Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (24 page)

Exclusive events like the Fort Myers welcome luncheon and golf outing were held in spring-training towns throughout Florida. But unlike previous springs, this time they were loudly criticized. The most attention was drawn to St. Petersburg, which called itself the capital of the Grapefruit League as home to the Yankees and Cardinals. Both teams had been staying at segregated hotels, the Cardinals at the Vinoy Park and the Yankees at the Soreno, but under pressure from the local NAACP and black players, the system was finally being cracked. When Soreno’s management refused to change its policy, the Yankees picked up and moved across the state to Fort Lauderdale, and in the aftermath, St. Pete officials were so worried about losing baseball entirely that the Cardinals were finally allowed to house their entire team in the same hotel. Small victories of that sort were being won here and there, rivulets in the mighty stream of civil rights. On March 13, in Miami Beach, Floyd Patterson defended his heavyweight boxing crown in a title match with Ingemar Johansson, and along with Patterson’s victory the most newsworthy aspect of the fight was that, at the champ’s insistence, the color bar was lifted in the Convention Hall. “Negroes were spotted freely among the predominantly white crowd in all sections,” the
New York Times
reported, and “so far as could be noted, no incidents arose from the integrated set-up.” It was an off-day for the Pirates, and third-baseman Don Hoak, who had been a decent amateur boxer, covered the event for a Pittsburgh newspaper. Yet in Sarasota and other spring-training cities, black ballplayers wanting to watch Patterson were not allowed into the whites-only theaters.

Change was slow, and did not occur unprovoked. One of the pivotal events that spring came when the chamber of commerce held a Salute to Baseball at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. Bill White, the Cardinals first baseman, blasted the lily-white event as a symbol of baseball’s capitulation to Southern racism. His words echoed across the state and
nation. “I think about this every minute of the day,” White told Joe Reichler of United Press International. “This thing keeps gnawing at my heart. When will we be made to feel human?”

For Clemente, already simmering over the personal slight of the MVP vote, the second-class treatment he encountered in Florida as a star player on a World Championship team only stoked his fire. He was a baseball player, not a journalist or politician, and it was on the baseball diamond that he expressed himself most often. In his first batting drill of the spring, he cracked a relentless volley of blistering line drives and then slammed two balls out of the park, and it seemed that he never stopped hitting from there. The most anticipated exhibition contest of the spring was a rematch with the Yankees, a game that drew a standing-room-only crowd of 5,351 to Terry Park. In the second inning of a game the Pirates won 9–2, Clemente started the scoring with a towering home run to left. It was just a solo homer in a meaningless spring game, but it was also a statement:
Clemente was not to be ignored. Several factors were coming together to transform him from a dangerous hitter with weaknesses into a great hitter who was essentially unpitchable.

George H. Sisler, the sweet-swinging Hall of Fame first baseman, deserved a generous share of credit. Gorgeous George, who hit for a .340 career average from 1915 to 1930 and twice batted over .400, had been working as a special assistant with the Pirates throughout Clemente’s first six seasons. Even now, as he was turning sixty-eight, he still knew how to help good hitters improve, and he thought Clemente was on the verge of becoming the best hitter in the National League.
Sisler’s first breakthrough with Clemente had been teaching him to stop lifting his head, or bobbing it, as he strode into the swing. By holding his head still, and keeping it down, Clemente could train his eye on curveballs as they broke down and away, pitches that gave him trouble earlier. As a slashing line-drive hitter himself, Sisler also helped Clemente work on staying back on the ball and keeping his hands in, close to the chest, a technique known as swinging from the inside out. Sisler had no problem with another aspect of Clemente’s hitting that others
criticized, a tendency to swing at bad balls; what was important, he thought, was having an idea of what pitches you could hit, and in that regard he considered Clemente uncommonly intelligent at the plate.

