Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (32 page)

Clemente began talking to her in Spanish. Feeling embarrassed, she had to confess that she didn’t have a clue what he said. In English, Clemente asked her where she was from and why she was studying Spanish. His teammate Andre Rodgers, a shortstop from the Bahamas who had come over to the Pirates from the Cubs the previous year, was standing nearby, listening. There was something about Clemente’s warmth and directness that helped Carol overcome her shyness, and they talked easily about language, home, and family. Why are you here alone? Clemente asked. Carol said she was with her father, who was over in the Phillies clubhouse. They talked on, losing track of time, until a security guard came by and announced that the Pirates’ bus to the airport had departed, leaving Clemente and Rodgers behind. Carol was red-faced again. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry!” she said. “Wait here and I’ll go get my dad and we’ll drive you to the airport.” She ran to the Phillies clubhouse, found her father, and explained that they had to leave immediately for the airport because of an emergency.

As the odd quartet—father and daughter Phillies fans in front, visiting team right fielder and shortstop in back—pulled out of stadium traffic, John Brezovec turned to Carol and asked, in his blunt way, “Can you tell me what the fuck is going on? Who are these people?” Carol had not bothered to tell him who the passengers were. “Let me introduce you,” she said. “This is Roberto Clemente and Andre Rodgers.” He was stunned. How did this happen? She said she would explain it all on the way. Clemente appeared unfazed by his predicament and perfectly content in the backseat. From his traveling bag, he pulled out a battery-powered portable record player and a selection of albums, and the sweet lyricism of Roberto Ledesma’s island ballads started filling the car. John Brezovec, who wrote his own polkas and waltzes, loved the music, and he and Clemente struck up a conversation about their favorite songs as the music played in the background. They discovered that they had other things in common, and the foursome
talked animatedly all the way to the airport. Instead of dropping Clemente and Rodgers off at the departure curb, Brezovec parked the car and he and his daughter escorted the ball players to the Pirates’ airline gate. The plane, as it turned out, had not left yet.

Clemente was still in no hurry. He seemed less interested in the flight than in his newfound friends. “This is incredible,” he told Carol. “It feels like I’ve known you my whole life.” He said he wanted them to meet his wife, Vera, and his family back in Puerto Rico. The Pirates wouldn’t return to Philadelphia until late September, but he hoped to see them again before then. Would they like to come to New York the following week and see the Pirates play at Shea Stadium? He asked for a telephone number and said that he would call and make arrangements. Then, before boarding the plane, he autographed his Roberto Ledesma album and handed it to Carol.

All the way home, the Brezovecs kept saying to each other, no one will believe this. A half hour after Carol got back to her house in Allentown, the phone rang. Her mother answered. “Is this Carolina?” the voice on the other end asked, in a soft Spanish accent.

Close enough. Yes.

“This is Roberto Clemente. I met your daughter tonight and wanted to be sure she is home. Did she get home safely?” Carolyn said yes and asked whether he wanted to talk to her. No, he said, just wanted to make sure. Then he asked, “Do you like baseball?”

Love baseball, she said, adding that she usually went to the games with Carol, but her father took her tonight. Good, Clemente said. If they would come to New York next week, he would get tickets for them to see him play at Shea Stadium. That would be fun, Carolyn said. But where should they stay? Don’t worry about any of that, Clemente said. Just come. His friend Phil Dorsey would take care of everything. The tickets would be waiting. And he had family in New York who would look after them, too. A day later, Dorsey called and said a room had been reserved for them at the Hotel Commodore at Forty-second and Lexington, where the Pirates stayed, and there would be tickets for the games on Saturday July 2 and Sunday July 3 waiting for them at the players’ window at the stadium.

