Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 2

4.

The Residue of Design

RIDICULING THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES WAS ONE OF THE simple pleasures of the national pastime in the first half of the 1950s. The Boy Buffoons of Baseball, Life magazine called them. "The atrocities they committed under the guise of major league baseball were monstrous," wrote Marshall Smith. "Pirate pitchers threw the ball in the general direction of home plate and ducked. Pirate batters missed signs as blithely as they missed baseb.a.l.l.s. Pirate fielding was so graceful that the team gave the opposition four or five outs per inning. Sportswriters accused Pirates of running the bases with their heads tucked under their arms." When the club's top minor league manager wanted to scare one of his underachieving players, he threatened to send him up to Pittsburgh. The Pirates were bound for the cellar every year; the only tension came with guessing how many games back they might finish. In 1952 when they were accused of fielding a team of midgets, infielders so short that b.a.l.l.s bounded over them for doubles, they ended up fifty-four and a half games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers. All of this was overseen by Pittsburgh's esteemed general manager, Branch Rickey.

In Pittsburgh, some skeptics said, Wesley Branch Rickey finally met his match-or worse, let the game pa.s.s him by. For more than four decades, since he had graduated from Michigan Law and got into baseball management, Rickey, an erudite Presbyterian from Lucasville, Ohio, had been regarded as the one true genius of the sport. Red Smith, the New York sportswriter, called him "a giant among pygmies." Before coming over to run the hapless Pirates in 1950, at the seasoned age of sixty-nine, he had built two of the century's dominant National League clubs, first the Gas House Gang in St. Louis, and next what would become the Boys of Summer in Brooklyn. His place in history was a.s.sured by a single bold act, breaking the color line with the signing of Jackie Robinson, but there was far more to him than that. It was as a measure of respect that he became known as the Mahatma. He was cool and manipulative in his transactions, meticulous with his records, formal and pompous in his speech, stingy with his money, always curious and innovative, brutally sharp in his a.s.sessments, and interested equally in a player's psychological disposition and his ability to learn an elusive hook slide.

All events in Mr. Rickey's world could be studied, categorized, and explained. Good things did not fall upon people, or baseball clubs, by accident. He was a man of sayings, and his most famous phrase came at the end of this thought: "Things worthwhile generally don't just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference or inattention are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exact.i.tudes. Luck is the residue of design."

And what was his design for the Pirates? "The Pittsburgh club was in last place on merit and not by mishap or circ.u.mstance," Rickey said when he took over, and when they got better it would not be through luck. He doubled the number of minor league affiliates and started stocking them with young players, underscoring his belief that, in baseball, the surest way to get quality was through quant.i.ty. He spent what to him seemed like a huge sum ($900,000) on prospects, most of whom flopped. He worked to rid the team of popular players who in his opinion could never take the Pirates to a champions.h.i.+p, Ralph Kiner prime among them. Kiner, the slow-footed slugger who won four straight home-run t.i.tles (and eventually seven), was not only beloved in Pittsburgh but was also a duck-hunting companion of the owner, John Galbreath. But Rickey was so determined to trade him that he wrote Galbreath an eight-page, single-s.p.a.ced letter on March 25, 1952, enunciating "twenty-four reasons why Ralph Kiner was useless to the Pittsburgh Pirates." Within a year, Kiner was a Cub. And with his sharp-eyed talent men, scout Haak and coach Sukeforth, Rickey plucked young players from other clubs, none more important, in the long run, than the twenty-year-old outfielder, Roberto Clemente.

In the mythology that later enveloped the Clemente story, there is a commonly recounted scene of Rickey blessing him at the dawn of his career. It supposedly took place in the winter league in Puerto Rico in 1953. According to the story, first told by San Juan sportswriters and repeated through the years, Rickey caught sight of Clemente at a Santurce game, was stunned by his skills, called him over to talk, asked him a few questions, and ended the conversation by telling the young man to find a girl and settle down to the business of baseball because he was destined to be a superstar. But Rickey was an inveterate memo-keeper; his dictated observations and handwritten notes were typed out by his personal secretary, Ken Blackburn, after virtually every game that he attended. And the doc.u.ments point to another less-glowing account.