Paradoxical as it sounds, another factor in Clemente’s development as a hitter was his aching back, which had bothered him off and on since the December 30 traffic accident in Caguas in 1954. There were times when the injury was debilitating, particularly during the 1956 season, when he developed a pinched nerve, but most of the time he could play through it. In a sense, it proved to be long-term pain for long-term gain. The pain that occasionally knifed into the lower left side of his back forced him to slow his swing—perhaps a mere nanosecond slower, but enough to prevent him from trying to pull every pitch—again, the weakness that Branch Rickey at first feared would be his undoing. Instead, he started hitting the ball more to center and right. “I learned to go with the pitch,” Clemente said later, out of physical necessity. That might explain why at times during his career when he was feeling free and easy, without pain, he might end up swinging so violently his head would bob and he would lose his balance and virtually whirling-dervish his way to the ground; but conversely, whenever his teammates heard him moaning about a bad back, they joked to themselves that the opposing pitcher was in trouble and a four-hit day was in the offing.

A third element in Clemente’s refinement as a hitter involved his selection of bats. Early in his career with the Pirates, he used thirty-two and thirty-three-ounce M117 (Stan Musial) model Louisville Sluggers, and then S-2s, which were first made for Vern Stephens, the power-hitting shortstop who played most of his career with the St. Louis Browns and Red Sox in the 1940s and early fifties.
But by 1961 he was using much bigger and heavier bats, mostly thirty-six inches and thirty-four to thirty-five ounces. The models were U1s, named for one Bernard Bartholomew Uhalt, known to his friends as Frenchy. The major league career of Frenchy Uhalt amounted to fifty-seven games with the Chicago White Sox in 1934. His bat seemed to have very few hits in it—five doubles, one triple, thirty-four singles—yet it made a significant contribution to the history of baseball as the model favored by Roberto Clemente. What was most notable about the U1 was that it
didn’t have a knob, but instead tapered out at the bottom. It felt exactly right in Clemente’s sensitive hands, and the extra weight, like his bad back, had the effect of forcing him to hit more straightaway and to right.

To Clemente, a bat was not just a bat, it was an instrument that had to meet his exacting standards. “He probably knew as much about timber as anyone,” recalled Rex Bradley, the Hillerich & Bradsby executive in charge of Louisville Slugger bat sales to major leaguers. “He knew if he had a good piece of bat. He would bang them together and see if they sounded good. He could tell from the sound.” Wood was not only essential to Clemente’s profession, it was also his hobby. During the off-season in Puerto Rico, he loved nothing more than combing the Atlantic beach from Punta Cangrejos to Punta Maldonado in search of driftwood he could use to make lamps and furniture. As an amateur carpenter, he studied the hardness and grains of different woods. He once sent a note to Bradley stating that he wanted “no red wood”—which meant no wood from the heart of the ash tree, which was a darker color. “He wanted the widest grains, always,” according to Bradley. “And he knew the wide grains came in the summer growth, he was that precise.”

With all this—with pure talent, with pride and will fueled by the need to prove his doubters wrong, with the expert instruction of Hall of Famer George Sisler, with the beneficial swing adjustments arising from his bad back, and with the comfort of the heavier, knobless Frenchy Uhalt bats, Clemente came blasting into the prime of his career.

•   •   •

In baseball, as in so many other ways, 1961 launched the sixties decade on its stunning trajectory. Life reinvented, and seeming so much larger. Two more teams were added to the American League: in Washington (again, a reborn version of the old last-place Senators) and Los Angeles. The National League had the Mets and Colt .45s in gestation, a year from taking the field. In persuading major league owners to grant Houston a franchise, Judge Roy Hofheinz had already wowed them with a model he had built of the world’s first domed stadium.
With its expansion teams, the American League had scheduled the longest regular season in major league history, extended to 162 games. Was it a prefiguring of the antiestablishment mood that emerged later in the decade, or just plain madcap hopelessness, that found the Chicago Cubs that year rejecting the concept of a single manager and instead delegating authority to a succession of feeble coaches? The Yankees still wore pinstripes, but Casey Stengel, the Ol’ Perfessor, was gone, Mickey Mantle told the press he would assume a stronger leadership role, and the new boss, Ralph Houk, said his team looked lean and mean. The big bats started booming in April. By the end of the month, Mantle had fourteen home runs and his outfield mate, Roger Maris, had twelve, and the pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record was on. Six months later, Maris held the record, sixty-one, ahead of Mantle’s fifty-four, and four other Yankees, Moose Skowron, Yogi Berra, Elston Howard, and Johnny Blanchard, finished with more than twenty home runs each. Even taking into account the two additional teams, 1961 was prodigious, the year of the homer. The 2,730 total home runs in the two leagues were nearly five-hundred more than any previous year.