As Carol and Carolyn took their seats behind the visitors’ dugout at
Shea for the Saturday game, they looked out to right field. “Carol, there’s Roberto,” Carolyn said to her daughter. “I can’t believe this . . . he’s waving at us.” Before the game, Clemente sent a note up with a batboy asking them to wait for him afterward. The Pirates were hot, having won six straight, with Clemente, Stargell, Clendenon, Manny Mota, and Matty Alou all hitting over .300. In the series opener on Friday night, a young lefthander named Woody Fryman had given up a leadoff hit to Mets second baseman Ron Hunt in the first inning and then retired the next twenty-seven Mets in order, a one-hitter and near perfect game. On Saturday, Clemente’s new friends from Allentown watched him stroke a home run, his twelfth of the year, but it was not his best game. Twice in the late innings he made an out with the bases loaded, and the Pirates lost 4–3. When the game ended, Clemente met his guests outside the visitors’ clubhouse and announced that he was taking them out to eat at an elegant Spanish restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Clemente’s friends Carlos and Carmen Llanos—he called them cousins, though they were not related—were there, along with José Pagán and Andre Rodgers and a few other Latin players. Carol ate paella for the first time, and was starstruck, and quickly agreed to come along after dinner when Clemente said they were heading up to a party at the Llanoses apartment. Her mother politely declined, saying she was tired. A half hour later, Clemente sent back an emissary to assure her that Carol was in safe company.

Later that night, back at the Commodore, Clemente was sleepless as usual, and called Carolyn’s room and asked if she wanted to talk. She agreed, and they stayed up until three, sharing the stories of their lives. Clemente asked her whether she knew the name of the town where he was born. No, she said. “The name is Carolina,” he said. “And that is what I’m going to call you. You are my Carolina. You’re going to be my sister. You are going to be my family from now on.” Clemente was warm but unthreatening; there were no sexual overtones in his dealings with either the mother or daughter. He was a man of many sides, and he kept that side from them. Women were constantly flattering him, flirting with him, throwing themselves at him, calling his room at every road hotel. His friend Phil Dorsey, if he was around, screened
the calls for Clemente. Other friends filled the same role when Dorsey was not there. For all his love of Vera, Roberto was not above temptation. But with Carolyn and Carol his passion was about family. He had lost his only sister, Anairis, before he was old enough to know her, but had always felt her presence. Now he would have two American sisters, Carolina and Carolina. From now on, he would visit them whenever he came to Philadelphia, and they would come see him play in New York and make visits to Pittsburgh. And, he said again, they must come visit him in Puerto Rico.

•   •   •

When he first saw Forbes Field in 1955, Clemente told himself to forget about hitting home runs. The outfield was among the most spacious in baseball: 365 feet to the left-field fence, 442 to dead center, 436 to right-center, and right field was topped by an eighteen-foot-high wire screen. “I was strong, but nobody was that strong,” Clemente said. The implication was that he could hit home runs if he wanted to, but smartly adapted his game to the surroundings. There is undoubtedly some truth to that, but it is also true that the arc of his swing simply did not produce home runs in the way that those of Henry Aaron and Frank Robinson did, to name the two other great all-around right fielders of his era. The issue was not raw power—at times, Clemente could clout the ball monstrous distances, as far as Mickey Mantle, Frank Howard, Willie Stargell, or any of the prodigious sluggers, a fact that he constantly reiterated to sportswriters and teammates. But when he stepped to the plate, he thought about getting a base hit and keeping his average above .300 and helping his team win, but never visualized hitting one over the fence. Never, that is, except in 1966, after he and Harry Walker patched up their differences. It was then that Walker told Clemente that the Pirates needed more power from him if they were to contend for a pennant, and that providing more power was part of what he had to do as the team leader, and that if he hit more home runs and the team won he might finally get the prize that had eluded him and bothered him for so many years, the MVP award.

“
So the story goes, Harry said, ‘I need more power from you,’ and so Clemente goes out and hits twenty-nine home runs and drives in
119 runs,” said the pitcher Steve Blass. “Now that’s scary.” Those were Clemente’s power numbers for 1966, the best of his career, and though he said he was afraid his batting average would fall dramatically if he went for home runs, the drop was minor, down to .317. The tradeoff seemed worth it. And there was no padding in Clemente’s statistics. Day after day, his hits came when they were needed, not at the end of a lopsided game. His play in right field was as thrilling as ever. He led the league in outfield assists, with seventeen, and it was difficult to calculate all the ways that his arm made a difference. Gaylord Perry, the crafty spitballer who won twenty-one games for San Francisco that year, would never forget a game when the score was tied in the late innings and Willie Mays was on second and there was a hit to right—“and Mays rounds third and screeches to a halt” because Clemente was in right. “
When you have the world’s best base runner put on the brakes on a hit to right, you know it’s because the world’s best arm is in right,” said Perry later, shaking his head. “And it was a close game. We needed that run.”

