Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 8

At the head of the pack was Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times. With Murray at least, it was as much about the way he made his points as the points he made. Murray was not one for understatement; his style was all metaphor all the time. "This World Series is no longer a contest," he began. "It's an atrocity. It's the Germans marching through Belgium, the interrogation room of the Gestapo. It's as one-sided as a Russian trial . . . The Pirates should ask where they go to surrender. It should rank with such other great contests of history as the St. Valentine's Day Ma.s.sacre, the yellow fever epidemic, and the bombing of Rotterdam. To enjoy it, you'd have to be the kind of person who goes to orphanage fires or sits at washed-out railroad bridges with a camera . . . They're taking the execution to Pittsburgh today. Unless the Red Cross intervenes."

At home in Pittsburgh on the night before Game 3, Clemente could not sleep. Vera stayed up with him until dawn, and they talked about everything but baseball. Then she made him breakfast: pork chops, three eggs, always sunny side up, fruit shake; it seemed like his breakfast feast would fill the entire table. After eating, he retreated again to the bedroom where they darkened the room by pinning the drapes to the walls with black rubber tape, and finally he got a few hours' rest. Steve Bla.s.s, slated to pitch that day for the Pirates, had also stayed up all night, anxious about the game. He lay in bed thinking about the Orioles. .h.i.tters, and what he would say to the press if he won, or what he would say if he lost. In Baltimore during the first two games, he had slipped into the clubhouse to study the Orioles batters on the television monitor and had taken copious notes, but left them in the hotel room so they were of no use to him now. He went out for breakfast with his father and thought he was starving but when the food came he couldn't touch it. All he had was some "toast and a few pulmonary wheezes."

Before the game, as usual, Bla.s.s and Clemente met in the trainer's room at Three Rivers Stadium. Clemente was getting his neck ma.s.saged by Tony Bartirome. Bla.s.s sat nearby, trying to settle his nerves. Those two hours before walking out to the mound were the worst part of the day for him. He tried to take his mind off the game by leafing through Penthouse, a skin magazine. Bartirome looked over at Bla.s.s as he gazed at the photographs of nude women then turned to Clemente and said, "Well, Robby, look what we got our f.u.c.kin' money on today, this pervert!" As for Bla.s.s, just being in the vicinity of Clemente was rea.s.suring. Every time his turn came in the rotation, he'd look at the lineup, see the name Clemente, and say to himself, "Robby's playing and there's peace in right field."

It was Bla.s.s against Cuellar on the afternoon of October 12 as a sellout crowd of 50,403 filled Three Rivers. The Red Cross did not intervene, but Bla.s.s and Clemente did. In the first inning, Clemente knocked in a run to give the Pirates a lead they never relinquished. In the fifth, he singled to extend his World Series. .h.i.tting streak to ten games. In the bottom of the seventh, with the Pirates leading 21 in a tight pitching duel, he took a fierce cut at a Cuellar screwball but failed to hit it squarely, chopping a high bouncer back toward the mound. Cuellar casually waited for it to come down, and when he turned to throw to first there was Clemente busting down the line as though he had a chance to beat it out. Cuellar hurried his throw and pulled Boog Powell off the bag, allowing Clemente to reach safely on the error. Of all the plays before and after, this is the one that would haunt Orioles manager Earl Weaver-not a home run or great catch or throw, but the sight of thirty-seven-year-old Roberto Clemente making a mad dash to first on a routine ground ball back to the pitcher. "The most memorable play of the series," Weaver said decades later. "The one that I think turned it around, the key to the series, when [Clemente] ran hard after tapping the ball back to Cuellar on the mound. Cuellar took his time, looked up, and Clemente was charging to first, and it surprised him and he threw it off target . . ." As it turned out, this was the equivalent of the little dribbler Clemente had hit in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series off Jim Coates in the bottom of the eighth, the ball that Skowron had fielded down the first-base line but could not make a play on, setting the stage for Hal Smith's dramatic three-run home run.

Cuellar, fl.u.s.tered, now walked Willie Stargell on four pitches, bringing up first baseman Bob Robertson with runners on first and second. Robertson to that point was. .h.i.tless in the series and had lined out and struck out twice in three previous at-bats against Cuellar. He took the first pitch for a ball, then fouled off the next. From the Pirates dugout, Danny Murtaugh noticed that Brooks Robinson was cheating by two or three steps, as he had said he would against the big right-handed pull hitter, playing deep and close to the line. Murtaugh gestured to third-base coach Frank Oceak, who flashed a sign down to the plate. Robertson gave no recognition that he received the sign, so Oceak went through the motions again. From second base, Clemente sensed the confusion and raised his hands over his head, attempting to call time. But it was too late; Cuellar was in his windup. In came a screwball, a few inches outside, and out it went, soaring into the seats in right center. Only as Robertson touched home plate and Stargell congratulated him with the words "That's the way to bunt the ball!" did he realize what he had done. "Guess I missed a sign," he said sheepishly when he reached the dugout. "Possibly," responded Murtaugh, smiling.

That was the game, the Pirates winning 51. Bla.s.s went the distance and gave up only three hits, including a solo home run to Frank Robinson. He said it was the best game he had ever pitched.

Few spans in American history involved more cultural change than the eleven years between the Pirates' World Series appearances of 1960 and 1971. The social revolutions of the 1960s were trivial and profound, obvious and complex, in baseball as in society at large. It is a long way from Deacon Law to Dock Ellis. The Pirates club of 1960 was still rooted in the old school. Ten players on that roster had been born in the 1920s and a few were veterans of World War II. They were crew-cut white guys, mostly, with nicknames like Tiger and Rocky and Vinegar Bend and Smoky. From that squad, only two players were still around when the Pirates returned to baseball glory in 1971-Bill Mazeroski, hero of the 1960 series with his dramatic bottom-of-the-ninth seventh-game home run, and Roberto Clemente. Maz, now thirty-five and approaching retirement, was cut from the old school mold, with his square jaw and West Virginia coal miner heritage, but he had adjusted comfortably to the new. He sat on the bench, mostly, and tutored young Dave Cash and Rennie Stennett, and joked with the youngsters about Clemente and the old days. When the proud Clemente, sensitive about his modest home run totals, tried to tell the kids about one of his old tape-measure shots, Maz responded, "Nah, he didn't hit that one very good"-sending Clemente into a playful funk about the "dumb Polack." Manny Sanguillen, the ebullient Panamanian catcher, wors.h.i.+pped Clemente, but turned to him in the clubhouse once and announced that Maz was his hero. "Okay, Polack," Clemente responded.

