Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (7 page)

Along with Jim Crow segregation in the South, Power dealt with a more subtle form of prejudice during his baseball rise: the subjective standards of the New York Yankees. From 1951 to 1953, playing for Yankee farm clubs in Syracuse and Kansas City, Power was one of the best all-around players in the minor leagues. For two years, he was the lone black player on his team, and for the third he was joined by catcher Elston Howard. But Power was ready for the majors before the Yankees were ready for him. Word was that he was considered too flashy and socially daring to become the first black in pinstripes. Yankee officials were reluctant to call up a player who drove a Cadillac, listened to jazz, dated white women, and was unafraid to show his vibrant personality.

Power was the same man off the field as on. His style at first base
was free and easy. He played far from the bag, always got there on time, and snatched the ball into his glove with a one-handed snap. It was a method that he had used effectively since his days in winter ball at Caguas, when his manager, none other than Luis Olmo, suspended him for ten days for refusing to follow instructions and catch with two hands. Olmo eventually relented, and so did all coaches thereafter, but not without some complaints. “They called me a showboat, but it was just the way I did it,” Power recalled. “I told them, ‘The guys who invented the game, if they wanted you to catch with two hands they would have given you two gloves, and I only had one glove.” His trademark pendulum swing as he awaited a pitch was also as much about substance as style. “I had a weakness, and the weakness was I cannot hit the inside low ball,” he later explained. “Now how am I going to manage that? What I would do was, I would keep the bat there, low and inside, and swing it back and forth, and people would say, be careful, he’s a low-ball hitter, and they would pitch me high. Oh, baby. That was psychology.”

After a third stellar season in the minors, when Power batted .331 and drove in 109 runs for the top farm club, the Yankees ran out of rationalizations for keeping him in the minors. But they chose instead to promote Elston Howard, reserved and unassuming, more the Yankee style—or at least more of what they seemed to want from a non-white player. Although the organization projected a public image of dignity and class, the Yankees of that era had their share of hard-partying roustabouts. With his deadpan sarcastic wit, Power took note of the contradiction: “They say they didn’t call me up because I was going out with white women. And I told them, ‘Jeez, I didn’t know white women were that bad. If I knew that, I wouldn’t go out with them.’ I told them that they had a ballplayer in the organization, a white ballplayer, who would go out with black women. And they asked me who that guy was. It was Billy Martin. He was white. He was Italian. He was going out with black women. When they ask why I would say that, I say, ‘Because I trade two of my black women for one of his white ones.’” On December 16, 1953, before he got a chance to play first base in Yankee Stadium, Power was traded to the Philadelphia Athletics.

Hiram Bithorn was dead by then. Luis Olmo, his major league career over, was back in Puerto Rico and scouting for Milwaukee. The Braves hoped Olmo could help them sign a nineteen-year-old kid from Carolina who was playing outfield for the Santurce Cangrejeros.

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Five major league teams expressed some interest in Roberto Clemente: the Braves, Dodgers, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Giants. It was unlikely that Boston really wanted him, considering that they had no black players (and in fact were the last American League team to integrate in 1959 with Pumpsie Green). St. Louis was also an outside possibility, but New York, Brooklyn, and Milwaukee were serious suitors. All had connections. The Braves were represented by Olmo, who would play on the Cangrejeros with Clemente and had been one of the stars of his childhood. The Giants enjoyed a close relationship with Pedrin Zorrilla, the Santurce owner, and their major league roster included Clemente’s childhood idol, Monte Irvin, as well as Ruben Gomez, a right-handed pitcher from Puerto Rico. The Dodgers claimed perhaps the closest connection to Santurce—Al Campanis was a frequent visitor to the Zorrilla home—and beyond that they were known in Puerto Rico for fair treatment of black players, many of whom had been playing winter ball on the island. When it came to bidding, the Braves offered Clemente the largest bonus. Most accounts say $25,000 to $35,000, although Olmo later claimed it was even more. But money alone was not enough. “He was very loyal to Pedrin and he wouldn’t take it,” Olmo recalled. If loyalty was a factor, of equal importance was Clemente’s desire to play in New York, where he had friends and relatives in the large Puerto Rican community who could make him feel more at home.

