Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (15 page)

From the beginning, the Gunner seemed to appreciate Clemente, at first as a circus barker might appreciate the virtuosity of his most dazzling trapeze artist, and later as a friend would admire a friend. There was rarely tension between the two, as there was between Clemente and many members of the press. Prince was among the few people who could call him Bob or Bobby with no hard feelings. He also called him Roberto often enough. And when Clemente entered the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves near the end of the 1958 season and took basic training at Parris Island with Platoon 346 of the 3rd Recruit Battalion, he came back to find Prince saluting him as Private Clemente, the leatherneck. But whenever Clemente approached the plate, Prince greeted him with a phrase that came to define their relationship.
¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!
He had heard Lino Donoso, a Spanish-speaking teammate, say it to Clemente once, early in his career, and liked the sound of it. Translated, it means something like Get there! Go up! Arise! Let’s go! The etymology goes back to the Latin words for reaching shore.
¡Arriba!
The double r’s would trill on Prince’s tongue with fluid, exaggerated delight.

In the early winter of 1960, at the dawn of the sixties decade, Prince and the Pirates and all the baseball world were still waiting for Clemente to get there. At age twenty-five, after five full seasons in the major leagues, he remained a player with more promise than results. He had batted over .300 only once, during his sophomore season in 1956. His third year had been almost a complete washout; he was disabled by a painful back and spine and hit a meager .253 with thirty runs batted in. At the close of the 1958 season and into the following preseason his baseball had been interrupted by the Marine Corps training, and for much of that time he was plagued with a sore right arm. He had played for three managers already—Fred Haney, Bobby Bragan, and Danny Murtaugh—and feared that they had misinterpreted his pride and perfectionism as malingering, not realizing how much he was hurting. On the field, he was such a dashing ballplayer—
¡Arriba!
—yet the cold numbers were unimposing. In no season had he driven in more than sixty runs or hit more than seven home runs. Even his stunning arm in right field had a downside; along with high assist totals and highlight reel plays came too many errors. All these deficiencies had been pointed out by general manger Joe L. Brown when he offered Clemente a contract of $27,500 plus bonuses for the 1960 season.

On February 26, 1960, after signing for a sixth season with the Pirates,
Clemente wrote Brown a letter and included it with the agreement he sent back to Pittsburgh. The typewritten letter, composed by Clemente in English, unpolished but improving, was his answer to any and all criticism.

Dear Joe,

Here is the 1960 contract.

I want to tell you that last year I played most of the season sick. Just because when I said when my arm was sore nobody believed it and I
played that way until I almost lost my arm. I think that if somebody is sick you should know if he can’t play or not, but with me is different. Is different occasion I can’t see where I stand with Pittsburgh club when I said that something is wrong with me.

Clemente had played fewer games in 1959 (105) than in any previous year. Murtaugh, who took over as manager midway through 1957, Clemente’s worst season, was a hard-charging Irishman who wanted his men to play hurt and wasn’t particularly interested in explanations.

Okay, I was the player who make more errors. I can play like Skinner and make one error or nothing and Virdon and make not so many assists and I’d be way ahead, too. So Please don’t count those errors because playing safe everyone can field .1000.

Clemente made thirteen errors in 104 games in right field and had a fielding percentage of only .948 in 1959. His attempt to contrast his play with left fielder Bob Skinner and center fielder Bill Virdon was not entirely on the mark. Clemente had ten outfield assists in 1959, below his totals of previous years, while Skinner had nine assists and Virdon sixteen. While Skinner was clearly less adventurous in the field than Clemente, Virdon covered as much ground and took nearly as many chances, yet had a fielding percentage of .979. Most of Clemente’s errors were on wild throws, often to third base. Some fans with seats in the third base boxes brought gloves to games with the specific hope of catching an errant heave from Roberto.

With the RBI if I hit third I can get some but not hitting seventh with nobody on base. Well, I think that is all for now. My car leaves the 26th for Miami. I would like the 28th to pick it up in Miami. With best regards.

Roberto Clemente

In 1954, when Momen left Puerto Rico for his first spring training, he was still a naïve teenager, healthy, happy, and hungry for fame. Now, six years later, he returned to the mainland struggling to find a comfortable
mental equilibrium. The fire inside him burned hotter than ever. He was still trying to show the world the full measure of his talent and character. At the time he wrote his letter to Brown, he felt in the best physical condition of his career and had just finished a stellar season in the Puerto Rican winter league. He had batted .334, trailing only his pal Vic Power, and drove in forty-two runs, only eight fewer in four dozen games than he had knocked home in all of the previous year for Pittsburgh.