With aide-de-camp Blackburn at his side, Rickey flew south in January 1955 for a scouting swing through Cuba and Puerto Rico (which in Blackburn's transcriptions was often spelled the way Rickey said it, Puerto Rica). In Cuba, on January 18 and 19, Rickey watched two games between Havana and Cienfuegos. His notes show that he was impressed with young players in the St. Louis Cardinals chain, especially Don Blasingame (" . . . a pest at the plate. He should become a good base on b.a.l.l.s man, and his power is ample. He is no puny in any respect.") and Ken Boyer. ("I saw the best ballplayer on first impression that I have seen in many a day. Boyer by name . . . Never loafs. Has big hands and knows what to do with them . . . He is a line drive hitter deluxe. The newspapermen down here are raving about the outfielder Bill Virdon, saying, in effect, unanimously, that Virdon is the greatest player ever to be in Cuba etc. etc. I will take Boyer.") With those three players coming up, Rickey concluded, all the Cardinals needed was a top-flight pitcher to contend against the Dodgers, Giants, and Braves.

The next week he was in San Juan, taking in a game at Sixto Escobar between Santurce and Ponce. He kept his own scorecard and dictated his game notes to Blackburn, though he complained that he was "disturbed by dignitaries so much during the game" that his notes were not as sharp as normal. "The Ponce team is managed by Joe Schultz Jr. and Santurce by Herman Franks-both really two kids who came up with me," Rickey began his Memorandum of Game. Schultz and Franks were both old catchers who had played for the Cardinals. "I have had interviews with both boys, and Schultz is to have breakfast with me in the morning."

Then, one by one, Rickey a.n.a.lyzed all the players he had seen on both teams. His comments on the Cangrejeros were often blistering. Luis Olmo, he observed, "pinch hit for Lopez and looked lazy, overweight, indifferent, helpless." (It is well to remember that Rickey and Olmo had a falling out back in the mid-forties, when Olmo, insulted by Rickey's salary offer after his best season with the Dodgers, bolted to an upstart Mexican League.) Willie Mays did not play that day, resting for the winter league playoffs, which were to begin in a few days. Rickey's most in-depth a.s.sessment was done on the young man who moved over from left to center, Roberto Clemente. He must have begged dignitaries away whenever Clemente was in action.

Two months earlier, the Pirates had made Clemente the first overall selection in the Rule 5 draft. He was Pittsburgh property, and bound by rule to stay with the big club in 1955. From the content of Rickey's notes, it appears that this was the first time he had seen Clemente play. The language does not correspond to the legend of Rickey observing Clemente in 1953 and telling him that he was destined for superstardom. He saw a few things he loved in the young player, but more flaws. The memo began: I would guess him to be at least 6' tall, weight about 175 pounds, right hand hitter, very young. I have been told very often about his running speed. I was sorely disappointed with it. His running form is bad, definitely bad, and based upon what I saw tonight, he had only a bit above average major league running speed. He has a beautiful throwing arm. He throws the ball down and it really goes places. However, he runs with the ball every time he makes a throw and that's bad.

Rickey had his own scouting vocabulary. One of his favorite baseball words was adventure. In this regard, by his standards, Clemente was no Willie Mays.

He has no adventure whatever on the bases, takes a comparatively small lead, and doesn't have in mind, apparently, getting a break. I can imagine that he has never stolen a base in his life with his skill or cleverness. I can guess that if it was done, it was because he was pushed off.

Later, Rickey thought he saw that same timidity in the field: The most disappointing feature about Clemente is his lack of adventure-of chance taking. He had at least two chances tonight to make a good play. He simply waited for the bounce. I hope he looks better to me tomorrow night when Santurce plays San Juan-the final game of the regular season and the city champions.h.i.+p of San Juan is at stake. Perhaps this boy will put out in that game.

When Clemente was. .h.i.tting, Rickey found more to like. With the cool detachment of a cattle appraiser, he reported: His form at the plate is perfect. The bat is out and back and in good position to give him power. There is not the slightest hitch or movement in his hands or arms and the big end of the bat is completely quiet when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. His sweep is level-very level. His stride is short and his stance is good to start with and he finishes good with his body. I know of no reason why he should not become a very fine hitter. I would not cla.s.s him, however, as even a prospective home run hitter.

From his observations in San Juan, Rickey reached a disappointing conclusion. He believed that the bonus baby he had swiped from the Dodgers was not ready for the big time: I do not believe he can possibly do a major league club any good in 1955. It is just too bad that he could not have had his first year in Cla.s.s B or C league and then this year he might have profited greatly with a second year as a regular say in Cla.s.s A. In 1956 he can be sent out on option by Pittsburgh only by first securing waivers, and waivers likely cannot be secured. So, we are stuck with him-stuck indeed, until such time as he can really help a major league club.

There are several things to keep in mind when reading that critical a.s.sessment of Clemente made a few months before the first game of his major league career. First, though Rickey was astute, he made mistakes. Three years before he compiled his report on Clemente, he had observed a Pirate minor league pitcher named Ron Necciai and declared: "There have only been two young pitchers I was certain were destined for greatness, simply because they had the meanest fastball a batter can face. One of those boys was Dizzy Dean. The other is Ron Necciai." All baseball lovers know Dizzy Dean. Necciai won exactly one game in the major leagues. Second, despite those rare raves, Rickey tended to look for a player's faults, and was merciless in doing so. Of Tony Bartirome, a prospect in 1955, he wrote: "A puny hitter. He never will go major." (Perhaps Rickey had forgotten, but he had called up the 5'9'' Bartirome briefly to start 135 games at first base in 1952 as part of the midget infield.) A pitching prospect named Jackie Brown was lucky not to see Rickey's private a.s.sessment of him: "Brown was born prematurely, and has never caught up. I don't think he ever has a thought. He has never related an incident in his life, never told a story in his life, never had a belly laugh in his life. He would be incapable of comprehension to so deep a point." Could Rickey be any crueler? Yes. In another report he noted that Brown "is also afflicted with rectal warts."

It also must be said that Rickey's scouting report on Clemente was not completely inaccurate. Clemente did have an odd running style, and looked a bit faster than he really was. While he never stole many bases, though, he was regarded as a smart base runner and thrilled fans with his dashes from first to third and second to home. The prediction that he would become "a very fine hitter" turned out to be a severe understatement. As to power, Rickey was at least half right. Clemente never was a big home-run hitter, though on occasion he could hit mammoth shots, and he frequently drove the ball deep into the gaps for doubles and triples. Based on Clemente's statistics in 1955 and the next few years, Rickey's a.s.sessment that he needed a few more years of seasoning was within the realm of debate. But where Rickey was most mistaken was in his conclusion that Clemente's game lacked adventure. It was true that he did not steal many bases, but to think of him as timid was wildly off the mark. Clemente in the field, sprinting in and sliding across the gra.s.s to make a catch; on the base paths, legs flying, arms pumping furiously as he ran out every ground ball or raced from first to third; at the plate, daring a pitcher to get it by him no matter where he threw it-everything about his play evoked a sense of adventure. An essential fact of which Rickey seemed unaware when he wrote the scouting report is that Clemente had been in a car accident less than a month earlier and was suffering from neck and back troubles that would plague him off and on for the rest of his life.