That left the Giants and Dodgers. Any signing over $6,000 would designate Clemente as a bonus player, meaning a team would have to protect him on the major league roster or face losing him in a supplemental draft after his first year in the minors. The Giants, apparently concluding that Clemente needed at least a year of seasoning, kept their offer below the bonus line. Their scout, Tom Sheehan, hoped that Clemente would sign for a $4,000 bonus and begin in Class-A ball in Sioux
City, Iowa. Leo Durocher, the Giants’ manager, later rationalized the low bid this way: “We offered him under the $6,000 bonus limit so he could go to the minors and mature there. We tried to do what was best for Clemente, but the Dodgers . . . dangled more money in front of him and you know what a kid his age does when money becomes a factor.”

What the Dodgers dangled—a $10,000 bonus and $5,000 first-year salary—was far less than the Braves but enough to close the deal. Clemente wanted to play for the Dodgers. He had no way of knowing that they, on the other hand, had a covert motive in signing him. In their private calculations, even though their scouting reports on Clemente were great, they shared the Giants’ assessment that he was not ready for the majors. Their plan was to send him to their top farm club in Montreal. As much as they coveted Clemente, part of their mission was simply to keep him away from the Giants. “We didn’t want the Giants to have Willie Mays and Clemente in the same outfield and be the big attraction in New York,” Dodgers executive Buzzie Bavasi said later. “It was a cheap deal for us any way you figure it.” A cheap deal that was cheapened even more by the racial practices of that era. White bonus babies were being signed for an average of six times as much as their black and Latin counterparts.

On February 19, 1954, with his sons Roberto and Matino (just back from the Army), and Pedrin Zorrilla at his side, Melchor Clemente sent a telegram to Matt Burns, Brooklyn Baseball Club, 215 Montague Street, Brooklyn, New York:

I WILL SIGN A CONTRACT ON BEHALF OF MY SON ROBERTO CLEMENTE FOR THE SEASON 1954 FOR THE SALARY OF $5,000 FOR THE SEASON PLUS A BONUS OF $10,000 PAYABLE ON APPROVAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION. I WILL SIGN THE CONTRACT WITH THE MONTREAL CLUB OF THE INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE. SIGNED, MELCHOR CLEMENTE, FATHER, ROBERTO CLEMENTE, SON

One week later the signing was made public in a UP wire service report: “The Montreal Royals have signed Roberto Clemente, a Negro
bonus player from Puerto Rico, General Manager Guy Moreau said today.” Clemente would play center field for the Royals, the report added, “if Sandy Amoros, the league’s leading hitter in 1953, moves up to the Dodgers.” But more than the telegram or the public announcement, the true marker of Clemente’s new status came when Hillerich & Bradsby, makers of Louisville Slugger bats for organized baseball, took note of the bonus baby and contacted him about his equipment needs.

His first bats were variations of a Stan Musial model, classified at headquarters in Louisville as M-117. The signature engraved on them read
Momen Clemente.

BEFORE MOMEN LEFT HOME TO PLAY BASEBALL IN THE
North, Melchor presented him with a going-away gift. It was a fine brimmed hat, and the son thanked his father for it, not having the stomach to say that he hated gentlemen’s hats. His older brothers Andres and Matino knew how he felt and teased him about the hat as they drove him to the airport in San Juan, where he would catch a flight to Florida, the first stop on his baseball migration. As they were making their way from Carolina to the airfield, Roberto fidgeted with the hat and then flung it out an open window. His brothers were shocked. Even knowing how much he disliked it, they asked him why he threw it away instead of just giving it to someone who needed it. This was not like him; he was not wasteful or thoughtless. Roberto explained that he did not want to get in trouble with his father. “Just imagine that I become famous and the person that I give the hat to tells everybody that it was my hat,” he said. “Father will kill me.” And that is how he left the island: hatless, thinking of fame.

It is hard to imagine a more dazzling debut than his first game a few weeks later as a Brooklyn Dodgers farmhand.
CLEMENTE PACES ROYALS TO WIN
ran the headline after the opening day of spring training for the Montreal Royals of the Triple-A International League. The wire service account from Vero Beach on April 1, 1954, described Clemente as an “18-year-old Puerto Rican bonus baby”—close, he was nine-teen—and noted that along with two singles he pulled off one of the rarest and most stirring feats in baseball, hitting and running his way to an inside-the-park home run. From the box score in the
Montreal Gazette,
the numbers indicated that he batted fifth, went three for four,
drove in two runs, made one outfield putout, was the only Royals starter to play nine innings, and moved defensively from center to left late in the 12–2 rout of the Civilians.

