Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (9 page)

“They’ll be calling us the Montreal Somnambulists,” said Dixie Howell, the Royals veteran catcher and coach. Somehow, the zombies from the North managed a split, winning the second game behind the two-hit pitching of Joe Black. Amoros, Cimoli, Whitman, and Cassini shared outfield duties, and the bonus baby never got off the bench. The crowd at Gran Stadium was large and buoyant: twenty thousand fans whistling, jeering the umpires, chanting “Sol! Sol! Sol! Sol! Baby!” to the insistent rhythm of conga drums and marimbas. In the press box, writers sipped espresso cups of Cuban coffee and downed bottles of “one-eyed Indian” (Hatuey) beer as they looked down on the field and beyond to the old city washed in faded yellow and ivory. Nothing unusual for Clemente and the Latin players, or for Anglo teammates who had played in the winter leagues. Tommy Lasorda, a born ham, would even delight the crowd by doing a little wriggle to the rhythm before he went into his windup on the mound. But for those experiencing baseball in the Caribbean for the first time, it all seemed exotic and a bit dangerous, reinforcing stereotypes. “The Cuban fan is a complete extrovert and does everything but get right into the ball game,”
Dink Carroll observed after his first day at the park. “After watching them for a while, it’s easy to believe a paragraph we read in a local publication: ‘In Cuba people talk about two things: politics and baseball. These are passionate topics leading often to violent discussions.’”

Butch Bouchard, a former Canadiens hockey player and Montreal restaurateur who came South with the team for a vacation, joked that if Cubans got into hockey “There’d be nobody alive when the game ended.”

When Mickey McGowan, a writer for the
Montreal Star,
noticed a stirring in the crowd after a loudspeaker announcement, he blurted out, “What is it? A call for the militia?”

Collier’s
Tom Meany had to explain that it was merely notice of a gift giveaway for kids who attended the doubleheader the following Sunday.

Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, was also on the scene. After taking in Joe Black’s impressive performance, he skipped the rest of the games to go deep-sea fishing in the Gulf with Bud Holman, his pal from Eastern Airlines. Not a bad place to hang out for a few days. The Hotel Nacional, sitting on a hill overlooking the blue-green Caribbean, was all comfort and ease, the good life, with two swimming pools, sweet flowering bushes, a putting green, high-ceilinged rooms with fans and air-conditioning, rum, beer, and beautiful women. One night, after the game, Rocky Nelson strolled through the lobby chomping a Cuban cigar, rounding up teammates for poker. They hooked Max Macon and drained his wallet until he was almost broke. According to Glenn Cox, the manager pushed back from his seat at the table, held up his last $10 bill, shouted “You guys aren’t gonna get this!” and went over to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet. Then he said:
No more high-stakes poker on the road.

Havana was not home for Momen, but it was close enough. There was even a Morro Castle, jutting into the sea, a fortress much like El Morro at the tip of Old San Juan. Clemente made friends with the jack-of-all-trades for the Sugar Kings (publicist, radio announcer, promotions director, and road secretary), the gregarious Ramiro Martínez. It was Martínez who branded the logo for the Sugar Kings, a cartoon character shaped like a baseball named Beisbolito. He also came up
with the idea of publicizing the new team by flying a plane over Havana and dropping thousands of matchbook sewing kits that featured Beisbolito on the cover. Years later, after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and the baseball franchise fled to New Jersey, Martínez would settle in Puerto Rico and remain close to Clemente, whom he called “the top personality I ever met in my life.” At first, he knew him only as a talented, lonely young man. The highlight of the trip for Clemente came when Chico Fernández picked him up at the hotel and drove him over to the Fernández house: the big family, the teasing and laughing, the mother making a home-cooked meal—it reminded him of Carolina.

In the six-game series, the Royals won three, lost two, and tied one. The final game was scoreless in the tenth inning when they had to call it so the Royals could catch their plane back to Montreal. Joe Black had pitched nine more shutout innings. Over the entire series, Clemente never played. Too many scouts in Havana was the word.

•   •   •

Scouts and baseball officials were always roaming the International League circuit. A week after the Royals returned home from Havana, Dodgers personnel man
Andy High visited Montreal to assess the talent. Rumors were going around that another organization had offered the Dodgers $150,000 for Amoros. “It isn’t hard to believe,” High told the Montreal press. The baseball men in Brooklyn hadn’t given up on Amoros, he insisted. They didn’t think he was much of a fielder, and his arm was weak, but he sure could hit the ball hard. It took Duke Snider a few times to make the big club, too, High pointed out.

