Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (17 page)

Friend pitched a three-hitter against the Dodgers, the thermometer dropped to ten. A few days later, on September 18, Deacon Law won his twentieth, and Clemente made a dazzling catch in the second inning of the second game of the doubleheader, diving to his left to snare a ball off the bat of rookie Bobby Wine with two men on, helping Vinegar Bend Mizell roll to a three-hit shutout—and the Braves and Cards lost and the number dropped to five. They started resodding Forbes Field for the World Series, painted the left-field wall, and constructed new digs for the national press and photographers. The Bucs swept a pair from the Cubs and the magic number was now two. Clemente was superstitious. He thought that Benny Benack and his Iron City Six had become a jinx; when he saw them play the Pirates lost. He didn’t want them to go to Milwaukee for the three-game series. Hal Smith kept the team loose, playing his harmonica on the bus to the ballpark. The Pirates lost the first game, and then the second, but the Cardinals also lost and the magic number was one. The good news was that Groat had taken the cast off his wrist and said that he was ready to make a comeback.

The final game in Milwaukee was Sunday, September 25. The Pirates were winning 1–0 late in the game. Clemente was at the plate. Paul Long was announcing with Bob Prince in the broadcast booth. “One to nothing, the Pirates lead on the strength of a home run by Bill Mazeroski. Back in the fifth inning. Otherwise, it’s been a real pitching duel between the great lefthander Warren Spahn and the great lefthander Harvey Haddix. Right now it’s one to nothing, the Pirates lead . . .”

Bob Prince interrupted. “They’ve just won it! It’s all over! The Pirates win it!”

Just as Prince makes the announcement, Clemente slaps a hard single to center. He began the season hitting and kept hitting to the end.
¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!
In Pittsburgh, thirty-three years of frustration are over. The Pirates have arisen. Families celebrate and head for the airport to await the arrival of their heroes. City officials make plans for a torchlight parade down Fifth Avenue and Grant Street and prepare for a welcome-home crowd of a hundred thousand that will celebrate long into the night. “The Pirates have won the National League pennant on the basis of the Cardinals losing to the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. It’s all over,” Long continues. “And the crowd here knows it. A lot of transistor radios here. And the applause has gone up . . . And somehow this crowd . . . now they’re making the announcement on the loudspeakers. The Cubs have beaten the Cardinals, and the Pirates have won the National League pennant!”

THE LAST TIME THE PIRATES PLAYED IN A WORLD SERIES,
in 1927, the opponents were the same New York Yankees. Then the American League champions terrorized opposing pitchers with a lineup of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel and Tony Lazzeri, now it was Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Moose Skowron. Murderers’ Row old and new, one baseball legend long established, another in the making. The formula was identical in either case: audacious power, solid pitching, pinstripes, intimidation, all rendered glorious by the self-centered hyperbole of New York and its sporting press.

Part of the lore of the 1927 Yankees was a boast that the Pirates, after watching the famed sluggers take batting practice before the series opener, felt so overmatched they folded and lost four straight. Harold (Pie) Traynor, Pittsburgh’s Hall of Fame third baseman, had bristled at that story for decades, insisting that it was apocryphal. By Traynor’s account, the Pirates were in the clubhouse poring over a scouting report when the Yankees took their pregame cuts. Whatever prodigious shots Ruth and Gehrig stroked during batting practice, the Pirates saw none of them. But the debunking of this myth did not sit well with baseball’s commissioner, Ford Frick, for the particular reason that it was Frick himself, as a young sportswriter for the
New York Journal,
who had spread the story in the first place.

The 1960 Pirates were rated 13–10 underdogs by the bookies, but seemed even less likely than their predecessors to be awed by New York, even though these Yankees had won their last fifteen games of the season heading into the World Series.
“We’ll fight ’em until our teeth fall out and then we’ll grab ’em with our gums,” snarled Don Hoak, sounding
like the former boxer and inveterate scrapper that he was. It was the nature of this team, Hoak said, that they would always rise to the challenge of the better opponents. Virgil Trucks, the batting practice pitcher, told anyone who approached him in the days before the series opener that Pittsburgh was the most relaxed team he had ever seen. Relaxed and gabby. When it came to quotable quotes, Pittsburgh was a gold mine for visiting sportswriters. Hoak, shortstop Groat (recovered from his wrist injury and ready to play), outfielder Gino Cimoli, trainer Danny Whelan, ace Deacon Law, pudgy old Smoky Burgess (who talked so much behind the plate Richie Ashburn once beseeched the ump to shut him up before Ashburn bopped him over the head with his bat), Vinegar Bend Mizell, the big galoots at first, Dick Stuart and Rocky Nelson, and the story-spinning dark Irishman, manager Danny Murtaugh (prone to blabbing about anything but the game itself)—they all were go-to guys on deadline. The
Post-Gazette,
further short-cutting the process, enlisted Hoak, Groat, and Law to write stories during the series, or at least columns published under their by-lines.