Clemente’s slow rise and seeming readiness to break through at long last in 1960 mirrored the frustratingly slow ascent of the ball club. A decade had passed since Branch Rickey unveiled his five-year plan for pennant contention in Pittsburgh. Rickey had come and gone, no longer even a consultant to the club. He had spent the final years of the fifties obsessed with a new idea—to create a third major league, the Continental League, which would never come to fruition but would help major league expansion. His successor was Joe L. Brown, who had been trained by Rickey and was the baseball-loving son of comedian and actor Joe E. Brown. The younger Brown had been focused on baseball since age eleven when he traveled and trained with the old San Francisco Missions and Hollywood Stars. By twenty he had his first pro front office job with Lubbock in a low Class-D League, and from then on relied more on hard work and talent than celebrity connections to make his way up the ladder, becoming general manager at AAA New Orleans and then Rickey’s successor after only one year in the front office of the big club. As much as he admired Rickey’s brain, Brown realized that the Mahatma had failed in Pittsburgh and that a new course had to be followed. He brought in more veteran talent and paid the players better. “Mr. Rickey was penurious with salaries; if he could save a thousand or two, he did it,” Brown recalled. “I made a decision to pay them even more than they were worth . . . I felt the players should have somebody who believed in them, and one of the best ways to show a man is worthy is to put it in his paycheck.” By 1960, ten years into the rebuilding program, Brown’s reconfiguration of the Rickey plan had finally molded a balanced team that was ready to contend.

The acquisition of Virdon from St. Louis in 1956 had solidified the
outfield, but the key trade occurred in January 1959 when Hoak, Burgess, and little left-handed pitcher Harvey Haddix arrived from the Reds in exchange for John Powers, Jim Pendleton, Whammy Douglas, and the slugger Frank Thomas. Burgess did not like to run and was adequate behind the plate but could hit in his sleep. Hoak, the hard-living, hard-playing prototype, who had married a popular singer from western Pennsylvania named Jill Corey (her real name was Norma Jean Speranza), quickly emerged as a team leader and one of Pittsburgh’s most popular players. And Haddix became the ideal third man in the rotation behind the rock-solid twosome of Law and Friend. Surpassing Face’s record-smashing win-loss percentage in 1959, that season’s most amazing feat was Haddix’s twelve-inning perfect game against the Braves at Milwaukee County Stadium. Lew Burdette had also shut out the Pirates for those twelve innings, while giving up thirteen hits, and Haddix ended up losing the game, in the thirteenth, when Hoak made an error on a Felix Mantilla grounder, Hank Aaron walked, and Joe Adcock lofted a home run (that was ruled a double because of a base-running mistake). Haddix had pitched possibly the best game in major league history and had only an L to show for it, as well as a secure place in the annals of bad luck. But the game brought more notice to the Pirates, who had been National League afterthoughts for so long. After dismal seasons in 1956 and 1957, they were now demanding attention, not just individually but as a team. They finished second in 1958 and fourth in 1959 and played the two seasons a cumulative sixteen games over .500. As the 1960 season approached, Pittsburgh seemed ready to fulfill its promise.

•   •   •

The regular season started on the road, with an odd one-game series in Milwaukee. The Pirates treated it more like an exhibition game, and lost 4–3 when Face gave up a two-run home run in the bottom of the eighth. Clemente had two hits and a run batted in, but it was not enough. No big deal, said the Baron of the Bullpen, joking that he had already matched his loss total for the previous year. On the charter flight back from Milwaukee, Dick Groat told the beat reporters: “This is a ball club that will make its presence felt this summer—and you can
mark that down in your notebooks for rehashing ’round about the end of the season.”

Two days later came the home opener, a day game, a 1:30
P.M.
start, on a weekday, Thursday, April 14. Day and time seemed to make no difference in workaday Pittsburgh; whenever the game was played it would draw a packed house. In many ways, the first Pirates home game of the sixties decade was a scene from baseball past. Tribes of businessmen in gray and brown suits; crowds hopping off the No. 64, 66, and 68 streetcars on Forbes Avenue; the congenial black preacher greeting patrons near the third-base entrance, sermonizing on his quarter-bags of neatly packed peanuts. Not long after the gates opened at eleven, a sellout crowd of 34,064 started massing into Forbes Field, greeted by a ragtime band, Benny Benack and the Iron City Six, who had anointed themselves the club’s musical mascots. For the first time, Pirates fans would hear a tune that would become the season’s baseball anthem.