There were many reasons why Clemente felt more at ease with the 1971 Pirates than the earlier team. Much of it was him-he was older, wiser, more established and secure. But much of it was the composition of the team. On the 1960 roster, there were only four players of color during the season-Clemente, Gene Baker, Joe Christopher, and Roman Mejias, and only Clemente got much playing time. The 1971 squad was dominated by blacks and Latins: Dave Cash, Roberto Clemente, Gene Clines, Vic Davalillo, Dock Ellis, Mudcat Grant, Jackie Hernndez, Al Oliver, Jose Pagn, Manny Sanguillen, Willie Stargell, Rennie Stennett, and Bob Veale. Late in the season, in a September 1 game against the Phillies, without fanfare and little notice beyond the clubhouse, the Pirates in fact had fielded the first all-black and Latin lineup in major league history-Stennett at second, Clines in center, Clemente in right, Stargell in left, Sanguillen catching, Cash at third, Oliver at first, Hernndez at short, and Ellis on the mound. Hebner, the normal third baseman, was out with a minor injury, and Bob Robertson, who usually played first against lefties (southpaw Woody Fryman was on the mound for the Phillies), was being rested by Danny Murtaugh.

It only lasted an inning-the Phils knocked Ellis out in the second by scoring four runs-but it was another marker in the long road traveled since Jackie Robinson came up with the Dodgers in 1947, and Curt Roberts broke the color line with the Pirates in 1954, and Clemente played as the team's lone black starter through the remainder of the 1950s. Just as sports were a step ahead of society on civil rights matters, the racial transformation of the Pirates moved more quickly than the att.i.tudes of Pittsburgh fans. The correlation was anecdotal, not methodologically established, but fan fervor in Pittsburgh, a predominantly white blue-collar city, seemed to decline as the team's racial composition changed. Bruce Laurie, who attended graduate school in Pittsburgh during that era, lived in an apartment on North Dithridge Street and often encountered "a beefy big-boned guy named Jim" on the first floor, who would "sit on a beach chair at night in the warm months with a couple of quarts of Iron City beer and a radio"-but never listened to a ball game. As Laurie, who became a history professor at the University of Ma.s.sachusetts-Amherst, later recounted the scene, whenever Jim was asked the score of a Pirates game, he would never answer-"until one day when I asked him why he didn't follow the Pirates. 'Too dark,' he snorted. 'Too many n.i.g.g.e.rs.' I think the feeling was widely shared."

On Wednesday, October 13, Game 4 of the 1971 series made baseball history for a more prosaic but nonetheless sport-changing reason. There had been 397 World Series games staged over nearly seventy years, and this was the first one held at night. The dominance of black and Latin players made the Pirates no less popular on this night. The prime-time weekday game drew the largest crowd in Pittsburgh history-51,378, and the largest national television audience in history, more than 61 million. The hurler-rich Orioles brought out their fourth-best pitcher for the occasion, Pat Dobson, who sported a mere 208 record with eighteen complete games and a 2.90 earned-run average, all of which would have made him the ace of the Pittsburgh staff. The Pirates countered with Luke Walker, who won ten games that year on his way to a 4547 career. A pitcher turned out to be the story of the game, but it was neither Dobson nor Walker, but Bruce Kison, a twenty-one-year-old sidearmer for the Pirates who entered with two outs in the first inning and threw six and a third innings of shutout ball, giving up only one hit and walking none, though it would be hard to say he had pinpoint control, since he hit three batters. He seemed less nervous about facing the veteran Orioles. .h.i.tters than he was about getting married at the end of the week. After jumping to a 30 lead in the first off Walker, the Orioles never threatened again and lost the lead for good in the bottom of the seventh on a game-winning pinch-hit single by another kiddie corps Pirate, twenty-one-year-old catcher Milt May.

Clemente shone again, rapping out three hits. He was so hot that the Three Rivers organist played "Jesus Christ Superstar" every time he strolled to the plate. The Baltimore scouts, in going over Pirates. .h.i.tters before the series, had no clue how to pitch to Clemente. Try low and away, they said, and if that doesn't work try something else. "How to pitch Clemente? There was no way," Earl Weaver observed later. "But we tried to pitch him inside. Jam him. But he'd hit anything. We couldn't get him out." The best play against Clemente on this night was made by the umpire down the right-field line, John Rice. In the third inning, with the Pirates still trailing 32, Dobson tried to pitch Clemente outside, but Clemente went with the pitch, slas.h.i.+ng the ball straight down the right-field line. It cleared the ten-foot fence at the corner, but the question was whether it was fair or foul. Rice called it foul. Don Leppert, the first base coach, insisted that it was fair, and raced out toward Rice to argue, joined quickly by a furious Clemente. From most vantage points it looked like a fair ball, a home run. Leppert insisted then and decades later that he saw the ball hit fair. The problem was that there was a gap between the fence and the stands of about twenty inches, and that gap made it difficult to follow the white stripe that was painted below the foul pole to serve as the demarcation between fair and foul. According to a few Pirates relief pitchers who had a fairly close perspective on the ball, it was indeed foul by no more than an inch or two.

After the argument, Clemente strolled back to the plate and thwacked another hit, a single. Kison was the main story, but the rumble in the press box was starting to grow louder about the wonders of the oldest man on the field. Not only was he hitting everything the Orioles threw at him, and making great throws from right, but he also was running superbly on the base paths, taking an extra base that night on Paul Blair, just as the day before he had raced down the line to beat a double-play throw, along with the hustle he showed on the dribbler that fl.u.s.tered Cuellar. "The best d.a.m.n ballplayer in the World Series, maybe in the whole world, is Roberto Clemente," wrote d.i.c.k Young. "And as far as I'm concerned they can give him the automobile [as the outstanding player] right now."

In Game 5, the Orioles returned to Dave McNally, but the Pirates sent out their fifth different starter in five games. This time it was Nelson Briles, who was the 1971 team's version of Vinegar Bend Mizell-a veteran who came over from the St. Louis Cardinals to stabilize the rotation. Briles had pitched six seasons for the Cards, and had won nineteen games in 1968, his best season. Then major league officials, reacting to the utter dominance of pitching that year and the resultant lack of scoring, lowered the pitching mound. Briles suffered more than most from the change, until he altered his pitching motion in an effort to replicate the action of his old overhand curveball. His new motion left him off-balance, tumbling from the mound. In one game he fell down eleven times. Against the Orioles on Thursday, October 14, he fell down three times-which was one more than the number of hits he gave up to Baltimore's. .h.i.tters. Briles was virtually unhittable. He allowed only singles to Brooks Robinson in the second and Boog Powell in the seventh, and left only two runners on base in pitching a 40 shutout. When he came to bat in the eighth, Pittsburgh fans rose for a thunderous ovation and Briles was overcome by emotion. Among his many talents, Briles was an actor who could draw on his emotions to appreciate a scene. In college at Chico State in California, he had even played the lead character, Joe Hardy, in d.a.m.n Yankees, and now, though not selling his soul, he was living out his own Joe Hardy moment. The fans could not see it, but Briles was crying as he stood at the plate and thought about the struggles of the last two years and all the people who had helped him reach this point, back to his high school coach.

