Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (11 page)

The next week he was in San Juan, taking in a game at Sixto Escobar between Santurce and Ponce.
He kept his own scorecard and dictated his game notes to Blackburn, though he complained that he was “disturbed by dignitaries so much during the game” that his notes were not as sharp as normal. “The Ponce team is managed by Joe Schultz Jr. and Santurce by Herman Franks—both really two kids who
came up with me,” Rickey began his Memorandum of Game. Schultz and Franks were both old catchers who had played for the Cardinals. “I have had interviews with both boys, and Schultz is to have breakfast with me in the morning.”

Then, one by one, Rickey analyzed all the players he had seen on both teams. His comments on the Cangrejeros were often blistering. Luis Olmo, he observed, “pinch hit for Lopez and looked lazy, overweight, indifferent, helpless.” (It is well to remember that Rickey and Olmo had a falling out back in the mid-forties, when Olmo, insulted by Rickey’s salary offer after his best season with the Dodgers, bolted to an upstart Mexican League.) Willie Mays did not play that day, resting for the winter league playoffs, which were to begin in a few days. Rickey’s most in-depth assessment was done on the young man who moved over from left to center, Roberto Clemente. He must have begged dignitaries away whenever Clemente was in action.

Two months earlier, the Pirates had made Clemente the first overall selection in the Rule 5 draft. He was Pittsburgh property, and bound by rule to stay with the big club in 1955. From the content of Rickey’s notes,
it appears that this was the first time he had seen Clemente play. The language does not correspond to the legend of Rickey observing Clemente in 1953 and telling him that he was destined for superstardom. He saw a few things he loved in the young player, but more flaws. The memo began:

I would guess him to be at least 6’ tall, weight about 175 pounds, right hand hitter, very young. I have been told very often about his running speed. I was sorely disappointed with it. His running form is bad, definitely bad, and based upon what I saw tonight, he had only a bit above average major league running speed. He has a beautiful throwing arm. He throws the ball down and it really goes places. However, he runs with the ball every time he makes a throw and that’s bad.

Rickey had his own scouting vocabulary. One of his favorite baseball words was adventure. In this regard, by his standards, Clemente was no Willie Mays.

He has no adventure whatever on the bases, takes a comparatively small lead, and doesn’t have in mind, apparently, getting a break. I can imagine that he has never stolen a base in his life with his skill or cleverness. I can guess that if it was done, it was because he was pushed off.

Later, Rickey thought he saw that same timidity in the field:

The most disappointing feature about Clemente is his lack of adventure—of chance taking. He had at least two chances tonight to make a good play. He simply waited for the bounce. I hope he looks better to me tomorrow night when Santurce plays San Juan—the final game of the regular season and the city championship of San Juan is at stake. Perhaps this boy will put out in that game.

When Clemente was hitting, Rickey found more to like. With the cool detachment of a cattle appraiser, he reported:

His form at the plate is perfect. The bat is out and back and in good position to give him power. There is not the slightest hitch or movement in his hands or arms and the big end of the bat is completely quiet when the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. His sweep is level—very level. His stride is short and his stance is good to start with and he finishes good with his body. I know of no reason why he should not become a very fine hitter. I would not class him, however, as even a prospective home run hitter.

From his observations in San Juan, Rickey reached a disappointing conclusion. He believed that the bonus baby he had swiped from the Dodgers was not ready for the big time:

I do not believe he can possibly do a major league club any good in 1955. It is just too bad that he could not have had his first year in Class B or C league and then this year he might have profited greatly with a second year as a regular say in Class A. In 1956 he
can be sent out on option by Pittsburgh only by first securing waivers, and waivers likely cannot be secured. So, we are stuck with him—stuck indeed, until such time as he can really help a major league club.