As the year went on, his teammates noticed that Clemente’s power, perfectly rounding out his game, was accompanied by a more assertive attitude. He seemed less preoccupied with himself and more obsessed with winning. He had always played hard, every play of every game he was in, but now he talked about it more in the clubhouse, urging his fellow Pirates to put out more every day, saying they owed it to the city and its fans. Only four players remained from the World Series champions, Law and Face on the mound and Clemente and Mazeroski on the field, and this was now becoming Clemente’s team. The twenty-five-man squad included nine blacks and Latins, often five in the starting lineup, with Bob Veale emerging as their best pitcher. And it was an increasingly loose bunch. “We haven’t got a sane guy on this ball club,” declared catcher Jim Pagliaroni, who could be seen wearing an old leather pilot’s helmet and goggles. Clemente’s countryman, José Pagán of Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, was now playing third base and he and his wife, Delia, lived in the other apartment on the second floor of Mrs. Harris’s house,
making it feel more like home for Roberto and Vera when she was in town. After a game, the smell of bacalaitos filled the house, as Vera fried his favorite cod-cake fritters. All of this made
Clemente more comfortable, and the more at ease he was the more he asserted his will on his teammates.

It was not a complete transformation; there were still times when he appeared agitated and oversensitive. In the heat of the pennant race, when the Pirates visited Los Angeles in mid-September to play the streaking Dodgers, he grew angry after a crucial loss in which he had gone hitless in four at-bats against Sandy Koufax. He had read and heard that Koufax was complaining about an arthritic elbow yet pitching one superb game after another. “Sore arm, my foot
! He couldn’t pitch like that if it hurt very bad,” Clemente told the press afterward, straight-faced, failing to see the irony of that particular statement coming from a player known for playing his best when he had some physical complaint.

But was Clemente really angry about Koufax or once again expressing the hurt he felt over being misunderstood? As he continued talking in the clubhouse, the latter seemed to be the case. “When my back hurts they call me goldbrick,” he said. “But when Koufax says his elbow hurts, they call him a hero.” It was as though he were beseeching the world: When will people start calling Roberto Clemente a hero?

The Pirates finished twenty-two games over .500, at 92–70, good but not quite good enough, three games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers. But for so many Pirates, led by Clemente, 1966 was a most productive year. The middle infield combination of young Gene Alley at shortstop and veteran Mazeroski was perhaps the best in the league in the field and at the plate. Stargell, the big lefty slugger, had the highest power numbers of his young career, hitting thirty-three home runs and driving in 102. Matty Alou, his hitting style revamped, largely by Clemente in daily tutoring sessions, transformed himself from a weak lefty pull hitter into a dangerous all-fields slap hitter and led the league with a .342 average. The team as a whole had the highest cumulative batting average in the league at .279. And all of this was accomplished during a season when National League pitching was dominant, led by the big three of Koufax, Marichal, and Gibson. Clemente was wrong about Koufax—the pain in his arm was not a ruse but enough to make him retire; 1966 would be the final brilliant season of his too-brief
career. Juan Marichal of the Giants was still in the middle of his nearly decade-long string of great seasons. And Bob Gibson of the Cardinals had become virtually unhittable. Koufax, Marichal, Gibson—their numbers that year were golden. Gibson had twenty-one wins, twenty complete games, 225 strikeouts, and an earned-run average of 2.44. Not as good as Marichal, who won twenty-five games, had twenty-five complete games, 222 strikeouts, and an earned-run average of 2.23. Which was not as good as Koufax, who finished the season with twenty-seven wins, twenty-seven complete games, 317 strikeouts, and an earned-run average of 1.73.

Manager Harry Walker attended the World Series that year as a fan, watching the Dodgers lose to the young Baltimore Orioles. All he wanted to do was talk about his team, and especially about his team leader. In Walker’s own peculiar way, knocking someone down and then building him up higher, he promoted Clemente as the most valuable player in the league. “Clemente has his critics,” he said. “He’s such a hypochondriac that some people also think he’s a malingerer. But no man ever gave more of himself or worked more unselfishly for the good of the team than Roberto. I know the votes are already in for most valuable player. I’m convinced that Clemente deserves it. Whether he gets it or not, he’s most valuable in my book.”