Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (10 page)

Foreigners: make space

Because here, the Puerto Rican troubadour

Will sing with noble valor

Land, blood, name and race.

But he had no time for baseball and wanted his son to have nothing to do with it, either. The old poet even sent Pedrin off to boarding school in the States with the intent of keeping him away from the dissolute life of an athlete, but it was of no use. Manatí was a place for intellectuals, proud of its reputation as the Athens of Puerto Rico. People there lived for their
juegos florales,
poetry pageants. But when Pedrin had his own Dream of Deeds (the title of his father’s most famous poem), he dreamed only of baseball. He started the Cangrejeros with no money, rounded up a first team that included many of his friends, and from there built a dynasty.

Over the years, Zorrilla had lured many great players from the North, but none with the major league glamour of Willie Mays, who less than a month before his arrival had led the New York Giants to victory in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians—and had imprinted his image into the American sporting consciousness forever with his dashing over-the-head catch of Vic Wertz’s drive into deepest center field. In baseball-mad San Juan,
Mays was embraced joyously. More than a thousand fans waited in the rain on the gray Saturday morning of October 16 when he arrived at Isla Grande airport, many disbelieving that he was coming, and once he truly arrived, uncertain that he would stay. They quickly took up chants of his trademark greeting, “Say, Hey!” and developed their own Spanish variation, “Ole, Mira!” Like Clemente in Montreal, Mays felt lonesome in San Juan, hating the empty feeling of returning to his spare apartment near the stadium. But he was not among strangers. The manager, Herman Franks, was the third-base coach for the Giants. Santurce’s star pitcher, Puerto Rican Ruben Gomez, was also a Giants teammate, and several American blacks on the team—pitcher Sam Jones, outfielder Bob Thurman, and third baseman Buster Clarkson—knew Mays from the barnstorming circuit.

Clemente admired Mays, but did not worship him. He preferred the other black Giants outfielder, Monte Irvin, his childhood hero. Some observers would later assume that Clemente learned his basket catch from Mays when they played together that winter. Not so. Clemente had been making basket catches, with the web facing up instead of forward, since his softball days, a style common among Puerto Rican outfielders. Luis Olmo was making basket catches years before Mays came along. Olmo held his basket near his navel; Mays at his hips, and Clemente drooped the glove even lower. On days when Olmo started for the Cangrejeros that winter, they had perhaps baseball’s one and only all-basket outfield. Pete Burnside, a pitcher on the team, later told baseball historian Thomas E. Van Hyning that he sensed “a friendly rivalry” between Mays and Clemente, who were “trying to outdo each other on the field.” Mays and Gomez, the Giants teammates, also had a bit of a rivalry, apparently, and got into a fairly heated shoving match one day during practice, an incident that Zorrilla desperately tried to downplay for fear that apoplectic Giants officials might spirit Mays off the island before he got injured.

At eleven on the Monday morning of November 22, while the front-running Cangrejeros were practicing on an off-day in Puerto Rico, representatives of the sixteen major league teams gathered in Room 135 of the Biltmore Hotel in New York for what was known formally as the Major-Minor League Rule 5 Selection Meeting. This was the draft of minor league players who had not been protected by the big clubs. The order of selection for two rounds ran from worst record to best, starting with the worst team in the National League, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and ending with the best team in the American League, the Cleveland Indians. Branch Rickey’s son, Branch Rickey Jr., a club vice president, was there representing the Pirates. He carried in his briefcase scouting reports from Sukeforth and Haak, as well as detailed instructions from his father.

Ford Frick, commissioner of baseball, began the proceedings and called on the Pirates for their selection. What was described as “a gasp of surprise” swept through the room when Rickey Jr. announced the first choice: Roberto Clemente. It might have been a surprise to major league sportswriters, who knew nothing about him and quickly looked
up his modest statistics in Montreal, but it was an obvious choice to baseball men in the room. Many of them acknowledged afterward that the young Puerto Rican was the top name on their lists. It is always interesting, in retrospect, to examine a group of names from the past, at a moment of hope and promise, and see if any survived the fate of athletic oblivion. The other ballplayers picked that day included Mickey Grasso, Art Ceccarelli, Parke Carroll, Bob Spicer, Jim King, Vicente Amor, Glenn Gorbous, Jerry Dean, John Robert Kline, Joe Trimble, Roberto Vargas, and Ben Flowers. Some of them can be found in the Baseball Encyclopedia. And then there was Clemente, who came to the Pirates for a mere $4,000 drafting fee. “He can run and throw—and we think he can hit,” Rickey Jr. told the press.

