Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (16 page)

His fielding was as daring as ever, but far more consistent than 1959, when his ten assists and thirteen errors were cited negatively by general manager Brown during contract talks. This time Clemente had nineteen assists and only eight errors, and he won as many games with his glove as with his bat. It was not just all natural talent with Clemente; he worked diligently at the craft of fielding. He spent countless hours before games studying how balls caromed off the right field fence at Forbes Field and other National League stadiums. And he combined that studiousness with fearlessness. Danny Murtaugh would say for the rest of his career that the best catch he ever saw was made by Clemente on August 5 that year in a home game against the San Francisco Giants. In the seventh inning, Willie Mays hit a line shot to the right-field corner that Clemente, running full speed, caught just as he was crashing into a brick abutment on the unpadded wall. He bruised his knee and cut his chin, needing six stitches, but held on to the ball and saved the game for Mizell, who won 1–0.

Clemente and Murtaugh had an uneasy relationship over the years, but during 1960 the manager found little to criticize in his right fielder. If there were years when Murtaugh thought Clemente should play more even if he was hurt, this was not one of those years. Clemente played 144 games, 4 more than Hal Smith said they would need to win the pennant.

The Pirates were as consistent as Clemente. They had winning records against the Reds, Cubs, Phillies, Giants, and Braves and were all even, eleven and eleven, with the Dodgers and Cardinals. They had winning records at home and on the road, in day games and night games, against righties and lefties, in nine-inning games and extra-inning contests. They won a majority of the games played every day of the week except Monday, when they went six and six. Their longest losing streaks were four games (twice), while they rolled off winning streaks of nine straight in April, six straight and five straight in May, five straight in June, seven straight in August, and six straight in September. And they also had some magic. Starting with that incredible opening-week comeback against the Reds, they won twenty-eight games that they were trailing in the sixth inning, and twenty-one of those times they staged their winning rallies in the last inning. Clemente was second on the club, behind slugger Stuart, in last-inning game-winning hits.

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Throughout the season, the
Pittsburgh Courier
kept close watch on all forty-eight black players in the National League and fifteen in the American League.
One of the paper’s weekly features was a guest column by a major leaguer, usually cobbled together by Bill Nunn Jr. after an interview. Gene Baker, the veteran utility infielder for the Pirates, who had missed all of the 1959 season with an injury, wrote about how the Pittsburgh front office put him to work as a scout when he was out of action. It was Baker who spent several weeks tailing the Kansas City Athletics and made the key recommendation that the Pirates pick up reserve catcher Hal Smith. “I’m one of those optimists who like to think that the day will come when Negroes are accepted in front-office
jobs the same as they are on the playing field,” Baker wrote. Al Smith, the White Sox star outfielder, wrote about how much things had improved for black players since the days of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. Bill White of the Cardinals wrote that if he had to do it over again he would complete his college education before going into baseball. Willie Kirkland of the Giants wrote about how he was signed off the sandlots of Detroit for $2,500. Don Newcombe, in Cleveland after an illustrious career pitching for the Dodgers, compared the two leagues and said the American League had nothing to match the power of Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Orlando Cepeda, old Stan Musial, and Frank Howard. In June it was Roberto Clemente’s turn for the guest column.

Nunn published the verbatim transcript of Clemente’s tape-recorded comments, using the phonetic spellings that so irritated Clemente when they were done by the mainstream white press. A few weeks earlier, a society note in the paper had taken a jab at Clemente, questioning whether he preferred whites to people of his own race. Clemente lived in Schenley Heights and spent most of his off-hours in the Hill District, but was never fully at home, and occasionally had been the subject of unkind whispers. Coming from Puerto Rico, where segregation was not an overt matter, he had been quoted as saying that he did not want to be treated as a Negro, but by that he meant that he was not accustomed to being discriminated against, not that he disliked blacks. With the column, Nunn gave his friend the opportunity to respond.

“
Som’ Co-lored people I understand saying ‘Clemente, he do not like co-lored people,’” the column began. “This is not the truth at all. Look at me. Look at my skin. I am not of the white people. I hav’ color the skin.