A face in the crowd at the home opener, making his way by streetcar from Squirrel Hill, was twelve-year-old Howard Fineman. He was the son of Mort Fineman, a shoe sales representative, who during his college years had peered down on Bucs games in the stadium below from the aerie of a library carrel on an upper floor of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning; and the grandson of Pirates fan Max Fineman, the patriarch who at age nine ran alongside the baseball parade heading to the wondrous new Forbes Field for the 1909 World Series and was hoisted up by one of the players and carried the rest of the way in an open convertible. Grandfather and father had each seen the Pirates to glory. The youngest Fineman was ready for his turn, and the herald of better things to come; the inane words of Benny Benack’s ditty would stick with him for the rest of his life:
Oh, the Bucs are going all the way, all the way, all the way. Oh, the Bucs are going all the way, all the way this year. Beat ’em, Bucs! Beat ’em, Bucs!

As it turned out, it did not take long for the Pirates to make their presence felt. They won the opening game against the Cincinnati Reds 13–0 with Vernon Law pitching a complete game shutout, giving up seven hits and no walks. Second baseman Bill Mazeroski, lean and mean after a pudgy and disappointing 1959 season, hit a home run and drove in four runs, but the star of the game was Clemente, who went
three for three and drove in five, smacking two doubles, a single, and a long sacrifice fly that would have been a home run in any other park but was hauled in by Vada Pinson near where the batting cage was stored at the 457-foot sign in deepest left center. Hal Smith, Pittsburgh’s backup catcher, who had been acquired from Kansas City during the off-season, had by then become one of the right fielder’s biggest fans. “If you play in 140 games,” Smith told Clemente, “we’ll win the pennant.”
¡Arriba!
Clemente was on his way.

During an Easter Sunday doubleheader against the Reds a few days later, a season-long pattern first became apparent. “It was magical,” Bob Friend recalled years later. “You could sense it even then.” Friend pitched the first game and won 5–0, another complete game shutout, with Clemente belting a two-run home run to clinch it. In the second game, the Reds were leading 5–0 going into the bottom of the ninth. The game seemed over. Reds manager Fred Hutchinson brought in a second-line reliever to finish it off. Then the Pirates scored a run, and got two more runners on, and Hal Smith smacked a three-run homer to draw them within one. Another Pirate reached base, and Bob Skinner stepped to the plate, shrouded by early evening shadows. In the gloaming, Skinner said he couldn’t see the ball, but his swing was smooth and level and he caught a pitch in his bat’s sweet spot and it clanked off a pipe on top of the right-field screen for a game-winning two-run shot. Minutes later, in the visiting dressing room, chairs and food trays started flying as manager Fred Hutchinson pitched a fit. In the locker room next door, Skinner was surrounded by well-wishers. Reflecting the journalistic mores of that era, a
Post-Gazette
writer had no qualm reporting that Skinner “took a congratulatory pounding from players, newspapermen, club officials and others . . .” The story also quoted Clemente going on excitedly about his teammate’s game-winning clout. “I bet you that Doggie’s ball, she bent iron bar over the right-field fence. That’s how hard he hit son-mo-gun.”

Within a week, in the midst of a nine-game winning streak, the Pirates had claimed first place, a lofty position they would hold most of the season, dropping to second for a few days in May and only once after that, for a single day in July. It was the quintessential team effort,
with strong pitching, led by Law, Friend, and Face, and supplemented by Haddix and Vinegar Bend Mizell, obtained from the Cardinals in a crucial trade in late May. There was timely hitting up and down the lineup, including a career year from shortstop Dick Groat and clutch performances from Hoak, first baseman Dick Stuart, Skinner, Maz, and catchers Smith and Burgess, but Clemente was the driving force behind the team’s rise. From that first game, when he knocked home five runs, he was the team’s top run producer all season. He drove in half as many runs in the first thirty games as he had in all of 1959. He was hot all of May, when he was named the National League’s player of the month for batting .336 and driving in twenty-five runs in twenty-seven games. Throughout the long season what stood out most was Clemente’s consistency. From the opening game to the final out, his batting average never dropped below .300. His final average was .314. He had no long hitless slumps, his worst lasted only four days, and no long hitting streaks, either, but a succession of short ones—nine games once, eight games three times, six games once, five games twice. And with that steady hitting he more than doubled his power totals, finishing with sixteen home runs and ninety-four runs batted in, the team high.