•   •   •

Herman Franks’s lineup card for Santurce was packed with five fearsome hitters: Mays, Clemente, Thurman (known as “Big Swish”), Clarkson (team RBI leader with sixty-one), and George Crowe (first baseman who would make it to the majors in 1956)—a group that came to be called “The Panic Squad.” He also had scrappy young Don Zimmer at shortstop, Valmy Thomas and Harry Chiti behind the plate, and aging local stars Olmo and Pepe Lucas St. Clair coming off the bench. “I always said that was the greatest winter league team ever assembled,” Zimmer recalled a half-century later. “Can you imagine Mays, Clemente, and Thurman in the outfield? And Orlando Cepeda just hanging around, a big kid stumbling all over himself because he was growing so fast.” As they ran away with the winter league pennant, Mays, with a .395 average, was the most valuable player and star, but Clemente shone nearly as bright. He hit .344 and led the league in hits (ninety-four) and runs scored (sixty-five). The Crabbers ended the season in mid-February by winning the Caribbean World Series, which was held that year in Caracas. Zimmer, Mays, and Clemente were the stars in Venezuela, with Clemente rapping two triples, his specialty, and scoring eight runs, including one dash from first to home on a single by Mays to win the fifth game. Zorrilla, the Big Crab, said the fury and pride with which Clemente ran the bases was something that he would never forget.

In the end, it was not the stirring Caribbean series that Clemente would remember from that winter, but another series of events that occurred earlier, on the last two days of 1954. On the weekend after Christmas, Santurce was playing three games down in Ponce, over the mountains on the southern coast.
When the road trip was over, because of a family emergency, Roberto did not take the team bus home but instead drove back with his brothers, Andres and Matino. Their oldest sibling, Luis Oquendo, Luisa’s firstborn, a school teacher then thirty-eight, for months had been suffering from terrible headaches, occasional seizures, and sudden loss of sight. After several examinations, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor, uncertain whether it was malignant. On December 30, a Sunday, they operated on his brain. His brothers were still in Ponce. With Momen at the wheel, driving the 1954 blue Pontiac he had bought with his bonus money, they sped north to see Luis as soon as the game was over. At eleven at night, as they were driving through the dark mountain streets of Caguas just past the Gautier Benitez School, another car barreled through the intersection from the side, running a red light, and smashed into them. Andres and Matino were unhurt. Roberto wrenched his neck and spine, but insisted that he did not need treatment. The car was dented in the front but still drivable, and soon they were back on the road.

When they reached Doctor’s Hospital in Santurce, the news was bleak. Luis’s tumor was malignant and advanced. He was conscious but groggy when his brothers entered the room. Momen flicked on the lights, but Luis said he wanted it dark. He died the next day, at noon. The date was December 31.

RIDICULING THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES WAS ONE OF THE
simple pleasures of the national pastime in the first half of the 1950s.
The Boy Buffoons of Baseball, Life
magazine called them. “The atrocities they committed under the guise of major league baseball were monstrous,” wrote Marshall Smith. “Pirate pitchers threw the ball in the general direction of home plate and ducked. Pirate batters missed signs as blithely as they missed baseballs. Pirate fielding was so graceful that the team gave the opposition four or five outs per inning. Sportswriters accused Pirates of running the bases with their heads tucked under their arms.” When the club’s top minor league manager wanted to scare one of his underachieving players, he threatened to send him up to Pittsburgh. The Pirates were bound for the cellar every year; the only tension came with guessing how many games back they might finish. In 1952 when they were accused of fielding a team of midgets, infielders so short that balls bounded over them for doubles, they ended up fifty-four and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers.
All of this was overseen by Pittsburgh’s esteemed general manager, Branch Rickey.