The writers asked him about Don Hoak, the former Royal who was starting at third for the Dodgers in place of the injured Billy Cox. High had nothing but praise. “Hoak is a dynamic type of player,” he said, and would stay in the lineup as long as he was hitting. They also loved the way he charged slow-hit grounders and fielded them with his “meat hand.” Still, Cox remained the best-fielding third baseman in the league, even if he was colorless and backed up on hard-hit ground balls.

What about Chico Fernández? Would he ever hit big-league pitching?

“Chico doesn’t have to hit too much,” High said. “I guess you’ve noticed that he’s changed his stance this year. He’s crouching. That’s something he developed in the winter league in Cuba. I remember I was watching him with Fresco Thompson this spring training in Vero Beach. The first time he came to the plate and went into that crouch, Fresco said, ‘Ho, ho, take a look at this! We’ve got a new hitter.’ But he makes some great plays in the field. We don’t teach young ball players to go after a ball with one hand; they do that by themselves. But they’re apt to make those seemingly impossible plays because they practice that way.”

There was more talk about Don Zimmer and Moose Moryn, Dodgers prospects in St. Paul. Not a word about Roberto Clemente. Better not to put his name in the papers.

A month later, after a long road trip, the Royals came back to town and found Dodgers front-office men Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis waiting for them. During the final road stop in Toronto, Max Macon had been kicked out of a game for the third time that year, and was about to be suspended and fined for almost coming to blows with home-plate umpire Carlisle Burch. But Bavasi and Campanis had other concerns. The Dodgers were going nowhere, lost in the whirlwind of Willie Mays and his Giants. Tommy Lasorda had just been recalled to help the pitching, and they were looking again at Joe Black. They were also worried about the frustrations of their Latin players. Amoros was discouraged. Fernández wondered whether he would ever get a chance. And Clemente wanted to go home.

It was Campanis who had first seen his uncommon talent during that tryout at Sixto Escobar two years earlier and had stamped Clemente for greatness. How could he be great if he didn’t play?
Don’t leave,
Campanis urged him.
Trust us. You’ll get your chance.
The next night, in a mess of a game that the Royals lost 22–4, Clemente was inserted into the lineup in the second inning, replacing Whitman, and got two hits in three at-bats. He played some more during that series against the Maple Leafs, but then, with Bavasi and Campanis gone, it was back to the bench.

The effort to hide Clemente from the world, or more specifically from the last place Pittsburgh Pirates, who would have the first selection
in the supplemental draft at season’s end, was ineffective. Branch Rickey, who ran the Dodgers organization for most of the 1940s, had moved on to Pittsburgh at the start of the fifties, where he had struggled to lift a pathetic Pirates club out of the National League cellar. Although there had been no notable success at the big-league level to show for it, Rickey was starting to accumulate talent, with the help of two superb scouts who had come with him from Brooklyn, Clyde Sukeforth and Howie Haak. They were opposites in personality: Suke-forth a modest, efficient, polite New Englander, Haak (pronounced Hake) a prodigiously profane baseball addict who chewed tobacco from the moment he got up and could keep a wad going in his mouth while eating scrambled eggs. But they were two of the best talent evaluators in the game. With Rickey’s intimate knowledge of the Dodgers and their system, and with his scouts at his call to go wherever he needed them, there was no way a prospect like Roberto Clemente, dangling out there, ready to be drafted at the end of the year, was going to escape their notice. At various times during the summer, Rickey dispatched Sukeforth and then Haak out to report on Montreal’s bonus baby.

As Sukeforth later told the story, he checked on the Royals during a series against Richmond. Just observing Clemente in outfield practice, when he unloosed one stunning throw after another, and at the plate during batting practice, when he kept drilling shots back through the box, was enough. It hardly mattered that Macon kept Clemente on the bench.

Before he left town, Sukeforth approached the Montreal manager and said, “Take care of our boy!”

“You’re kidding. You don’t want that kid,” Macon answered.

“Now, Max. I’ve known you for a good many years,” the scout said, softly chiding Macon. “We’re a cinch to finish last and get first draft choice. Don’t let our boy get in trouble.”