“That is the first theeing I straighten out. I like all the people, both co-lored and the white; and since I am co-lored myself, in the skin, I would be seely hate myself.

“Thees’ people tell me I don’t like colored people. Well, I use this time to tell deeferant. I like myself, so I also like the people who are like me.”

Clemente turned to the baseball season. “I hit real good,” he noted.

I hit many what you call the “bad bol” pitches, and get good wood. The bol’ travel like bullet. That remind me, I hit 565 foote hum-rum in Chicaga, last year; the bol’ disappear from centerfield, and Raj Hornsby tell me it longest drive he ever saw hit out of Wrigley Field.

The bol’ feel good on the bat but I feel bad at heart, when no writer with our team play up the big drive. I feel effort not appreciated.

Next came a discussion of ball parks, with Clemente saying he liked Forbes Field best for both batting and fielding. His least favorite was Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, and next worst was Candlestick in San Francisco. “Pretty seats and grass but poor playing in tricky wind,” he wrote. As for his play this year, he attributed it to his better health. He felt better, he said, than any time since his rookie year. And he saw the team coming together at last.

We have the best . . . hitter in the clutch; none better than Bob Skeener. I tell him they bring in southpaw lefty, and that they lefty mean him trouble. Skeener merely wave hand, then step in and hit line drive for the extra bases.

Don Hoak he player we hav’ to hav’ in line-up. He solid everywhere. If he out of line-up, Pirates hurt plenty. Everybody got specialty, Groat best hit-run men in baseball.

We have good speerit on Pirates thees’ year. Ev’rybody hungry for winning, to get more money. Everybody try little harder and make it harder for the other team.

Ev’rybody work with Manager Murtaugh and the coaches because we hungry to win ball games and fly pennant flag in Forbes Field. If nobody get sick, we make it a race all the time. Thank The Courier very much.

As the season neared its final month and the Pirates looked like pennant winners, talk inevitably intensified on the question of who was the most valuable player.
The Pirates had several candidates, including Groat, the quiet captain who led the league in hitting; Tiger Hoak, their gutsy clubhouse leader, the player Clemente himself cited as being indispensable; Deacon Law, on his way to winning twenty games, and Clemente, excelling at the plate and in the field. Les Biederman, the beat reporter for the
Pittsburgh Press,
made it known that he favored Groat, even though Groat had only two homers and barely half as many runs batted in as Clemente. In talking to sportswriters in Los Angeles, Biederman took his campaign a step further, not only pushing Groat but telling his colleagues that Clemente and Hoak, but especially Clemente, did not deserve consideration. By the time the club arrived in San Francisco, word of the sportswriter’s actions reached Clemente, leaving him distraught. He had been on another tear, knocking out twenty-two hits in fifty-eight at-bats during the fourteen-game road trip, including five home runs and fifteen runs batted in. He had been lighting the way for his teammates all season, and still Biederman was down on him? On the plane from San Francisco to Chicago, the first leg of a long red-eye flight home, Clemente shared his feelings with Rocky Nelson, the old first baseman, a friend since Clemente had played with him on the Montreal Royals. Nelson had heard about Biederman’s anti-Clemente whisperings, and had read other stories in the papers that seemed to ignore Clemente’s role on the team, and he thought it was all unfair.

As the team waited for a change of planes in Chicago at five in the morning of September 1, Nelson sought out
Post-Gazette
beat writer Jack Hernon to make Clemente’s case. Hernon was no real fan of Clemente’s either, but listened and took notes. “There’s one thing I can’t understand,” Nelson said as he approached Hernon. “I’ve read many stories about who is the most valuable player on the Pirates. But never see the name of Roberto mentioned. I don’t know how he can be overlooked when you talk about players on the club. Actually, there is no one player that can be classed as the most valuable, in my opinion. There are about five fellows on this team we couldn’t get along without.
I mean individually, there’s Dick Groat and Don Hoak and the Deacon and Elroy and Clemente. But he doesn’t get a call. He’s been consistently around .320 all season. He has hit more home runs than ever. He just might be the only player here to drive in over a hundred runs. And certainly he is the best right fielder in the league. Sure, those others are valuable to the team, but no more valuable than Clemente. He’s won more games for us with his bat, with his arm, and with his speed on the bases. What more can you ask a player to do to be recognized? If Roberto beefs about not being mentioned, I wouldn’t blame him. He’s done as much as any other player on this team to keep us in first place.”