Everyone was in on the action, it seemed, except the Pirate in the middle of the lineup who roamed right field. Roberto Clemente was indisputably an important member of the team, yet also in many ways alone. At the end of his sixth and finest season, he was still separated by culture, race, language, and group dynamics. He was the lone black player in the starting lineup and a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican, while none of the sportswriters for the major dailies in New York or Pittsburgh were black or spoke Spanish. Life is defined by images, especially public life, and the Pirates image was that of a band of scrappy, happy-go-lucky, fearless, gin-playing, hard-drinking, crewcut, tobacco-chewing white guys. Where was the place in that picture for the proud, regal, seemingly diffident Roberto Clemente? He had led the team in runs batted in and total bases, finished second in batting average, hits, game-winning hits, runs scored, home runs, and triples, had the best arm on the team, played with style and every bit as much grit as Hoak or Groat, yet now was the invisible man. In the runup to the World Series, the writers of Pittsburgh and New York, for all their overwrought coverage of the spectacle, gave Clemente barely a passing glance.

A notable exception, as usual, was the
Pittsburgh Courier,
the black weekly that had been paying close attention to Clemente all season. On the weekend before the series opener, sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. saw Clemente on the street in Schenley Heights, the middle-class black neighborhood where they both lived, and asked him how he felt about facing the mighty Yankees.
The Pirates would win, Clemente assured him, his words echoing Hoak and Trucks. Although the Yankees had more power, he believed Pittsburgh was the better team, stocked with hard-nosed players who could not be intimidated. “We’ve been a relaxed team all season and I expect us to be the same in the Series,” he said. “Pressure didn’t get us down during the National League race. We fought off Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Los Angeles without cracking. Now that we’ve come this far, we aren’t going to look back now.” In Clemente’s estimation, the Braves, not the Yankees, were the second-best team in baseball. “If the Braves had won the pennant, they would have been good enough to beat the Yankees, too.” As for playing in Yankee Stadium, Clemente said he would not be haunted by the outfield ghosts of Ruth and DiMaggio, but he was concerned about the late-afternoon shadows. He had played there in the second 1960 All-Star game and found the ball hard to follow.

Aside from Nunn’s interview, the other notice Clemente received before the series was negative. Someone had leaked a scouting report from the Yankees suggesting that the most effective way to pitch him was inside. “Knock him down the first time up and forget him,” was the dismissive summary. Clemente laughed when asked about it, but the report bothered him. Like many black stars of that era, in a tradition that went back to Jackie Robinson, he got brushed back nearly every series, and he suspected that opposing pitchers chose him for retaliation in part because of the color of his skin. They’d been knocking him down all season in the National League, Clemente observed, and he’d still gotten his share of base hits. During one sequence that season, so memorable that pitcher Bob Friend could recall it forty-five years later, Clemente was hit in the stomach by Dodgers fireballer Don Drysdale but came back the next at-bat and cracked a home run over the right-field fence.

Another scouting report got in more digs. It was by Jim Brosnan, a
pitcher who had gained renown for
The Long Season,
a pathbreaking journal-style sports book that provided a revealing glimpse inside his 1959 season with St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the wake of that successful book, Brosnan had been commissioned by
Life
magazine to analyze the series lineup of the Pirates, a team he had faced many times. (Ted Williams, just retired from the Red Sox, wrote
Life
’s scouting report on the Yankees.) After stating that Clemente “dislikes knockdown by close pitch” and that the best way to pitch him is to “jam him good,” Brosnan added a caustic and contradictory conclusion. “Clemente features a Latin-American variety of showboating: ‘Look at
número uno,’
he seems to be saying . . . He once ran right over his manager, who was coaching third base, to complete an inside-the-park grand-slam home run, hit off my best hanging slider. It excited fans, startled the manager, shocked me, and disgusted the club.” Here was precisely the sort of characterization Clemente had battled since he arrived at Fort Myers for his 1955 rookie season. Then the phrase that bothered him was “Puerto Rican hot dog.” Now came Brosnan, a respected opponent, far from a redneck, blithely referring to his
Latin-American variety of showboating.
Clemente’s mad dash around the bases, the anecdote Brosnan employed to make his point, might have inspired a different interpretation had it been Don Hoak or Dick Groat or years later Pete Rose. Rather than the showboating of a flashy Latin, it would have been viewed as the indomitable spirit of a tough competitor.