Clemente singled up the middle in the fifth, driving in a key run and extending his World Series. .h.i.tting streak to twelve straight games. "He's showing the others how to play the game, isn't he?" longtime baseball executive Lee McPhail said in the press box after the game. There was something about Clemente that surpa.s.sed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a box score and of a year's worth of statistics and calculate the case for players they consider underrated or overrated and declare who has the most real value to a team. To some skilled pract.i.tioners of this science, Clemente comes out very good but not the greatest; he walks too seldom, has too few home runs, steals too few bases. Their perspective is legitimate, but to people who appreciate Clemente this is like chemists trying to explain Van Gogh by a.n.a.lyzing the ingredients of his paint. Clemente was art, not science. Every time he strolled slowly to the batter's box or trotted out to right field, he seized the scene like a great actor. It was hard to take one's eyes off him, because he could do anything on a baseball field and carried himself with such n.o.bility. "The rest of us were just players," Steve Bla.s.s would say. "Clemente was a prince."

The prince was a pip in the locker room after the game, with the Pirates now holding a three games to two lead in the series. "I've always felt I've been left behind," Clemente told the national press corps gathered around him. And then came his long lament-how he was tired of reading that he was second best, and hearing that he had one of the best arms, instead of the best arm; and that he was a hypochondriac, when in truth he would soon pa.s.s Honus Wagner for most games played in a Pirates uniform; how some players would only dive headfirst for a ball in the World Series but he always played that way, the Clemente you saw in this series was the Clemente who played every day; how he never got enough endors.e.m.e.nt offers because he was black and Puerto Rican; and how he is really a happy person, not some sourpuss, but only smiles when the occasion calls for smiling. Roy McHugh took it all in with some bemus.e.m.e.nt. He had heard this many times before. McHugh thought the Pittsburgh press gave Clemente a better accounting than it got credit for, and that it was disingenuous of big-city writers to swoop in and pretend they understood him in a way the locals did not-but it was all part of the sportswriting dodge. And Clemente knew precisely what he was doing. His pa.s.sion play had become an act, a ritual, part of what it meant to be Clemente. "When he was younger, Clemente reached pa.s.sionate heights of eloquence on the subject" of his being misunderstood, McHugh thought. "Dark eyes ablaze, his voice would rise to a shout. Now he is just a trooper going through a performance, dressing it up with subtle touches of humor and not unaware of the effect he is having on his audience."

The main effect Clemente had on his audience was to increase the talk about his prowess at the end of a long career played in the relative obscurity of Pittsburgh. Had he spent his baseball days in New York, Boston, Chicago, or Los Angeles, he would have been a national icon already, a living legend, and now was his chance to make up for lost time. When a visiting writer asked a Pittsburgh man in the press box whether Clemente had ever run and thrown and hit like this before, the simple response was, yes, every day. But the out-of-town sportswriters had not seen him play every day, until now. "He wants to be appreciated," wrote Steve Jacobson of Newsday. "That's why he plays the game so hard, making his old, spraddle-legged mad dash on the bases, burning in his throws from right field, and generally behaving as if his reputation were on the line every day." The way Clemente was going, wrote Bob Maisel of the Sun, he could extend his World Series. .h.i.tting streak until he was a hundred. "Put it altogether and you have about as good a player as there is in the game. He has a license to hurt you." Jim Murray praised Clemente after doing his version of Carl Sandburg on Pittsburgh: "This is where they poured the steel that forged the cannon, that laid the track. Toughtown, U.S.A. America's glare in the sky. One million guys in bowling s.h.i.+rts with Tick Tock Lounge stenciled on the back. A town that needed a shave twice a day. Hard coal and molten iron. The sinew of America. It was all power, and guys who dunked doughnuts in hot coffee, and worked the mills till the sweat ran black across their backs and down their eyes . . . But the greatest player this town will ever see came not out of the crucibles or the mine shafts or the ore boats, but out of the canebrakes of the Caribbean." It was common for the World Series to produce an unlikely hero while the big names flopped, Murray added. "It's nice to see a great player living up to his greatness. It's about time 60 million people got in on a legend and not just Toughtown, U.S.A. It's nice to see a great artist giving people goose pimples instead of just goose eggs."

There were two outstanding right fielders in the 1971 series, and by the time the teams returned to Baltimore for Game 6 the contest in some ways had become a test of wills between Roberto Clemente and Frank Robinson, on and off the field. Since the first practice in Baltimore before Game 1, Clemente had complained about Memorial Stadium, saying the outfield was the worst in the major leagues, full of holes and ditches that made it hard to charge the ball, and with lights positioned so that it was hard to see the ball in the air. The reporters dutifully reported the criticisms to Robinson, who said he appreciated Clemente and did not want to start a feud, and then in essence started one by adding: "Why, until the middle of last year Roberto played in a coal hole himself [Forbes Field]. Sure, there are shadows in our park. He's supposed to be a great outfielder, though. He should adjust. If he has any trouble . . . just tell him to watch me in the outfield and stand where I stand."

Robinson, a year younger than Clemente, had come up with the Reds in 1956, a year after Clemente began with the Pirates, and for the next ten seasons their careers had run along parallel tracks as two of the finest five-tool right fielders the game had ever seen. But both played in the shadows of Mays and Mantle, and in those early years, before F Robby was traded to Baltimore in 1966, they had to compete not only with each other but with Henry Aaron just to land a starting berth on the National League All-Star team. Robinson lacked Clemente's flair, but always got the job done, and burned with the same aggressive fire. Each had matured into the undisputed leader of his team, the player their teammates relied on physically and emotionally. They both had surprisingly soft, second-tenor voices, yet spoke with confidence and authority. Their leaders.h.i.+p skills were readily apparent, and had been tested during the winter league in Puerto Rico the previous winter, when Robinson managed the Santurce Cangrejeros, Clemente's original team, and Clemente managed the San Juan Senadores. The major league establishment was not yet considering the possibility of a black Latin manager, but the idea of a black American manager was now within the realm of discussion, and the man most often talked about was Frank Robinson. During the series, in fact, Robinson had made news one day by saying that he had changed his mind and thought now that he didn't want to "go through the strain, the agonies, the frustrations of managing" in the big leagues. "Managing is out for me-period!" he announced. (Never say period: Four years later, Robinson became the first black manager in the majors, taking over the Cleveland Indians, and a full three decades after that he would still be receiving notice as the skilled manager of the over-achieving Was.h.i.+ngton Nationals.) In their Game 6 showcase, Clemente could not have performed better, yet Robinson did what he had to do. While the Pirates brought out Bob Moose, their sixth starter in six games, Baltimore's rotation came around again to Jim Palmer, who went nine strong innings, leaving with the score tied 22 as it entered extra innings. Clemente opened the game with a booming first-inning triple. Bust him inside, the Orioles had finally decided, after failing utterly with their low-and-away theory, so Palmer came in and Roberto pulled the ball down the left-field line for three bases, but he was stranded at third when Willie Stargell struck out. In the third inning, he strode to the plate for the second time. "And now here comes Bobby Clemente," announced Bob Prince on the radio. "If there's ever been a vendetta, this might be it. Pitch to him from Palmer . . . And there's a ball hit very deep to right field. And going back for it is Frank Robinson. He's at the wall. He can't get it. It's gone for a home run. Bobby Clemente continues to totally annihilate Baltimore pitching."