There are several things to keep in mind when reading that critical assessment of Clemente made a few months before the first game of his major league career. First, though Rickey was astute, he made mistakes. Three years before he compiled his report on Clemente, he had observed a Pirate minor league pitcher named Ron Necciai and declared: “There have only been two young pitchers I was certain were destined for greatness, simply because they had the meanest fastball a batter can face. One of those boys was Dizzy Dean.
The other is Ron Necciai.” All baseball lovers know Dizzy Dean. Necciai won exactly one game in the major leagues. Second, despite those rare raves, Rickey tended to look for a player’s faults, and was merciless in doing so. Of Tony Bartirome, a prospect in 1955, he wrote: “A puny hitter. He never will go major.” (Perhaps Rickey had forgotten, but he had called up the 5’9’’ Bartirome briefly to start 135 games at first base in 1952 as part of the midget infield.) A pitching prospect named Jackie Brown was lucky not to see Rickey’s private assessment of him: “Brown was born prematurely, and has never caught up. I don’t think he ever has a thought. He has never related an incident in his life, never told a story in his life, never had a belly laugh in his life. He would be incapable of comprehension to so deep a point.” Could Rickey be any crueler? Yes. In another report he noted that Brown “is also afflicted with rectal warts.”

It also must be said that Rickey’s scouting report on Clemente was not completely inaccurate. Clemente did have an odd running style, and looked a bit faster than he really was. While he never stole many bases, though, he was regarded as a smart base runner and thrilled fans with his dashes from first to third and second to home. The prediction that he would become “a very fine hitter” turned out to be a severe understatement. As to power, Rickey was at least half right. Clemente never was a big home-run hitter, though on occasion he could hit mammoth shots, and he frequently drove the ball deep into the gaps
for doubles and triples. Based on Clemente’s statistics in 1955 and the next few years, Rickey’s assessment that he needed a few more years of seasoning was within the realm of debate. But where Rickey was most mistaken was in his conclusion that Clemente’s game lacked adventure. It was true that he did not steal many bases, but to think of him as timid was wildly off the mark. Clemente in the field, sprinting in and sliding across the grass to make a catch; on the base paths, legs flying, arms pumping furiously as he ran out every ground ball or raced from first to third; at the plate, daring a pitcher to get it by him no matter where he threw it—everything about his play evoked a sense of adventure. An essential fact of which Rickey seemed unaware when he wrote the scouting report is that Clemente had been in a car accident less than a month earlier and was suffering from neck and back troubles that would plague him off and on for the rest of his life.

•   •   •

On his way back to Pittsburgh from the Caribbean scouting mission, Rickey stopped in Fort Myers, a city on the Florida Gulf Coast that was preparing a new training camp for his Pittsburgh club. The Pirates had been spring vagabonds in the years of Rickey’s reign, moving from San Bernardino in 1952 to Havana in 1953 to Fort Pierce in 1954, but now they were ready to settle down. The Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce had recruited them with a sweet offer. Here was a new stadium and clubhouse at Terry Park, constructed with $80,000 in city and county funds. Here was a guarantee from local businessmen of two thousand Grapefruit League season tickets worth $30,000. Here was a fleet of new Pontiacs from baseball booster Al Gallman, a local car dealer, for the use of club officials. Town leaders would even send several hundred citizens up to Pittsburgh for Fort Myers Day during the regular season and fill the Forbes Field outfield with a tractor-trailer’s worth of free coconuts. It might seem like small stuff compared with the desperate inducements Florida towns would throw at major league teams decades later, but it was enough to get the job done in 1955. The only possible drawback Pirates officials could think of was that there was no top-flight racetrack nearby for the thoroughbred horses of Mr. Galbreath.

Rickey arrived at Terry Park on the morning of January 29 to find another baseball legend waiting for him. “God bless you, Connie,” he said in greeting. “I’m sure glad to see you.” It was Connie Mack Sr., who had managed the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century, from 1901 to 1950, and was now ninety-two. The Athletics had trained in Fort Myers in the late 1920s, and Mack still spent the winters there with his son. He was perhaps the only person alive who knew more baseball than Branch Rickey, and he had come out to the park to show his compatriot around. Together the Mahatma and the Tall Tactician, with a hundred years of baseball experience between them, but both dressed like bankers, inspected the clubhouse, the infield, and the fences (set deep, 360 down the lines and 415 in center to give the feel of spacious Forbes Field up North). Rickey was impressed by the smoothness of the infield dirt and the luxurious green outfield, and decided that the team should stay off the main diamond and play only on the practice field for a few weeks, at least until owner Galbreath arrived. The clubhouse met his exacting standards. He said it was better than most clubhouses in the majors, and he was especially satisfied with the color choice for the shower room, a shade of light green that he considered good for morale.