Hernon acknowledged that Clemente was “Mr. Clutch” on the ball club during the first two months of the season. He remembered Groat telling him once in the locker room how Roberto’s eyes “lit up” when he came to the plate with men on base. The other teams seemed to recognize this, Hernon added, by making him the target of brush-back pitches later in the season. But as for himself, Hernon preferred Don Hoak.

The following week, sensing the press box preference for the other players, the
Courier’
s Nunn took up Clemente’s cause. “To me, just based on what was right, it was Clemente,” Nunn said decades later. “And most guys that really knew baseball felt the same way.” In his column, Nunn noted that Clemente had far more home runs and runs batted in than Groat and that he was the best right fielder in the league whereas Groat was in the middle rank of National League glove men at shortstop. “Groat supporters will loudly proclaim that there are intangibles going for their guy which don’t show up in the records,” Nunn observed. “Having watched both players over the season I would have to say, and very definitely, that this is a two-way street, on which Clemente can walk with pride.”

There was nothing easy about winning a pennant that year in the eight-team National League. Series after series, the heavy hitters came at you: Mays and Cepeda and Alou; Musial and Boyer and White; Aaron and Mathews and Adcock. The Pirates had been lucky all year, but in the season’s final two months they began to hurt. The first injury was hidden from the public and press for six weeks. On August 13,
after defeating the charging Cardinals, Hoak, Friend, Virdon, and Gino Cimoli, (the fourth outfielder, and another former teammate of Clemente’s in Montreal back in 1954), went to relax at a friend’s back-yard swimming pool in the Pittsburgh suburbs. As Hoak was pulling himself from the pool, he ripped his right foot on the ladder. A large gash opened between his second and third toes, and the bleeding would not stop until a doctor arrived and sewed it up on the spot, without anesthesia. Not for nothing was he called Tiger. The players vowed not to tell anyone about the incident, and Hoak played the next day in a doubleheader, but was hobbling slightly for the rest of the year.

Less than a month later, as the Pirates were playing the Braves in a crucial series at Forbes Field, Dick Groat froze on a high, hard, inside fastball from Lew Burdette in the first inning. At the last nanosecond, Groat raised his left hand to protect his head, and the ball struck him an inch above the wrist. Groat insisted on staying in the game, but the intense pain forced him into the dugout in the third inning, when he was replaced by Ducky Schofield. Officials urged Groat to leave immediately so that he could have his wrist examined, but he wanted to wait until the end of the game. He watched both Clemente and Schofield rap out three hits as the Pirates came from behind to win, 5–3. The X rays showed a fracture that doctors said might keep him out for four weeks, possibly even forcing him to miss the World Series. Groat’s prognosis brought a telegram from Vice President Nixon, whose presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy had just been stalled by a ten-day hospitalization for an infected knee. “I was very sorry to hear of your accident,” Nixon wrote. “While I will be able to campaign with a bum knee you can’t play with a broken wrist.” Of more importance to the Pirates, the season’s magic dust settled on Schofield, the light-hitting utility man, who suddenly perfected a stunning impersonation of Groat, coming up with key defensive plays and timely hitting game after game.

The same day’s paper that carried the grim news of Groat’s injury also had front-page stories on Hurricane Donna, which was bearing down on Florida and the East Coast. Donna had already ripped through Puerto Rico, killing more than a hundred people in flash floods, but reports of when and where were sketchy. When a concerned
Clemente finally reached his family, he learned that everyone was okay. His brother Matino was more worried about whether Momen was growing tired at the end of a long season and starting to pull off the ball. His batting average had slipped below .320 and his run production had slowed as well. A week later, with the temperatures in Pittsburgh dropping into the fifties in the wake of the hurricane, Clemente came to life with a two-run homer against the Giants. That same day, the Pirates announced that World Series tickets would go on sale in a few days, and the
Post-Gazette
began running a Pennant Fever thermometer illustration on the front page that showed the magic number of games the Pirates needed to clinch the pennant.