That gave the Pirates a 20 lead. Moose pitched well, shutting out the Orioles for five innings, but left in the sixth, grousing about the b.a.l.l.s and strikes calls of home plate umpire John Kibler. He had the support of his manager, Murtaugh, who was "getting really p.i.s.sed about the umpiring behind the plate," according to Tony Bartirome, who was sitting next to him in the dugout. It was actually a strike call that hurt Moose most, ironically. Baltimore's Don Buford, trying to coax a walk, threw his bat away and started trotting to first base after a three-and-one pitch, but Kibler called it a strike, so Buford returned to the plate and promptly hit the next pitch far over Clemente's head in right for a home run, starting the O's comeback. In the top of the ninth, with Belanger on first, Buford doubled to right-but Clemente was out there, and a perfect throw kept Belanger from scoring.

To relieve Palmer in the tenth, Baltimore turned to two of its twenty-game winners, Dobson and McNally. Dobson gave up a single to Dave Cash, who stole second, placing the lead run in scoring position. In most situations such a steal would be beneficial, but here it had the same boomerang effect as the strike call on Buford in the sixth. With first base open and two out, the Orioles intentionally walked the hitter they least wanted to face-Clemente. Weaver brought in McNally to pitch to Stargell, who also walked, but Al Oliver flied out to end the inning. Frank Robinson was first up for the Orioles in the bottom of the tenth. He had gone hitless in four at-bats, but now drew a walk, then raced to third on a single by Rettenmund, and was ninety feet from home when Brooks Robinson lofted a soft fly ball to center field.

The ball was so shallow that Brooks Robinson felt disappointed as he ran to first, thinking his teammate might not be able to tag up and score. If the ball had been hit to Clemente in right, there would have been no debate: stay put. But Billy Hunter, the third base coach, figured this might be their only shot. In center field now was Vic Davalillo, who had entered the game as a pinch hitter in the ninth. They could challenge his arm, even though he had almost nailed the runner at third on Rettenmund's single. Frank Robinson had barely avoided Richie Hebner's tag with a daring headfirst slide. Now Hunter turned to him and said, "You're going!" Robinson had already decided that he was going in any case. Davalillo, from the corner of his eye, saw the runner tag as he made the catch. He decided it was too far to reach the plate on a fly, so he fired a one-hopper toward the plate. Hunter, following the throw from near the third base box, thought F Robby was dead at home if the ball took a true bounce to Sanguillen, the catcher. Sanguillen, his attention divided between the ball and the shadow of the runner barreling toward him, also thought he had time to make the play. But the ball hit the gra.s.s in front of the plate and took a high, slow bounce, forcing Sanguillen to jump up and then lean back to try to make the tag. F Robby, churning down the line with his spindly thirty-six-year-old legs, slid in safely-game over. The series was now tied three games apiece.

In the visitors' locker room before the start of Game 7 on Sunday, October 17, Clemente moved from one teammate to the next, rea.s.suring them. "Don't worry," he said, again and again. "We are gonna win this game. No problem."

Two of his best friends on the team, Pagn and Hernndez, who would comprise the left side of the infield, felt lucky just to be there. Pagn, knowing that he would start at third against the left-handed Cuellar, was so anxious at the hotel before the game that he decided to take an early cab instead of waiting for the team bus. Hernndez came with him. As the taxi hurtled north and then east from downtown to Memorial Stadium, a little too fast for Pagn's comfort, a Volkswagen bug ran a stop sign, forcing the cabbie to swerve and slam on the breaks, spinning the vehicle in three full circles before it came to a stop. So close-and yet as it turned out the carnival-like taxi ride might have been just the shakeup Jose Antonio Pagn and Jacinto Zubeta Hernndez needed to excel in the most important game of their lives.

The capacity crowd of 47,291 started a clamor before the opening pitch and maintained a steady roar throughout. It was Cuellar and Bla.s.s again, and both pitchers were in command. Cuellar retired the first eleven Pirates in order until Clemente, neck rotating, made his regal stroll to the plate with two outs in the fourth inning. This was a grudge match, Clemente v. Cuellar. Over the winter in Puerto Rico, Clemente had managed Cuellar on the Senadores, and it had not gone well. Cuellar thought Clemente was unreasonably demanding, and said so. The rub of their relations.h.i.+p was only aggravated by that d.i.n.ky little play in Game 3, when Clemente dis...o...b..bulated the pitcher with his mad dash to first base. Now the Orioles were still following their revised game plan to pitch Clemente inside. When Cuellar came in, Clemente turned on the ball and pulled it 390 feet over the leftfield wall, putting the Pirates ahead, 10. With the crack of the bat, something like an electric jolt zapped through the Pittsburgh dugout. Clemente had said all along that he would win this thing. Murtaugh looked around and realized that the home run had "set off a chain reaction" among his players. Now they believed him.

Cuellar, unruffled this time, remained virtually unhittable, setting down ten of the next eleven batters until Stargell singled in the eighth. Up came Pagn, Clemente's Puerto Rican pal, the thirteen-year veteran who had recovered from a broken arm in August to share time at third with Hebner. Murtaugh flashed the hit-and-run sign to Oceak, who relayed it to Pagn. Stargell, taking off with the release of the pitch, was around second when Pagn's liner fell beyond Rettenmund's reach in deep left center, and came all the way home when the outfielder had trouble getting the ball out of his glove. The score was 20 Pirates going into the bottom of the eighth.

Bla.s.s was even more effective than Cuellar, working with an urgency that Jim Murray said made it look like "he was pitching out of a swarm of bees." Weaver had tried to distract him in the first inning, coming out of the dugout to complain that Bla.s.s was not touching the rubber on his delivery. Weaver was right, Bla.s.s would later confess. He had fallen into the habit of slipping his right foot off the rubber before releasing the ball, and for the rest of the game had to keep reminding himself not to do it. But Bla.s.s was in his own world again, at once a bundle of nerves and utterly unstoppable, shutting out the Orioles through the first seven innings. "I could hardly stand still," he said later. "I kept coming back to the clubhouse between innings and I must have opened seven c.o.kes, but I didn't drink any." In the bottom of the eighth, catcher Elrod Hendricks got a leadoff single, and Belanger followed with a soft single to center. Cuellar, up third, hit a bouncer back to the mound, and Bla.s.s, ignoring Sanguillen's shouts to go for the force at third, took the sure out at first instead. Runners on second and third, one out. Buford bounced to Robertson at first, who stepped on the bag for the second out, allowing Hendricks to score.

