Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (38 page)

•   •   •

In the final days of the season, Orioles scouts Jim Russo and Walter Youse tailed the Pirates. They traveled on the National League club’s plane and stayed at the same hotel. If an opposing player were caught stealing signs from second base, or a team hid someone behind a center-field scoreboard hole for the same purpose, all hell could break loose. But scouts were allowed to infiltrate the very bloodstream of another team. It was part of the code of baseball. The Orioles gave the same courteous treatment to Howie Haak and Harding Peterson of the Pirates organization.

Russo and Youse returned from their scouting mission with several tips for Orioles manager Earl Weaver and his staff. One strong recommendation was that the Orioles throw lefties at the Pirates, even though Pittsburgh had a 29–19 record against left-handed pitchers during the regular season. They felt that lefthanders might handcuff Stargell and encourage Danny Murtaugh to keep two tough young Pirates hitters, Richie Hebner and Al Oliver, on the bench. And no NL team had a pair of southpaws the quality of Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar. Weaver tabbed McNally to start games 1 and 4 or 5, and Cuellar to pitch Game 3 and be ready if necessary to pitch Game 7. Among the Orioles aces, young Jim Palmer, who would pitch games 2 and 6, had the most flash and brilliance, but McNally indisputably was the leader of the staff. Over the past four years he had been the best lefthander in baseball, winning nearly three of every four decisions. He had won twenty or more games each of those years; this year, a McNally classic, he had finished with twenty-one wins and only five losses.

Game 1, on the Saturday afternoon of October 9, followed predictable form. Clemente doubled in the first off McNally—had he recovered fully from the food poisoning or was he just once again reinforcing the belief that he played best when sick? In either case, Stargell stranded him by striking out, and the Pirates were able to scratch out only two more hits off McNally all day, another by Clemente and a run-scoring single from Dave Cash, the young second baseman whose stellar play had relegated Maz to the bench. Stargell was now 0–17 in the postseason; Clemente had extended his World Series hitting streak to eight games. Aside from a few uncharacteristic blunders in the second inning that allowed the Pirates to score three runs, the Orioles looked smart and dominant. Ellis, his arm as zipless as the double-knit uniforms, failed to survive the third, giving up two home runs and four runs before being yanked. Fans at Memorial Stadium, remembering his insults of their town’s hotels, showered him with boos, which Ellis said was nothing because he had once played winter ball in the Dominican Republic.

The key hit came in the third with Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger on second, left fielder Don Buford on first, and center fielder Merv Rettenmund at the plate. At breakfast that morning, kidding around with his nervous father, who supervised a body shop in Flint, Michigan, Rettenmund had boasted that he would hit a home run. Steady rains and football games had made such a mess of the stadium recently that groundskeeper Pat Santarone resorted to dyeing barren spots in the outfield. Now, as Buford led off first and studied Ellis on the mound, he detected a wide splotch of dark green on the baseball and shouted down to the plate urging Rettenmund to ask for a new ball. Rettenmund did, and the bright white replacement never touched dyed ground, flying from Ellis’s right hand to Rettenmund’s bat and over the fence for a three-run homer.

Solo homers by Buford and Frank Robinson, the great Orioles right fielder, made the final score 5–3. Ellis, the loser, was out for the rest of the series, his sore arm beyond the help of the finest bed in Baltimore. The star was McNally, with his three-hit complete game. Only three days earlier, his eight-year-old son Jeff had been injured in a bike accident near their home in Lutherville. Once McNally was assured that
his son had not suffered brain damage, he had been able to focus on the Pirates, his powers of concentration aided on this day by the best fastball he had shown all year.

In the locker room after the game, reporters asked Clemente whether he had ever faced such a pitcher as McNally. Given his competitive nature, his determination to show the world his greatness once and for all, this was not a question he wanted to hear. His answer sounded ungracious if not egotistical, with a touch of Muhammad Ali or Dock Ellis to it. It was not so much a boast as an assertion of will. “I faced lots of good pitchers,” he said. “Another good one don’t mean anything to me. Ask him what he thought about me. I got two hits off him so I say we’re even.”