The opposing team, comprised of ex-servicemen awaiting assignments to Dodger farm clubs, was certainly below International League caliber. And this was, after all, April Fool’s Day. How else to explain that Clemente’s auspicious opener was less a foreshadowing of things to come that year than a cruel bit of false hope? Only three more times all season would he be featured in headlines or photographs of Royals games, and one of those was a picture of him twisting his ankle. He was treated more like baby than bonus, protected from the world, often hidden away in the dugout. Eight years earlier, Jackie Robinson had joined these same Royals in Montreal on his path to Brooklyn, and his every move was analyzed and recorded by the sporting press as he changed baseball forever. Clemente’s coming was virtually ignored. His manager, Max Macon, assessed the team and its shortcomings almost daily in public, complaining about the first baseman’s inept fielding, the overall lack of power, his hopes that the big club would send down some real talent, but he was mum on the potential of Clemente.

Momen was the youngest player on the Royals. He was the only Puerto Rican, and at season’s start one of two blacks and two Spanish speakers. The other was Chico Fernández, a twenty-two-year-old shortstop from Havana. On top of that, during spring training in Florida, he found himself, for the first time, dealing with Jim Crow segregation whenever he left Dodgertown, where he was given a room and three meals a day. Even within the Vero Beach compound, he noticed how the black service workers were boarded onto buses and driven out of Dodgertown before sundown. Separated from the warm fold of his family in Carolina, Clemente felt isolated in an alien and at times malignant environment, a condition that accentuated his shyness. On the playing field, given a chance, he was daring, fierce, memorable, but now on most days he was tucked away, and what people saw was more like the reticent youngster with sadness around the eyes who sat in the back of Mrs. Cáceres’s room, looking down, on the first day of history class.

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The International Baseball League lived up to its name in 1954. Unlike the major league World Series, limited to one country in the world, this league was undeniably international. “There’s never been such a league as this one,” declared the writer Tom Meany in
Collier’s
after spending the early part of the season traveling with the Royals and some of the other clubs. “All a ballplayer needs to get by in the International League is the ability to hit the curveball and to go without sleep. It also helps if he has a smattering of Spanish, a soupcon of French, a fondness for plane rides and the digestive processes of an anaconda.” The eight teams included three in Canada: Montreal, the Ottawa Athletics, and the Jack Kent Cooke–owned Toronto Maple Leafs; as well as the Rochester Red Wings, Syracuse Chiefs, and Buffalo Bison of New York State, and two expansion franchises brought in that season, the Richmond Virginians and Havana Sugar Kings. The inclusion of a team from Cuba, where baseball was as much a national pastime as it claimed to be in the States, created a buzz in sporting circles, with some writers looking toward the day when Havana would field a team in the majors. Although that day did not come, the presence of the Sugar Kings in the International League served as an early landmark in the Latinization of North American baseball, a trend that would become more pronounced decade by decade for the rest of the twentieth century.

To call the IBL a minor league was somewhat misleading. It had been around for seventy-one seasons, going back to 1884, making it far older than the American League, which was established in 1900. And its talent pool, at a time when blacks and Latins were starting to get a chance, and when there were still only sixteen major league teams, was far deeper than minor leagues of later decades. The Toronto Maple Leafs alone boasted a roster that included twenty-two players with major league experience. Each of the eight teams had perhaps seven or eight players who would have been in the majors had they come up during the expansion era a generation later. The International League clubs had their own traditions and identities quite apart from their distant overlords. They played a schedule of 154 games, equal to the majors, and according to league secretary Harry Simmons, traveled by air 75 percent of the time. They even made personnel moves on their
own now and then, but they were not independent. The daily reminder of that was the Montreal uniform, with the club name scrawled across the front in the cursive Dodger blue. The team’s condition was still determined in large part by the decisions of Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner, and his baseball men in Brooklyn.