Bla.s.s now led 21, a runner on third, two outs. He was so nervous he could barely stand still, and paced a full 360 around the mound before approaching the rubber to face Davey Johnson. Jackie Hernndez, at short, remembered from Howie Haak's scouting reports that Johnson pulled the ball, so he moved a few feet toward third. Earlier in the year, after making a game-losing error, Hernndez had been inconsolable in the locker room. "I'm nothing!" he had said, head bowed. It was Clemente who sought him out and rea.s.sured him that he was an important member of the team and that everyone makes mistakes. All anyone could ask was that he give it everything he could. When Earl Weaver questioned how the Pirates could win with Hernndez at short, Clemente stood up for him again. Now, with a runner on third and the series in the balance, Hernndez was so confident that he wanted the ball hit to him. And it was-Johnson slashed one deep into the hole, and Hernndez moved expertly to his right to field the ball and make the long throw for the third out. One inning to go.

In the top of the ninth, Bla.s.s was so nervous he couldn't watch his team bat. He came into the clubhouse and threw up and was so psyched he couldn't stand still. When the Pirates were retired, he was "scared to death." He had to force himself up the steps and out of the dugout to the mound. O's fans were roaring. They had Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, and Rettenmund coming up, with Brooks Robinson waiting if anyone got on base. It had been cloudy all afternoon, but suddenly the sun came out. Bla.s.s figured he would throw strikes and hope for the best. They couldn't all hit home runs off him, he joked to himself, because after the first homer Murtaugh would yank him. There were no homers, no hits, just Bla.s.s, one last time, setting down the heart of the order, and with the final out he jumped and bounded and leaped until he landed in the arms of Manny Sanguillen. Clemente sprinted in from right field and bounced down the steps and into the delirious locker room, where Bob Prince, the Gunner, was rounding up interviews.

"I can't believe it. I don't know what to say," Bla.s.s told Prince. "The biggest thrill that could ever happen. A skinny kid from Connecticut . . ."

"Any moments when you were really worried?" Prince asked.

"There were several. One was a hanging slider to Davey Johnson, but he missed the pitch. I can't believe it! How many people have this kind of opportunity."

Bla.s.s, drenched in champagne, headed off to hold court with the rest of the press horde. At one point he picked up the ringing telephone and answered, "Wally's Delicatessen," then, going into a Bob Newhartstyle routine, he continued . . . "What? You want to talk to Clemente? Spell that please. Clemente who?"

Willie Stargell came in arm-in-arm with Jackie Hernndez. Clemente stood nearby. He had just been named the outstanding player in the series, finis.h.i.+ng with a .414 average, hits in every game, extending his World Series streak to fourteen, two doubles, a triple, and two home runs, along with his stellar base running, fielding, and throwing. Roger Angell, the pitch-perfect baseball writer for the New Yorker, described Clemente's performance over the seven games as "something close to the level of absolute perfection"-and no one disagreed. Prince turned to Clemente in the locker room. "And here with me now, the greatest right fielder in the game of baseball. Bobby, congratulations on a great World Series . . ."

"Thank you, Bob," Clemente said to Prince. "And before I say anything in English, I'd like to say something in Spanish to my mother and father in Puerto Rico . . ."

An ebullient Bla.s.s stepped in and blurted out, "Mr. and Mrs. Clemente, we love him, too!" It was spontaneous and joyful, but Bla.s.s would later wince whenever he thought about his interruption.

After seventeen seasons in the major leagues, this was Clemente's time, with the world listening and watching at last, having seen him perform at his best, carrying his team for seven games-and he made a conscious decision to speak first in Spanish. It was one of the most memorable acts of his life, a simple moment that touched the souls of millions of people in the Spanish-speaking world. "En el da ms grande de mi vida, para los nenes la bendicin mia y que mis padres me echen la bendicin. [In the most important day of my life, I give blessings to my boys and ask that my parents give their blessing] . . ."

Later, when the television cameras were off, Clemente stood on a bench in the dressing room, surrounded by reporters, and let it out one more time, a stream-of-consciousness monologue that fluctuated between pride and fury and grace. "Now people in the whole world know the way I play," he began. "Mentally, for me, I will be a completely different person. For the first time, I have no regrets." Completely different? The words were the same, still evoking his underappreciated past, but there was a barely repressed smile as he continued. He wanted people to know, again, that he played this way all the time, all season, every season. And that he wasn't a hypochondriac. And that he could pull the ball when he wanted to. And that he was tired of writers adding some qualifying "but" to their comments about him. He didn't play for himself, he said. He was happy the Pirates won because it was a team effort all year and it was great for the Pittsburgh fans. This win was more satisfying than 1960. George Hanson of the Montreal Star was on the edge of the crowd, not far from Manny Sanguillen.

"He's going pretty good, eh?" Sanguillen said. "Everything he is saying is true, you know. It's strange that he would have to remind people. Everyone should know it."

At the White House, President Nixon placed a call to Danny Murtaugh, the winning manager, and said he thought it was a team victory even though Roberto Clemente and Steve Bla.s.s were so outstanding. In a cla.s.sic Nixon-the-sports-expert moment, he also said he was impressed with how the Pirates second baseman, Dave Cash, had played all year. Murtaugh thanked the President for taking time out from his serious duties to call. Nixon then phoned Earl Weaver in the other locker room. "Hey, Pop, I just spoke to your boss!" the Baltimore manager called out to his father, a retired parking meter collector and longtime rank-and-file Republican in St. Louis. Weaver was also visited by Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who attended the game. A short time later, Nixon and Rogers had a brief telephone conversation, recorded by the White House taping system.

NIXON: You saw a good game, didn't you?

ROGERS: Great game. I went into the locker room the way you did . . . we were so pleased you called . . .

NIXON: Two great teams and could have gone either way, but boy . . .

ROGERS: Well, I'm sort of glad to see Pittsburgh win because that Clemente is so great.

NIXON: Oh, my G.o.d. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Really . . .

The Pirates by then were on the charter flight back to Pittsburgh. The pitching star, Bla.s.s, and his wife, Karen, were in seats near the wing. Clemente and Vera were seated farther back. Bla.s.s was staring out the window, still trying to process what had happened, when he heard a familiar voice. Clemente was standing in the aisle. "Bla.s.s, come out here," he said. "Let me embrace you."

That joyous hug, Bla.s.s said later, was his deepest validation.