This was nothing new for Clemente. It angered him but did not distract him. He still had the Pittsburgh fans on his side—they had voted him their favorite Pirate—and friends were coming from Puerto Rico to see the World Series.
Among those making the trip was his mother, Doña Luisa, who had never flown before. She was weakened from the flu, but came anyway, willing herself to be healthy enough to watch Momen play. Don Melchor was equally proud of his son but deathly afraid to fly, so he would not budge from the house in Carolina. He could follow the series from there; all the games were to be broadcast in San Juan on radio and television with Spanish-language announcers. Accompanying Doña Luisa to Pittsburgh was Momen’s older brother, Matino, a former ballplayer who had followed the rise of the Pirates on the radio all summer, keeping mental notes on Roberto’s
play and writing or calling him several times with batting tips. When Matino arrived in Schenley Heights, Clemente gave him some tips of his own on which streets and bars in Pittsburgh were friendly and which ones to avoid.

•   •   •

A fellow named Ralph Belcore was the first out-of-towner to make it to Pittsburgh for the World Series. He came by bus from Chicago toting a stool and a bag of sandwiches and camped outside Forbes Field five full days before standing-room-only tickets went on sale. Belcore was the definition of a baseball fanatic, but in Pittsburgh that week he was just one in the crowd. The city had lost itself with these Pirates. Bands of businessmen crowded the congested streets of the Golden Triangle wearing gold-banded black derbies, walking past block after block of gold-and-black-draped stores with
BEAT ’EM, BUCS
! signs in the windows. City Hall printed thousands of placards with the familiar slogan translated into seven languages. Carnegie Library came up with its own variation—
BEAT ’EM, BOOKS
! At the Central Blood Bank of Pittsburgh the sign read
BLEED ’EM, BUCS
!

Local radio stations incessantly blared out Benny Benack and the Iron City Six’s throbbing theme song. The Bucs were going all the way, over and over again. A correspondent for the
New York Times,
filing the first dispatch from alien territory, haughtily described a “carnival atmosphere . . . that one would never experience in sophisticated New York.” The Pittsburgh newspapers were all Pirates all the time, from the front page to editorials to society to sports, inspiring Red Smith of the
New York Herald Tribune
to praise the city for focusing on what truly mattered during a week when presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were debating on television and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was visiting the United Nations. “In New York,” Smith wrote, “the cops picked up a diplomat wallowing hip-deep in smuggled heroin. At the United Nations, Nikita hollered at Dag and Hammarskjöld yelled back and Nehru had a thing or so to say about the future of civilization. Rockets whirled through space, snooping into affairs on the moon, Lyndon [Johnson] called Nixon a fool and Nixon said Kennedy was another.
Only in Pittsburgh,
it seemed, did they preserve a sense of proportion. Announced the eight-column banner on page one:
YANKS, BUCS IN LAST WORKOUT.
It was comforting to find a town that puts first things first.”

So, first things first. The final workout before the opener was held on a bright October afternoon. Sunlight glanced off the bright white flannels of the Pirates as they took fielding practice. Danny Murtaugh, surrounded by a posse of national sportswriters, entertained them with stories about his Irish family. “When the kid brother gets a job, the brother-in-law quits his. That’s the way it is in my family,” Murtaugh said as a way of answering a question about how many ticket requests he was getting from relatives. Asked if he had any surprises planned for New York, he said, “Just to win.” Soon the Yankees emerged in their gray flannels and Roger Maris muscled into the batting cage, shirtsleeves rolled up over bulging biceps, and began bombing one pitch after another into the right-field stands. The Pirates were in the clubhouse by then, just like their forebears thirty-three years earlier, going over a scouting report prepared by Howie Haak. The Yanks effin’ feasted on high ball pitches, Haak said, so keep the damn ball low and outside.
A telegram had been taped to the clubhouse wall from the old man, Branch Rickey, gone from the Pirates but still their godfather. It read simply: