I couldn’t believe my eyes. As a 10-year-old with my dad at the Polo Grounds in New York in 1963, I watched the Pittsburgh Pirates warm up before taking on the Mets in a weekend afternoon contest. Roberto Clemente was shagging flies in right field. He caught a ball on the warning track and unleashed a throw that carried on a fly into the catcher’s mitt at home plate. Then he did it again.
Today, Major League Baseball holds a Roberto Clemente Day every September. All players and coaches on the Pirates and their opponent for the day wear 21 on their jerseys. Additionally, Puerto Rican players and any past Clemente Award winners and nominees can wear the number 21 on the backs of their jerseys. All other players, coaches, and umpires wear a No. 21 patch on their sleeves. Since Clemente’s death, no Pirates player has worn 21 on the field of play other than on this special day.
Clemente died in a plane crash at age 38 on New Year’s Eve 1972 as he accompanied a cargo plane departing San Juan, Puerto Rico, in an attempt to bring humanitarian aid to people affected by a devastating earthquake in Nicaragua. Months later, Clemente became only the second player in MLB history to have the mandatory five-year waiting period waived for Hall of Fame induction. He was the first Latin American player elected to the Hall.
Before our metric era, baseball players were evaluated using five tools: speed, arm strength, fielding ability, hitting for average, and hitting for power. Clemente had them all. Paul Ladewski of Stadium Talk applied a combination of Gold Glove Awards (Clemente won 12), Defensive Wins Above Replacement (dWAR), Total Zone Runs (an estimate of runs saved in the field), Range Factor per nine innings and YouTube clips, and rated Clemente the best defensive right fielder of all time.
He led the National League in outfield assists five times and, since 1904, ranks second in career assists as a right fielder, with 255. He didn’t try to steal many bases, but his speed in taking the extra base was phenomenal. Nobody ran from first to third with more wild abandon. He was a 15-time All-Star, an MVP in 1966, and a World Series MVP in 1971. He helped the Pirates win the World Series in 1960 and 1971, hitting a combined .362. A notorious bad-ball hitter, he also won four batting titles. He had exactly 3,000 hits, a career .317 batting average, a .359 on-base percentage, a .475 slugging percentage, and .834 OPS. He hit 240 homers and knocked in 1,305 runs.
Clemente spent all 18 major league seasons in Pittsburgh, where he didn’t get the media attention afforded to big-city stars like Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio, often cited as the greatest of all time.
That said, consider the attention Clemente garnered from his fellow Latinos. Former St. Louis catcher Yadier Molina told ESPN, “For all us Latinos who have played Major League Baseball and have had to deal with so many obstacles, difficulties, and challenges, Clemente is the source of inspiration we need to move forward and pursue our dreams and be an example to others on and off the field.”
Tony Bartirome, Clemente’s former trainer with the Pirates, told the Baseball Hall of Fame, “When Clemente came to spring training in 1969, the Pirates had just built Pirate City. It was basically for the minor league players. All the major league players stayed at Longboat Key (a popular island resort off Florida’s west coast). Clemente wouldn’t do that. He would stay at Pirate City. Believe me, the food was horrible. I asked, ‘Why are you staying here?’ He shrugged his shoulders. I made it my business to find out why.’ He discovered that Clemente didn’t want his teammates to go through the same struggles he had encountered as a rookie in 1955. Clemente was staying there for the young Latin ballplayers.
Tony Bartirome: “Every night after dinner, he would sit in the front of the building and teach the players how to order off a menu and to communicate with the other players. He did that every spring, and no one knew about that.”
Former teammate Al Oliver told the Hall, “To hear Roberto was like listening to my Dad. He preached like a Baptist minister. He would say, ‘How can the rich have so much (money) and people are starving?’ This was his mindset, his spirituality.”
Back to the ball field, Jerry Green of The Detroit News once wrote, “Roberto Clemente might not have been the perfect baseball player, but no other player in the game’s 140 seasons has been closer to perfection.” His one fault concluded Green — he played in Pittsburgh.
Matt Sieger, now retired sports reporter/columnist who worked for New York State and California newspapers, did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and received a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. This article first appeared in The Vacaville (California) Reporter on September 9, 2020.