Three days later, on the afternoon of October 20, Clemente was at Mamma Leone's restaurant in New York to accept the Sport magazine award as outstanding player of the series. The award was a new car, a Dodge Charger. Among the many guests and writers at the event inside the dimly lit restaurant was Stu Speiser, a plaintiffs attorney who specialized in airplane crashes. Viewing the Clementes for the first time, Speiser thought they "seemed to be unreal people, sculptured out of bronze instead of ordinary flesh and blood like those surrounding them." Even in a business suit, Clemente "conveyed power and intensity." He had a charisma that Speiser had seen only once before in an athlete, in Pele, the great Brazilian soccer player. Like others in the crowd, Speiser was expecting very little beyond a few jokes and drinks and slaps on the back, all the normal sporting world pleasantries. But Clemente had a deeper purpose. He spoke with a "huge, bursting beautiful heart," recalled Roger Kahn, the sensitive chronicler of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who might have featured Clemente in his renowned book The Boys of Summer had the Dodgers not failed to protect the young player.

Over the past year, Clemente's speeches, even in his second language, had become sharper and more powerful. He had a specific goal, the creation of a sports city in Puerto Rico, but also a more urgent sensibility, one that he had first articulated at a speech in Houston back in February 1971, before the start of his champions.h.i.+p season, when he received the Tris Speaker award. "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth," he had said then, and the line had become his mantra. Now, at Mamma Leone's, he said that he was gratified by the attention he had received because he could divert it to better use, turning his sports city idea into a reality.

"The World Series is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in baseball," he said. "Mentally it has done for me more than anything before. It give me a chance to talk to writers more than before. I don't want anything for myself, but through me I can help lots of people. They spend millions of dollars for dope control in Puerto Rico. But they attack the problem after the problem is there. Why don't they attack it before it starts? You try to get kids so they don't become addicts, and it would help to get them interested in sports and give them somewhere to learn to play them. I want to have three baseball fields, a swimming pool, basketball, tennis, a lake where fathers and sons can get together . . . one of the biggest problems we have today is the father doesn't have time for the kids and they lose control over the children . . ."

In the audience, Speiser noticed that Clemente was choking with tears as he talked about the poor kids of Puerto Rico and the need to treat all people with dignity. He did not intend to waste his time on this earth. "If I get the money to start this, if they tell me they'll give us the money this year and I have to be there, I'll quit right now," Clemente continued. "It's not enough to go to summer camp and have one or two instructors for a little time and then you go home and forget everything. You go to a sports city and have people like Mays and Mantle and Williams and kids would never forget it. I feel the United States should have something like this all over. If I was the President of the United States I would build a sports city and take in kids of all ways of life. What we want to do is exchange kids with every city in the United States and show all the kids how to live and play with other kids. I been going out to different towns, different neighborhoods. I get kids together and talk about the importance of sports, the importance of being a good citizen, the importance of respecting their mother and father. I like to get together with the fathers and sons and talk to them. Then we go to the ball field and I show them some techniques of playing baseball."

12.

Tip of the Cap

WHEN CLEMENTE CAME HOME TO PUERTO RICO THAT winter, he sought comfort in the rituals of his island life. He drove the family out to la finca, their rural retreat in the shadows of the El Yunque rainforest, and on the way home after a long weekend stopped to buy crabs from his favorite roadside vendor, Don Palito. Momen was a fanatic about crabs, he seemed to have an insatiable appet.i.te, and bought them by the dozens and dozens. The stop at Don Palito's was a great adventure for Robert.i.to, Luisito, and Ricky. They stared with fascination as the vibrating jumble of live critters scrambled around in the big caged containers. But this time, once the family returned to the house on the hill, Roberto and Vera were distracted for a few minutes, the cage opened, and the soon-to-be-boiled crabs made a ma.s.s jail break, scuttling for freedom. Most of the escapees were rounded up by the hungry ballplayer, but for a week or more afterward the boys would suddenly come across a vagrant crab as they played in the far reaches of the house.

Everyone wanted to hang around the Clemente house that winter, crustacean and human alike. His place in Ro Piedras became "like a museum," he said, with "people from town and even tourists" stopping by night and day, "walking through our rooms" or just stopping outside on the street until they sighted El Magnfico. The governor sent for him, the parks administrator wanted help, every civic club in San Juan had to honor him, every banquet hoped he would speak. The demands were so relentless that Clemente made it back to la finca only one more time. Finally, in late November, he and Vera escaped by embarking on a month-long tour of South America. They visited Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, So Paolo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and arrived in Lima, Peru, on an Avianca flight on the morning of December 17. When they reached the front desk of the old Gran Bolvar Hotel downtown on the historic Plaza San Martin, there was a message to call the family in Puerto Rico. Word came that Don Melchor had collapsed and was in the hospital. Without unpacking their suitcases, the Clementes returned to the airport and caught the next flight home. In his moment of triumph after the World Series, Momen had asked for the blessings of his father, but now it seemed that the baseball triumph and all the celebrations that followed were a bit much for the old man, who was approaching his eighty-seventh birthday.

As soon as Clemente returned to San Juan, he visited his father at the hospital. Deep into old age, Melchor still seemed indestructible, his body toughened by decades in the canebrake and miles of walking the dusty country roads every day. His organs were weakening, but doctors said it was not life-threatening; all he needed was medication and bed rest. On one visit, Clemente started talking to the patient in the next bed who shared a room with Melchor. The man said he was in great pain and was in the hospital to undergo a back operation. The words back and pain caught Clemente's attention, and soon he had spread a blanket on the bathroom floor and was stretching the man's legs and kneading his back with his magical fingers as Vera guarded the door to make sure no doctors or nurses came by. The next day, the man reported that his pain was gone and that he felt like he was walking on air. "G.o.d bless you," he said to Clemente, and broke into tears.

The word about Roberto Clemente's healing powers had spread throughout the San Juan area. Sick and sore friends of friends would make pilgrimages to the house on the hill at all hours of the day and night seeking his magic, and if Clemente was available he would treat them. If only he could ease his own aches and troubles so effectively. He was sleepless again, staying up through the night, every night, until four or five in the morning. Robert.i.to, now almost seven years old, also had insomnia, and sometimes slipped downstairs to find his dad playing pool. Vera was a sound sleeper, but she stayed up many nights keeping Roberto company as he worked on his decorative arts. He had two specialties now: tables and furniture pieces crafted from driftwood he collected on the Atlantic beach; and ceramic lamps, brightened by marbles that he heated in the oven until they exploded. But the hectic schedule and lack of sleep were taking a toll. He had lost ten pounds, down to 175, and his stomach was hurting. Vera developed sympathetic stomach pains. The requests kept coming, and Clemente had a hard time saying no.

"Since I've been back to Puerto Rico, I've been having my problems," Clemente said one night in January 1972 at a banquet of fathers and sons in San Juan. The speech was recorded by his friend, the broadcaster Ramiro Martnez, who tailed him wherever he went that winter.

