drabowsky of the Royals, Eddie Fisher of the Angels, and Reggie Jackson (sitting in for Catfish Hunter) of the Athletics; Ed Kranepool of the Mets, Denny Lemaster of the Astros, and Bob Locker of the new Seattle Pilots (about to become the Milwaukee Brewers); Jim Lonborg of the Red Sox, Dal Maxvill of the Cardinals, and Tim McCarver of the Phillies; Mike McCormick of the Giants, Milt Pappas of the Braves, and Jim Perry of the Twins; Gary Peters of the White Sox, Phil Regan of the Cubs, and Brooks Robinson of the Orioles; Tom Sisk of the Padres, Joe Torre of the Cardinals, and Woody Woodward of the Reds; Tom Haller for the National League, Steve Hamilton for the American League, and Jim Bunning for the Pension Committee. And representing the Pittsburgh Pirates, Roberto Clemente. Bunning and Clemente, Pirates teammates at the time and two future Hall of Fame players, had the most seniority among the players, fifteen years apiece, each making the majors in 1955. Clemente, who had replaced Donn Clendenon as player representative after Clendenon was traded, was the first Latin on the board.

  Three years into Miller’s leadership of the union, the players had started to assert themselves. In 1968, they had reached the first collective bargaining agreement with the owners, which among other things raised the minimum salary to $10,000. Now they were negotiating a new contract, and Miller spent the first part of the meeting assessing the latest management offer. The players wanted to cut the number of regular season games from 162 to 154, but the owners rejected any reduction. The owners also refused to discuss all proposals that would allow players freedom in moving from one team to another, and would not consider the concept of submitting salary disputes to arbitration. They agreed “in principle” to allow players to bring agents into contract negotiations, but refused to include that language in the basic agreement. Their proposal would raise the minimum salary by $500 for each of the next three seasons to an eventual $11,500. They would increase the daily meal money by 50 cents a year to $16.50. By unanimous vote, according to minutes of the meeting, the players rejected the offer but urged the negotiating committee to continue bargaining with the owners.

  The players then returned to the central issue of the negotiations, the restrictions on player movement imposed by what was known as the reserve clause, which allowed teams to maintain the rights to players beyond the length of a contract, in effect binding them to a single team unless they were traded or released. For generations of ballplayers, the reserve system had been an accepted part of major league life; all control rested with the owners. Now, slowly, the imbalance of power was being challenged. Miller noted that in the 1968 Basic Agreement the owners had promised to participate in a joint study of “possible alternatives to the reserve clause as presently constituted”—but since signing the agreement had “not advanced one single idea of their own for reform.” Player representatives agreed that the reserve clause was the most serious issue they faced and had to be resolved in future negotiations. Then Miller introduced an invited guest, Curt Flood, the veteran center fielder who had played twelve seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals. In a blockbuster deal at the end of the 1969 season, Flood had been traded by the Cardinals along with Tim McCarver, outfielder Byron Browne, and pitcher Joe Hoerner to Philadelphia for first baseman Richie Allen, infielder Cookie Rojas, and pitcher Jerry Johnson. The trade infuriated Flood. He did not want to play for the Phillies and started thinking about challenging the system.

  As he was introducing Flood, Miller recalled a conversation they had had shortly after the October trade. Miller said he gave Flood “the third degree” to test his convictions. The stakes for an individual ballplayer challenging the system, Miller said, were so great that he was “concerned that any player doing this understand all the consequences—personal and otherwise.”

  Flood then presented his case. Regardless of what the players association decided to do, he said, he would go ahead with his challenge. He had not yet made public his decision, but was about to announce that he was taking the owners to court to contest the legality of the reserve clause. He said that he was no longer willing to be bought and sold as a piece of property. All players were being treated like slaves, he said. “We are all under the same yoke.” Someone had to challenge the system, he added. “I feel I’m qualified and capable of doing it.”

  According to official notes of the meeting, along with more detailed handwritten notes taken by a participant, Miller offered two reasons why the players should support Flood. First, when a member of the union undertook a fight of concern to all players “the players association should give assistance to its full ability.” More important, he argued, they should join Flood to ensure that the case was argued effectively and did not result in bad law.

  Jim Bunning asked Flood whether he would be taking action if he had not been traded.

  Flood responded that his feelings
were “brought to a head by the trade.” It made him feel like he was being “treated like chattel.”

  Tom Haller asked whether being black was one of Flood’s motivations, given the social situation in the United States.

  “I am a black man and we have been denied rights,” Flood said. “But in this situation, race should not make the difference. We’re ballplayers, all with the same problem.”

  Tim McCarver, who had been moved from St. Louis in the same trade, asked what might happen if Flood won the case.

  The courts would only determine whether the system was legal or not, Marvin Miller answered. It may also award damages, but the real solution had to come from collective bargaining with the owners.

  Bob Locker asked what dangers might arise if Flood won.

  No danger, Miller said, “so long as all of us understand that our aim is not to wipe it [the reserve clause] out, but to make appropriate revisions.”

  Milt Pappas asked whether chaos would ensue if Flood won and twenty other players decided to follow him to court.