Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (42 page)

The World Series victory was still on his mind. “I always say to
myself that we athletes should pay the public to come and see us play. Because if you see what we saw in the World Series, what we see when we play ball, I guess I don’t have any money to buy the feelings inside the clubhouse. This year to have the opportunity to see Willie Stargell have the greatest season I’ve ever seen a player have . . .” He meant this as a gesture of goodwill to his friend and teammate who had been overshadowed in the series after carrying the Pirates much of the year. He would never forget the sight of Stargell and Jackie Hernández bounding into the locker room arm-in-arm after the seventh game, a picture of solidarity.

Life is nothing. Life is fleeting. Only God makes man happy
—so went his mother’s favorite spiritual verse. But Clemente looked for the lasting meaning in fleeting life. “As you know, time goes so fast,” he told the San Juan audience. “And we are living in a really fast life. You want to have the opportunity to have sons . . . We come home from work, sometimes our kids are in bed already. We go back to work, our kids are already in school. So sometimes we hear how bad our kids are, and how bad our American schools are. This is a big world and we are going to have our problems, but I think that we can help our difficult youth. We can give them the love and more attention to our home, our kids, our family, and our neighbors. We are brothers. And don’t say, ‘Well, I don’t want to do it. Somebody else will.’ Because you are somebody . . .” His closing message took on more urgency every time he said it. If you have a chance to help others, and don’t, you are wasting your time on this earth.

•   •   •

In his eighteenth spring with the Pirates, after all he had accomplished,
Clemente chose to live like a rookie. Many veterans rented houses on the beaches or golf courses around Bradenton, the Gulf Coast town that had been the team’s Grapefruit League headquarters for four years, but Clemente stayed in Room 231 at the four-story dorm at Pirate City on Twenty-seventh Street East. In late afternoons after practice, he was surrounded by young players and hangers-on who wanted to soak up his advice. “A lot of us young guys would just sit there and listen to him,” said Fernando González, a rookie infielder
from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, who had admired Clemente since he was a ten-year-old collecting autographs when winter league teams stopped at El Gran Café in his hometown on bus trips between San Juan and Mayagüez. “Clemente would talk about the way that baseball was going to be . . . situations in games . . . almost everything.”

Also hanging around was Roy Blount Jr., who came down to Bradenton to do a feature story on the hero of the 1971 World Series for the
New York Times Magazine.
Writing under the felicitous pseudonym C. R. Ways, which he later told Pittsburgh writers was the name of his dog, Blount took note of how Clemente “strolled the team’s Pirate City complex in his long-collar tab shirts and brilliant slacks, as vivid a major leaguer as there is . . .” While dutifully visiting the stations of Clemente’s cross—his maladies and complaints, his sore feelings going back to the 1960 MVP vote, his distaste for being quoted in broken English—Blount found a humorist’s delight in Clemente’s eccentric style, which he considered representative of Latin players who “in the 20 years since they began to enter American baseball in numbers from Cuba, Mexico and South America, have added more color and unexpected personal drama to the game than any other ethnic group.” The headline on the piece was
“NOBODY DOES ANYTHING BETTER THAN ME IN BASEBALL,” SAYS ROBERTO CLEMENTE . . . WELL, HE’S RIGHT.
Full recognition from New York, at last, just what Clemente had always wanted. The article had Blount’s sweet touch and was mostly accurate, yet reflected an attitude that could upset Clemente. The quirks of his personality were irresistible, but Clemente more than anything else wanted to be treated seriously, not as a stereotype, even when the stereotypes were true.

There had been another changing of the guard with the Pirates. Murtaugh was gone, again, his career capped by a second championship, and Bill Virdon, who had prepped for the job in San Juan, was now Pittsburgh’s manager. Perhaps the only situation as thankless as managing an abysmal team is taking over World Series winners. Virdon inherited a talented squad, yet had nowhere to go but down. His best player, Clemente, was nearly as old as he was and slowed that spring by stomach pains. “The other day I went out to buy an Osterizer [blender] when you called me,” Clemente wrote Vera one early March
evening. “It is the only time I’ve left here since I arrived. I’ve tried to control my nerves to see if that helps my stomach.” Even if the accounting of his time sounded like an absent husband’s fib, the stomach trouble was real.

Clemente’s life was far more than baseball at that point in his career.
In his letter to Vera he wrote about plans to open a chiropractic clinic. “God willing, we can move forward this clinic proposal,” he said. He had already bought a one-story house at the bottom of his hill in Río Piedras to treat neighbors, a modest beginning to his larger idea of someday running a chiropractic resort. He was also preoccupied with his plans for a sports city for underprivileged youths in San Juan. And Jim Fanning, then the general manager of the Montreal Expos, said that Clemente called him four or five times that spring hoping to persuade the Expos to move their spring training headquarters to San Juan. Yet when it came to baseball, Clemente kept looking for new methods of enhancing his powers of concentration. Late one afternoon after practice, when the major and minor league players had retreated into the clubhouse, Harding Peterson, the farm and scouting director, walked out to the fields and was surprised to see a lone figure in the distance, near the batting cage. “It is Clemente, and there is no one there but him, and he is standing at home plate,” Peterson remembered. “And he makes a stride but doesn’t swing, then makes a stride and swings, and runs three quarters of the way to first. I don’t want to bother him, but I go up to the batting cage and say, ‘Hey, Roberto, don’t want to interrupt, but what are you doing?’ And he says, ‘Well, I know we’re opening against the Mets. I’m making believe I see the same pitches I see on opening day.’” In Clemente’s mind, Peterson realized, Tom Seaver was on the mound, throwing sliders low and away.

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.