"I think the World Series was too much for my father," Clemente continued. He spoke of his deep love for his parents-"the most wonderful mother and father who ever lived" as an introduction to the themes of sports, compet.i.tion, country, teamwork, and parenthood. Though his extemporaneous speeches had the rhythm of stream-of-consciousness, they integrated the disparate threads of his life-as a Puerto Rican and an American citizen, as a ballplayer who loved his game, as a black and Latino, as a former Marine, as a believer in the underdog, and as someone who refused to be undervalued or dismissed. "All my life I have to thank G.o.d to make me a sports figure because I love compet.i.tion and I think compet.i.tion is part of the way that we are living today," he said. "I love compet.i.tion because when we compete, we compete to be proud of our country. I see myself sometimes wondering why some people still have to fight for their rights. As you people know, I have been fighting for my rights all my life. I believe every human being is equal. At the same time, we also have problems because we are a great nation." For all of Clemente's struggles adjusting to the culture and language of his baseball life on the mainland, he felt very much a part of the United States. "I am from Puerto Rico, but I am also an American citizen," he continued. "We have an opportunity to travel. I just came from South America. I've been in Europe . . . I can tell you one thing, I won't trade this country for no one country. We, no matter what, we have the best country in the world and you can believe it."

The World Series victory was still on his mind. "I always say to myself that we athletes should pay the public to come and see us play. Because if you see what we saw in the World Series, what we see when we play ball, I guess I don't have any money to buy the feelings inside the clubhouse. This year to have the opportunity to see Willie Stargell have the greatest season I've ever seen a player have . . ." He meant this as a gesture of goodwill to his friend and teammate who had been overshadowed in the series after carrying the Pirates much of the year. He would never forget the sight of Stargell and Jackie Hernndez bounding into the locker room arm-in-arm after the seventh game, a picture of solidarity.

Life is nothing. Life is fleeting. Only G.o.d makes man happy-so went his mother's favorite spiritual verse. But Clemente looked for the lasting meaning in fleeting life. "As you know, time goes so fast," he told the San Juan audience. "And we are living in a really fast life. You want to have the opportunity to have sons . . . We come home from work, sometimes our kids are in bed already. We go back to work, our kids are already in school. So sometimes we hear how bad our kids are, and how bad our American schools are. This is a big world and we are going to have our problems, but I think that we can help our difficult youth. We can give them the love and more attention to our home, our kids, our family, and our neighbors. We are brothers. And don't say, 'Well, I don't want to do it. Somebody else will.' Because you are somebody . . ." His closing message took on more urgency every time he said it. If you have a chance to help others, and don't, you are wasting your time on this earth.

In his eighteenth spring with the Pirates, after all he had accomplished, Clemente chose to live like a rookie. Many veterans rented houses on the beaches or golf courses around Bradenton, the Gulf Coast town that had been the team's Grapefruit League headquarters for four years, but Clemente stayed in Room 231 at the four-story dorm at Pirate City on Twenty-seventh Street East. In late afternoons after practice, he was surrounded by young players and hangers-on who wanted to soak up his advice. "A lot of us young guys would just sit there and listen to him," said Fernando Gonzlez, a rookie infielder from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, who had admired Clemente since he was a ten-year-old collecting autographs when winter league teams stopped at El Gran Cafe in his hometown on bus trips between San Juan and Mayagez. "Clemente would talk about the way that baseball was going to be . . . situations in games . . . almost everything."

Also hanging around was Roy Blount Jr., who came down to Bradenton to do a feature story on the hero of the 1971 World Series for the New York Times Magazine. Writing under the felicitous pseudonym C. R. Ways, which he later told Pittsburgh writers was the name of his dog, Blount took note of how Clemente "strolled the team's Pirate City complex in his long-collar tab s.h.i.+rts and brilliant slacks, as vivid a major leaguer as there is . . ." While dutifully visiting the stations of Clemente's cross-his maladies and complaints, his sore feelings going back to the 1960 MVP vote, his distaste for being quoted in broken English-Blount found a humorist's delight in Clemente's eccentric style, which he considered representative of Latin players who "in the 20 years since they began to enter American baseball in numbers from Cuba, Mexico and South America, have added more color and unexpected personal drama to the game than any other ethnic group." The headline on the piece was "n.o.bODY DOES ANYTHING BETTER THAN ME IN BASEBALL," SAYS ROBERTO CLEMENTE . . . WELL, HE'S RIGHT. Full recognition from New York, at last, just what Clemente had always wanted. The article had Blount's sweet touch and was mostly accurate, yet reflected an att.i.tude that could upset Clemente. The quirks of his personality were irresistible, but Clemente more than anything else wanted to be treated seriously, not as a stereotype, even when the stereotypes were true.

There had been another changing of the guard with the Pirates. Murtaugh was gone, again, his career capped by a second champions.h.i.+p, and Bill Virdon, who had prepped for the job in San Juan, was now Pittsburgh's manager. Perhaps the only situation as thankless as managing an abysmal team is taking over World Series winners. Virdon inherited a talented squad, yet had nowhere to go but down. His best player, Clemente, was nearly as old as he was and slowed that spring by stomach pains. "The other day I went out to buy an Osterizer [blender] when you called me," Clemente wrote Vera one early March evening. "It is the only time I've left here since I arrived. I've tried to control my nerves to see if that helps my stomach." Even if the accounting of his time sounded like an absent husband's fib, the stomach trouble was real.

Clemente's life was far more than baseball at that point in his career. In his letter to Vera he wrote about plans to open a chiropractic clinic. "G.o.d willing, we can move forward this clinic proposal," he said. He had already bought a one-story house at the bottom of his hill in Ro Piedras to treat neighbors, a modest beginning to his larger idea of someday running a chiropractic resort. He was also preoccupied with his plans for a sports city for underprivileged youths in San Juan. And Jim Fanning, then the general manager of the Montreal Expos, said that Clemente called him four or five times that spring hoping to persuade the Expos to move their spring training headquarters to San Juan. Yet when it came to baseball, Clemente kept looking for new methods of enhancing his powers of concentration. Late one afternoon after practice, when the major and minor league players had retreated into the clubhouse, Harding Peterson, the farm and scouting director, walked out to the fields and was surprised to see a lone figure in the distance, near the batting cage. "It is Clemente, and there is no one there but him, and he is standing at home plate," Peterson remembered. "And he makes a stride but doesn't swing, then makes a stride and swings, and runs three quarters of the way to first. I don't want to bother him, but I go up to the batting cage and say, 'Hey, Roberto, don't want to interrupt, but what are you doing?' And he says, 'Well, I know we're opening against the Mets. I'm making believe I see the same pitches I see on opening day.'" In Clemente's mind, Peterson realized, Tom Seaver was on the mound, throwing sliders low and away.