In Pittsburgh, some skeptics said, Wesley Branch Rickey finally met his match—or worse, let the game pass him by. For more than four decades, since he had graduated from Michigan Law and got into baseball management, Rickey, an erudite Presbyterian from Lucasville, Ohio, had been regarded as the one true genius of the sport. Red Smith, the New York sportswriter, called him “a giant among pygmies.” Before coming over to run the hapless Pirates in 1950, at the seasoned age of sixty-nine, he had built two of the century’s dominant
National League clubs, first the Gas House Gang in St. Louis, and next what would become the Boys of Summer in Brooklyn. His place in history was assured by a single bold act, breaking the color line with the signing of Jackie Robinson, but there was far more to him than that. It was as a measure of respect that he became known as the Mahatma. He was cool and manipulative in his transactions, meticulous with his records, formal and pompous in his speech, stingy with his money, always curious and innovative, brutally sharp in his assessments, and interested equally in a player’s psychological disposition and his ability to learn an elusive hook slide.

All events in Mr. Rickey’s world could be studied, categorized, and explained. Good things did not fall upon people, or baseball clubs, by accident. He was a man of sayings, and his most famous phrase came at the end of this thought: “Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference or inattention are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes.
Luck is the residue of design.”

And what was his design for the Pirates? “The Pittsburgh club was in last place on merit and not by mishap or circumstance,” Rickey said when he took over, and when they got better it would not be through luck. He doubled the number of minor league affiliates and started stocking them with young players, underscoring his belief that, in baseball, the surest way to get quality was through quantity. He spent what to him seemed like a huge sum ($900,000) on prospects, most of whom flopped. He worked to rid the team of popular players who in his opinion could never take the Pirates to a championship, Ralph Kiner prime among them. Kiner, the slow-footed slugger who won four straight home-run titles (and eventually seven), was not only beloved in Pittsburgh but was also a duck-hunting companion of the owner, John Galbreath. But Rickey was so determined to trade him that he wrote Galbreath an eight-page, single-spaced letter on March 25, 1952, enunciating “twenty-four reasons why Ralph Kiner was useless to the Pittsburgh Pirates.” Within a year, Kiner was a Cub. And with his sharp-eyed talent men, scout Haak and coach Sukeforth, Rickey plucked
young players from other clubs, none more important, in the long run, than the twenty-year-old outfielder, Roberto Clemente.

In the mythology that later enveloped the Clemente story, there is a commonly recounted scene of Rickey blessing him at the dawn of his career. It supposedly took place in the winter league in Puerto Rico in 1953. According to the story, first told by San Juan sportswriters and repeated through the years, Rickey caught sight of Clemente at a Santurce game, was stunned by his skills, called him over to talk, asked him a few questions, and ended the conversation by telling the young man to find a girl and settle down to the business of baseball because he was destined to be a superstar. But Rickey was an inveterate memo-keeper; his dictated observations and handwritten notes were typed out by his personal secretary, Ken Blackburn, after virtually every game that he attended. And the documents point to another less-glowing account.

With aide-de-camp Blackburn at his side, Rickey flew south in January 1955 for a scouting swing through Cuba and Puerto Rico (which in Blackburn’s transcriptions was often spelled the way Rickey said it, Puerto
Rica
). In Cuba, on January 18 and 19, Rickey watched two games between Havana and Cienfuegos. His notes show that he was impressed with young players in the St. Louis Cardinals chain, especially Don Blasingame (“ . . . a pest at the plate. He should become a good base on balls man, and his power is ample. He is no puny in any respect.”) and Ken Boyer. (“I saw the best ballplayer on first impression that I have seen in many a day. Boyer by name . . . Never loafs. Has big hands and knows what to do with them . . . He is a line drive hitter deluxe. The newspapermen down here are raving about the outfielder Bill Virdon, saying, in effect, unanimously, that Virdon is the greatest player ever to be in Cuba etc. etc. I will take Boyer.”) With those three players coming up, Rickey concluded, all the Cardinals needed was a top-flight pitcher to contend against the Dodgers, Giants, and Braves.