After the brief tour, the two venerable baseball hands sat in the sun and talked. Len Harsh, the young sports editor of the local paper, the Fort Myers
News-Press,
stood nearby, awed by the great men, and eavesdropped on their conversation. Rickey and Mack chatted like old codgers who had seen it all. Who lost more stock in the Wall Street crash of 1929. The peaks and valleys of their careers. Mack had ended his baseball years in a valley, a long string of losing seasons for his once champion Athletics, and now Rickey was hoping to avoid the same fate. As the conversation ended, he invited Mack to throw out the first pitch at the preseason opener, then left to go deep sea fishing with a local doctor. He would return to snowy Pittsburgh for ten days to get the team’s affairs in order before flying South again to the sunshine and the start of camp.

The sportswriters who covered the Pirates were waiting for Rickey when he got back to Pittsburgh. They were hungry for news about his scouting trip, especially his assessment of the young Pirate who was
tearing up the winter league for Santurce. Was Clemente really that good? asked Jack Hernon of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Without going into the precise critical analysis of his scouting report, Rickey put the best light on it while saying that he was not sure. “The boy is a great prospect, just as I was told. But you must remember he is only twenty years old and had almost no competition last season at Montreal. He is a big boy. He can run, throw, and hit. He needs much polishing because he is a rough diamond. He might go to town, but you can’t tell. He might (make it) but he’ll have his hands full.” Hernon wrote up the story for his paper and the
Sporting News
before leaving for Fort Myers with his writing brethren, Al Abrams, the
Post-Gazette
sports editor, Les Biederman of the
Press,
and Chilly Doyle of the
Sun-Telegraph.
None of the old boys would be Roberto men, as it turned out, and Hernon least of all.

Clemente reached Fort Myers on the last day of February, fresh from his star turn with Willie Mays in the Caribbean series. Even though he was a rookie, he reported with the other veterans because his spot on the roster was assured by his Rule 5 draft status. This was his second preseason in segregated Florida, but in many ways it proved more difficult for him than his first camp at Dodgertown.

There was no dormitory housing for the team, and while the white players were put up at the Bradford Hotel downtown,
Clemente and other black prospects were shuttled off to board in private homes in the historically black Dunbar Heights neighborhood across the railroad tracks on the east side of town. Dunbar was its own world, and though some back streets were unpaved and strewn with shacks that lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, there was also a bustling black merchant class along Anderson Avenue, where residents shopped at B&B grocery, ate at Clinton’s Café, and took in movies at the King Theater. Many of the residential streets in Dunbar Heights were named for citrus fruits. Clemente found a room at the home of Etta Power, widow of Charley Power, who lived on Lime Street. Lime and the next street over, Orange, were alive with children who tagged after Clemente whenever he was in the neighborhood. Jim Crow segregation was everywhere: in the schools, gas stations, hotels, restaurants. The white players and their families relaxed at beaches and pools
where black teammates could not go. There was a golf outing at Fort Myers Country Club—Bob Rice, the traveling secretary, nearly got a hole-in-one on the water hole—but Clemente and the black Pirates were not allowed to play. There was a designated “colored night” at the Lee County Fair when white residents stayed away.

If blacks wanted to watch the Pirates, they were penned in their own pavilion section of the bleachers at Terry Park. The bathrooms and water fountains at the ballpark were labeled
Whites
and
Colored.

Before the first intrasquad game on March 2, Branch Rickey, wearing his signature polka-dot bow tie and straw hat, delivered a long lecture to the players. He told them about what would be expected of them in training camp, and his aspirations for the season, and then briefly discussed the realities of race in Fort Myers. This was the South, he told them. They were all Pittsburgh Pirates, but upon leaving the confines of the field, conditions were beyond the team’s control. God knows it was damnably wrong, he said, but so it was. There would be no trouble here. The ladies and gentlemen of Fort Myers were peaceful citizens. Then Rickey left the clubhouse and walked over to the box seats, which were only folding chairs, and took his place in the front row amid a lineup of luminaries that included Connie Mack Sr., owner Galbreath, and Benjamin F. Fairless, the soon-to-be-retired president of United States Steel.