Eleven years earlier, before the second game of the 1960 World Series, it had rained all night and kept raining until an hour before the first pitch, but the bad weather system rumbled past Pittsburgh just in time and the game was played as scheduled. Pittsburgh surely would have preferred a rainout—the Pirates got clobbered by the Yankees that day, 16–3. Now, for the second game of the 1971 series in Baltimore on Sunday, October 10, the rains would not stop and the game was postponed for a day. Orioles ownership urged Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, to reschedule the second game for 7 Monday night, so that ticket-holders from the rainout would have a better chance of attending, but Kuhn rejected that request and made it a Monday day game. Night baseball was coming to the World Series all too soon, but Kuhn wanted to hold fast to his plan to hold the historic first night game in Pittsburgh a few days later.

After the Sunday game was called, the Clementes returned to Fort Meade to have dinner again with Orlando Zabala and his wife, Norma.
No bad clams at the restaurant this time. They ate at home and Roberto invited more teammates and friends to join them. Carol Brezovec’s mother, Carolyn, now married to Nevin Rauch, came down from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and brought several blueberry cheese pies, Roberto’s favorite. After dinner, the men played cards and little children ran around and Nevin Rauch taught Clemente how to play his Horner harmonicas. “It was wonderful, just wonderful,” Carolyn Rauch remembered.

But it was of no help to the Pirates. The next day, in keeping with second game tradition, they got slaughtered again, losing 11–3. First Lady Pat Nixon threw out the first ball and had as much stuff as the six Pirate pitchers who followed in pathetic procession, from Johnson to Kison to Moose to Veale to Miller to Giusti. Veale replacing Moose at least provided the press box material for carnivore jokes. Instead of the monstrous Mickey Mantle home runs that destroyed them in 1960, this time the Pirates were done in by fourteen well-placed singles. The M and M boys of Mantle and Maris were replaced by the R and R boys of Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson. Frank Robinson led off three innings with hits and left the game in the eighth to a standing ovation. Jim Palmer continued the O’s pitching mastery, holding the Pirates scoreless until he tired in the eighth and gave up a three-run homer to Hebner. The loss showed how difficult it is for a lone outfielder to control a game, yet it also revealed Clemente’s transcendence.

In the midst of the carnage, he got two more hits and made a throw from right that did nothing overtly to change the course of that particular game, and indeed did not even result in an out, yet became the most remembered play of the entire series. In the fifth inning, as the Orioles were pounding out six runs, Rettenmund was on second when Frank Robinson looped a ball deep down the right-field line into the swirling winds. Clemente raced over and grabbed it with one hand. Rettenmund tagged and advanced to third, certain that no human, not even Clemente, could make this a close play. But Clemente caught the ball, swirled, and fired toward third and—
¡Arriba!
—the ball arrived on a perfect line at the same time as Rettenmund. Decades later, Hebner could still see the play unfold in front of him, and remain amazed by it. “He was in another zip code in right field,” Hebner said. “He turned around and this ball got to me pretty damn quick. Usually a ball would take three or four hops from that spot in the outfield. He threw an absolute cannon. Rettenmund tagging up on a ball like that was probably saying, ‘This is a piece of cake.’
I had the ball and he was sliding. I said, ‘Wow, this is close!’ When I look at it now—I see the 1971 Series on TV a lot—I think he was probably safe. At the time, I thought he was out. Of course [Clemente] had the same uniform on. But to make a play that good . . . if I’m an umpire and somebody throws it that good
from that far, I might bang him out. After the play was over, I was like, wow, If somebody got my ass at third base like that I would have been embarrassed. The ball got there like it had some hair on it when it came in. And he was like thirty-seven when he did it!”

Andy Etchebarren, watching from the Orioles dugout, said it was the best throw he had ever seen. Danny Murtaugh, in the Pirates dugout, had witnessed too many impossible deeds by Clemente over seventeen seasons to go that far. He and other Pirates had their own collection of greatest-ever Clemente throws, most involving some variation of the time he let loose a bullet from the deepest corner of old Forbes Field and the ball zipped just over the heads of relief pitchers in the bullpen down the right-field line and stayed no more than seven feet off the ground—easy to cut off, but what infielder would dare?—all the way until it smacked into the catcher’s mitt at home plate knee-high, without a bounce. Clemente, when asked about the Rettenmund throw, did not feign modesty. “Ask the other players,” he said. “They remember a few years ago when my arm was really strong. No one can compare with my arm when it feels right. I’m not bragging. That is a fact.” Dick Young, the columnist for the
New York Daily News,
had become a great admirer of Clemente, yet chose to quote him in phonetic English on the same subject: “Eef I have my good arm thee ball gets there a leetle quicker than he gets there.”