Not long thereafter,
Rickey sent Haak up to Montreal to double-check. Haak, with his belly paunch, slicked-back gray hair, and pants that constantly drooped down a flat rear, drove to Montreal nonstop in his beat-up old car with a spittoon next to the driver’s seat. He would drive anywhere to see anyone, and was known for being able to size up
a player in a minute or two, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. As Haak later recounted the scene in writer Kevin Kerrane’s delicious book of interviews with baseball scouts,
Dollar Sign on the Muscle,
Rickey instructed him to watch the Royals without specifically stating what player to scout. “I knew who it was, though. Another Pirate scout [Sukeforth] had already been up to Montreal and he’d raved to me about this kid the Dodgers had hid out there. . . . When I walked into the Montreal clubhouse, I said hello to Max Macon, the manager, and he said, ‘You son of a bitch, what’re you doing here?’ I said, ‘I came to talk to you.’ He said, ‘You’re fulla shit. You’re here to look at Clemente. Well, you aren’t going to see him play!’”

Macon kept Clemente in the dugout again, but Haak outmaneuvered him. He met Clemente after the game and found the young outfielder in a perplexed mood, steamed again about being consigned to the bench. With that psychological opening, Haak told Clemente that he should bleeping stay where he bleeping was and keep bleeping quiet, because the bleeping Pirates bleeping wanted him. The Dodgers might not bleeping appreciate him, Haak said, but Mr. Rickey and the Pirates sure as bleeping did. And if they drafted him, he’d be playing in bleeping Forbes Field next bleeping year.

For a few weeks after Haak’s visit, Clemente found more playing time in left, center, and right. On August 14, his picture made the papers, but not the way he would have wished. The photograph showed No. 5 being lifted to a stretcher and carried off the field after he twisted his ankle stepping in a hole near the pitcher’s mound as he ran in from left at the end of the sixth inning. It turned out to be a minor sprain, and he was eager to show his manager that he could run without trouble. Two days later, on the road, he was back in the starting lineup, and his throwing arm was the headline after a game against the Maple Leafs:
CLEMENTE’S TOSS HELPS ROYALS DEFEAT TORONTO.
Here was the true harbinger of things to come, the thrill of a pure Clemente moment. He was playing right field that night, where he belonged. Bottom of the ninth, two out, Toronto’s Connie Johnson on second base, Ed Stevens raps a single to right, Clemente charges hard (he said he was always blessed with the ability to run fast in a crouching position), scoops the ball on the run, and catapults himself
into the air as he unleashes a perfect overhand peg to the plate. Game over.

At year’s end, his statistics were meager. Games Played: 87. At-bats: 148. Home Runs: 2. RBI: 12. Batting Average: .257. But all the numbers said less than that single throw from right ending an otherwise routine game in the middle of August.

•   •   •

Clemente played on several winning baseball teams during his career, but none with more appeal than the team he joined when he came back to Puerto Rico after that frustrating 1954 season in Montreal.
Even the batboy on that year’s winter league edition of the Santurce Cangrejeros had enormous talent. He was a gangly, bowlegged teenager named Orlando Cepeda, son of the legendary Pedro Cepeda. Orlando, known later as the Baby Bull, would go on to a Hall of Fame career himself, but now he was just glad to be rubbing shoulders with his elders. During practice every morning at Sixto Escobar, when the Santurce outfielders practiced charging the ball and throwing it in, Cepeda stationed himself near the pitcher’s mound to take their throws. Who was out there throwing to him? Fifty years later, in a deadpan voice, he brought back the names. “Oh, couple guys. Willie Mays in center and Roberto Clemente in left or right.”

Mays and Clemente, side by side, roaming the same outfield. That possibility was what drove the Dodgers to sign Clemente in the first place, at least in part—to keep him away from Mays and the New York Giants. But it was no problem in Puerto Rico, no nightmare for the Dodgers, only a baseball fan’s delight. Clemente was all fire when he got home, not so much rusty from disuse in Montreal as raging to play and to overcome the injustice of his lost, lonely season. If Mays drew most of the attention, Clemente would make it impossible for people not to notice that he was out there, too.

This marked Santurce’s seventeenth season, and for Pedrin Zorrilla, the founder and owner, in many ways it was the culmination of a life’s work. Pedrin was the son of a poet, the impassioned romantic Enrique Zorrilla of Manatí, who loved his country and its people.