The Pittsburgh Pirates were a very small part of all this. After being picked by a majority of sportswriters to repeat as National League champs and rampaging through spring training, they finished April three games over .500, but then remained stuck at that mediocre level throughout the first half of the season. They looked more and more like the overmatched team that was walloped by the Yankees in three losing World Series games rather than the gutsy club that prevailed in the other four. Groat, the MVP, had fallen back to being a slightly-better-than-average performer. Law, the reigning Cy Young winner, tore his rotator cuff and pitched only eleven games. The pennant-fever magic of southpaw Vinegar Bend Mizell vanished. Elroy Face, the tough little relief pitcher, won only a third of his games, going six and twelve, only two years after compiling an astounding .947 winning percentage by winning eighteen and losing one. The one player who was even hotter than he had been in 1960 was Clemente. By July 10, after a torrid week in which he stroked thirteen hits in twenty-seven at-bats, including one five-hit game and another four-hit game, he was leading the
league with a .357 average. With the soaring average came newfound power, with twelve home runs and fifty-four runs batted in—statistics so strong that his peers voted for him to start in right field at the July 11 All-Star game held at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

The All-Star setting offered Clemente another chance to shine before a nationwide audience, and he seized the opportunity. He played the entire game in right field, slashed a triple to right-center off Whitey Ford in the second, knocked in an early run with a sacrifice fly, and then, in the bottom of the tenth, after Henry Aaron singled and Willie Mays doubled, he drove in Mays from second with the winning run in a 5–4 game. From what Jackie Robinson started in 1947, here was a benchmark of black accomplishment in the major leagues, an All-Star team with Aaron, Mays, and Clemente in a row. The rosters that day presented in stark relief the different racial histories of the two leagues. The American League had only one black player, Elston Howard, who entered the game as a defensive replacement and had no at-bats. The National League fielded five black starters—Maury Wills at shortstop, Bill White at first, Orlando Cepeda in left, Mays in center, and Clemente in right, with Aaron, Frank Robinson, George Altman, and Johnny Roseboro coming off the bench. Those nine players combined for nine of their team’s eleven hits and drove in all five runs. Clemente at last was voted most valuable player, for one game.

In the locker room afterward, he was beaming about his game-winning hit off knuckleball pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm. The national press corps gathered around as he described the decisive moment. The Associated Press account quoted Clemente as he sounded, or as the reporter thought he sounded, using exaggerated phonetic spelling. (In the
Post-Gazette,
this account ran under the headline I G
ET
H
EET,
I F
EEL
G
OOD
). “I jus’ try to sacrifice myself, so I get runner to third if I do, I feel good. But I get heet and Willie scores and I feel better than good,” Clemente was quoted as saying. “When I come to plate in lass eening, with Mays on second and nobody out, I ask myself, ‘Now, what would Skipper [Murtaugh] want me to do?’ He want me to hit to right side to send Willie to third so he could score on grounder or fly ball. So I say, ‘I ’ope that Weelhelm peetch me outside, so I could hit to right,’ but he peetch me inside and I meet it and hit it in right field. Willie
runs to third and to home plate and the game is over. That make me feel real good. Just like when Pittsburgh won the World Series.”

Most of the press pack then moved on to the locker of Stu Miller, the little relief pitcher who had stolen the show with a comic absurdity. Before throwing his first pitch in the ninth inning, with the National Leaguers clinging to a 3–2 lead, Miller balked when the vicious winds at Candlestick literally blew him off the mound. The balk moved American League runners up to second and third, and the tying run then scored on an error by third baseman Ken Boyer, one of three errors in the wind-ravaged inning. For most of the press, Miller and the wind were the stories of the day. The
San Francisco Chronicle
ran a boldface banner headline above the masthead on the front page:
HOW WIND CONQUERED MIGHTY ALL-STARS.
Noting the seven errors in the contest,
Chronicle
sports editor Art Rosenbaum said the winds turned the game into “a Mickey Mouse comedy.” As much type was devoted to mustard-stained hot-dog wrappers that swirled around the field in the late innings as to the play of the National League’s right fielder.