The season was scheduled to open April 5, but there were no games that day, and none for the next nine days. On a vote of 663 to 10, the players had voted to strike until the owners agreed to improvements in the health and pension plans. It was the first full strike in major league history, and reflected the transformation of the players a.s.sociation in the more than five years since labor experts Marvin Miller and Richard Moss were hired. Earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had once again upheld baseball's ant.i.trust exemption, deciding the Curt Flood case against the player, but the struggle for player freedom was not over, and the court had directed organized baseball to resolve the issue on its own. Clemente strongly supported the strike, though he had pa.s.sed along the job of Pirates' player representative to Dave Giusti, the relief pitcher. The strike ended abruptly in a victory for the players, and the Pirates opened the season in New York against Seaver and the Mets on April 15. Clemente's spring training pantomime proved of no help as he went hitless in four at-bats.

As loose as the 1971 Pirates were, the 1972 team was even looser. It was virtually the same squad, but more confident and comfortable after winning the champions.h.i.+p, and the culture was becoming more informal year by year. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, when goatees seemed to come with the issuance of a major league uniform on some teams, it is difficult to imagine that Reggie Jackson and his Oakland A's were breaking with more than a half-century of tradition that spring by daring to sport facial hair. The Pirates were still clean-shaven, but the irrepressible Dock Ellis had a vibrant Afro in the works, and the prevailing antiestablishment mood meant that everything was fair game in the clubhouse, including old man Clemente. Ellis and Sanguillen mimicked "Grandpa" by limping and moaning when they saw him heading to the trainer's room. Clemente had his own antics; he enjoyed holding his nose to mimic the nasal drone of the team physician, Dr. Finegold. (This routine was a surefire hit at home, where little Robert.i.to would say "Do Dr. Fine-gold" and then fall on the floor laughing to the point of tears.) Giusti and Clemente were constantly yapping at one another. "The byplay between them became almost a ritual for us," recalled Steve Bla.s.s. "Any subject and suddenly they'd be hollering and insulting each other. Robby was our player rep before Dave and when something would come up, he'd say, 'When I was the player rep we never had these kinds of problems, but you give an Italian a little responsibility and look what happens!'"

His confidence boosted by his flawless World Series performances, Bla.s.s got off to a brilliant start in 1972 and remained strong all year, leading one of the deepest staffs in Pittsburgh history. There were no weak spots in the rotation: Bla.s.s would win nineteen games with a 2.49 earned-run average, followed by Ellis with fifteen wins and 2.70, Briles, fourteen and 3.08, Moose, thirteen and 2.91, and Kison, nine and 3.26. From the bullpen Virdon turned to an effective right-left duo of Giusti, who had twenty-two saves, and Ramon Hernndez, who had fourteen. Clemente naturally thought he could pitch better than any of them. "Come here, Bla.s.s, I gonna tell you one f.u.c.king thing," he would say, warming up before a game. "Look at this f.u.c.king breaking ball"-and he would uncork what Bla.s.s regarded as a pathetic attempt at a curve. "Robby," Bla.s.s would say, "you couldn't get anybody out with that if your life depended on it."

Among the many characters in the clubhouse, third baseman Richie Hebner stood out because of his off-season job as a gravedigger in Ma.s.sachusetts. When opposing players slid into third, Hebner would joke that he gave discounts to major leaguers. Clemente felt a bond with Hebner since they had both served in the Marines Corps, but he was spooked by his teammate's occupation. "He'd say, 'You dig graves?' I'd say, Yeah, somebody's got to dig them," Hebner remembered. Clemente, he said, seemed skeptical. " 'You bury people?' he'd ask. I'd say, 'Come up in the middle of winter and you can dig one yourself, then you can tell me if I'm full of s.h.i.+t.'" One day, Clemente had been taking a nap in the trainer's room with a towel over his head and awoke to find Hebner hovering over him. "What are you doing?" Clemente asked. "I thought you were dead," Hebner said, deadpan. "I'm measuring you up to see what size casket I got to get you, buddy."

Although he went hitless the first two games, Clemente quickly came alive in the batter's box that season and began rapping out his usual rataplan of base hits. The better the pitcher, the better Clemente hit. Bob Gibson, homer; Don Sutton, homer; Ferguson Jenkins, triple. Through early July, he was playing five or six times a week, with Virdon resting him on day games after night games or part of a doubleheader. His stomach was still hurting, and he kept losing weight until finally a sore heel took him out of the lineup altogether. He missed twelve consecutive games until July 23, when he started and drove in two runs, but left in pain and was out again through the first half of August. He was selected to the July 25 All-Star game in Atlanta, which was held later than usual because of the April strike, but withdrew from the contest because of injuries.

With Stargell, Oliver, Hebner, Robertson, Sanguillen, Cash, Davalillo, Clines, and Stennett all clubbing the ball, the Pirates were so loaded that they kept winning without Clemente, and by August 20 they were thirty games over .500 with a 7242 record. Clemente returned to the lineup during the final West Coast trip of the season and slowly got back into his. .h.i.tting groove. Fernando Gonzlez, the young Puerto Rican, had joined the team after a stint in the minors, and quickly became Manny Sanguillen's foil. "Hey, Roberto," Sanguillen called out in Spanish during a flight from Pittsburgh to Montreal in September. "Fernando says you are not a good ballplayer. He has been here watching you play and you are no good." Gonzlez was terribly embarra.s.sed. He had adored Clemente since he was a kid, and now here he was on the same plane with him, and it seemed that Clemente was taking Sanguillen seriously. "I know, I know," Clemente said. "I don't get the recognition I deserve!" The next day, in the visitors clubhouse, Gonzlez approached Clemente and apologized. "I didn't say anything like that," he said of Sanguillen's claim. "Don't pay any attention to them," Clemente a.s.sured him. "They like to get on me,"

Gonzlez would sit on the bench next to Clemente after that, trying to learn as much as he could. After Montreal, the Pirates reached Chicago on September 12, and by then no one could get Clemente out. He went three for four in the first game, then three for three with a homer and triple and game-winning home run against Ferguson Jenkins the next day. In an early inning, Gonzlez watched Clemente take a strike on the right-hand corner of the plate. "I know you can hit that ball good," Gonzlez said to him the next inning on the bench. "You'll see why I took it later in the game," Clemente said. In the seventh, he was up with a man on and Jenkins threw the same pitch to the same spot and Clemente knocked it over the fence in right-center. "When he came to the bench, he said, " 'That's why I gave him that pitch in the first at-bat,'" Gonzlez recalled. "He was doing things by that time that I never saw anyone do and I haven't seen anyone do since. He was like a computer. He was set to play baseball. He always knew what he had to do."

What he had to do that year was collect 118 hits to reach three thousand, a mark reached then by only ten players in major league history: Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Hank Aaron, Eddie Collins, Nap Lajoie, Willie Mays, Paul Waner, and Cap Anson. After going eight for twelve in Chicago, Clemente was within fourteen hits of the magic number. Four hits against the Cardinals, three against the Mets, one against Montreal, and he was down to six as the Pirates made their final visit of the year to Philadelphia. By then the team had clinched the National League's Eastern Division t.i.tle on its way to a 9659 record.<