The 1971 Pirates were a boisterous lot: Blass, Dave Giusti, Sanguillen, Veale, Nellie Briles, Stargell—Dock Ellis wasn’t the only one who said what he wanted to say. But after Game 2 no one was saying much of anything. Clemente looked around the locker room and saw all the heads hanging low. Not good, he thought, and he decided to speak. “I just say some things in the clubhouse when they have their heads down,” he explained later. “I tell them not to worry about it. We’re going to Pittsburgh and that’s our ballpark. When fellows have their heads down, you have to pep them up. If I put my head down they’ll say, ‘Why try?’ A man they trust, if he quits, everyone quits . . . I said, ‘Hold on, we’re gonna do it.’”

At the same time, in the press box,
the baseball writers had all quit, or were urging the Pirates to quit, hauling out their bag of death-knell clichés for Clemente’s club. It was always this way with the reporting
tribe. They had done the same thing to the Pirates in 1960. Arthur Daley of
The New York Times,
who had declared Pittsburgh dead after three games in 1960, needed only two games this time to call for an executioner “to put the poor devils out of their misery.” David Condon, in his “In the Wake of the News” column for the
Chicago Tribune,
relied on his repartee with Earl Weaver to make the same point. He was just about to ask the Orioles manager whether there was even much sense in continuing the series, Condon wrote, when he heard Weaver say that he took Palmer out of the game near the end because he might need to use him again. “That’s what the Baltimore man said. Honest. Honest. Honest. After slaughtering the Pirates twice to take a 2 game to 0 lead. Weaver says he might need Palmer again. The laugh that greeted his remark was the loudest heard in Baltimore since H. L. Mencken used to rip off some rib-splitters. There was a report that Weaver’s jest, when repeated, even drew some grins in the Pirate locker room, which was no more lively than a funeral parlor.”

At the head of the pack was Jim Murray of the
Los Angeles Times.
With Murray at least, it was as much about the way he made his points as the points he made. Murray was not one for understatement; his style was all metaphor all the time. “This World Series is no longer a contest,” he began. “It’s an atrocity. It’s the Germans marching through Belgium, the interrogation room of the Gestapo. It’s as one-sided as a Russian trial . . . The Pirates should ask where they go to surrender. It should rank with such other great contests of history as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the yellow fever epidemic, and the bombing of Rotterdam. To enjoy it, you’d have to be the kind of person who goes to orphanage fires or sits at washed-out railroad bridges with a camera . . . They’re taking the execution to Pittsburgh today. Unless the Red Cross intervenes.”

At home in Pittsburgh on the night before Game 3,
Clemente could not sleep. Vera stayed up with him until dawn, and they talked about everything but baseball. Then she made him breakfast: pork chops, three eggs, always sunny side up, fruit shake; it seemed like his breakfast feast would fill the entire table. After eating, he retreated again to the bedroom where they darkened the room by pinning the drapes to the walls with black rubber tape, and finally he got a few hours’ rest.
Steve Blass, slated to pitch that day for the Pirates, had also stayed up all night, anxious about the game. He lay in bed thinking about the Orioles hitters, and what he would say to the press if he won, or what he would say if he lost. In Baltimore during the first two games, he had slipped into the clubhouse to study the Orioles batters on the television monitor and had taken copious notes, but left them in the hotel room so they were of no use to him now. He went out for breakfast with his father and thought he was starving but when the food came he couldn’t touch it. All he had was some “toast and a few pulmonary wheezes.”

Before the game, as usual, Blass and Clemente met in the trainer’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Clemente was getting his neck massaged by Tony Bartirome. Blass sat nearby, trying to settle his nerves. Those two hours before walking out to the mound were the worst part of the day for him. He tried to take his mind off the game by leafing through
Penthouse,
a skin magazine. Bartirome looked over at Blass as he gazed at the photographs of nude women then turned to Clemente and said, “Well, Robby,
look what we got our fuckin’ money on today, this pervert!” As for Blass, just being in the vicinity of Clemente was reassuring. Every time his turn came in the rotation, he’d look at the lineup, see the name Clemente, and say to himself, “Robby’s playing and there’s peace in right field.”