On his way back to Pittsburgh from the Caribbean scouting mission, Rickey stopped in Fort Myers, a city on the Florida Gulf Coast that was preparing a new training camp for his Pittsburgh club. The Pirates had been spring vagabonds in the years of Rickey's reign, moving from San Bernardino in 1952 to Havana in 1953 to Fort Pierce in 1954, but now they were ready to settle down. The Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce had recruited them with a sweet offer. Here was a new stadium and clubhouse at Terry Park, constructed with $80,000 in city and county funds. Here was a guarantee from local businessmen of two thousand Grapefruit League season tickets worth $30,000. Here was a fleet of new Pontiacs from baseball booster Al Gallman, a local car dealer, for the use of club officials. Town leaders would even send several hundred citizens up to Pittsburgh for Fort Myers Day during the regular season and fill the Forbes Field outfield with a tractor-trailer's worth of free coconuts. It might seem like small stuff compared with the desperate inducements Florida towns would throw at major league teams decades later, but it was enough to get the job done in 1955. The only possible drawback Pirates officials could think of was that there was no top-flight racetrack nearby for the thoroughbred horses of Mr. Galbreath.

Rickey arrived at Terry Park on the morning of January 29 to find another baseball legend waiting for him. "G.o.d bless you, Connie," he said in greeting. "I'm sure glad to see you." It was Connie Mack Sr., who had managed the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century, from 1901 to 1950, and was now ninety-two. The Athletics had trained in Fort Myers in the late 1920s, and Mack still spent the winters there with his son. He was perhaps the only person alive who knew more baseball than Branch Rickey, and he had come out to the park to show his compatriot around. Together the Mahatma and the Tall Tactician, with a hundred years of baseball experience between them, but both dressed like bankers, inspected the clubhouse, the infield, and the fences (set deep, 360 down the lines and 415 in center to give the feel of s.p.a.cious Forbes Field up North). Rickey was impressed by the smoothness of the infield dirt and the luxurious green outfield, and decided that the team should stay off the main diamond and play only on the practice field for a few weeks, at least until owner Galbreath arrived. The clubhouse met his exacting standards. He said it was better than most clubhouses in the majors, and he was especially satisfied with the color choice for the shower room, a shade of light green that he considered good for morale.

After the brief tour, the two venerable baseball hands sat in the sun and talked. Len Harsh, the young sports editor of the local paper, the Fort Myers News-Press, stood nearby, awed by the great men, and eavesdropped on their conversation. Rickey and Mack chatted like old codgers who had seen it all. Who lost more stock in the Wall Street crash of 1929. The peaks and valleys of their careers. Mack had ended his baseball years in a valley, a long string of losing seasons for his once champion Athletics, and now Rickey was hoping to avoid the same fate. As the conversation ended, he invited Mack to throw out the first pitch at the preseason opener, then left to go deep sea fis.h.i.+ng with a local doctor. He would return to snowy Pittsburgh for ten days to get the team's affairs in order before flying South again to the suns.h.i.+ne and the start of camp.

The sportswriters who covered the Pirates were waiting for Rickey when he got back to Pittsburgh. They were hungry for news about his scouting trip, especially his a.s.sessment of the young Pirate who was tearing up the winter league for Santurce. Was Clemente really that good? asked Jack Hernon of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Without going into the precise critical a.n.a.lysis of his scouting report, Rickey put the best light on it while saying that he was not sure. "The boy is a great prospect, just as I was told. But you must remember he is only twenty years old and had almost no compet.i.tion last season at Montreal. He is a big boy. He can run, throw, and hit. He needs much polis.h.i.+ng because he is a rough diamond. He might go to town, but you can't tell. He might (make it) but he'll have his hands full." Hernon wrote up the story for his paper and the Sporting News before leaving for Fort Myers with his writing brethren, Al Abrams, the Post-Gazette sports editor, Les Biederman of the Press, and Chilly Doyle of the Sun-Telegraph. None of the old boys would be Roberto men, as it turned out, and Hernon least of all.

Clemente reached Fort Myers on the last day of February, fresh from his star turn with Willie Mays in the Caribbean series. Even though he was a rookie, he reported with the other veterans because his spot on the roster was a.s.sured by his Rule 5 draft status. This was his second preseason in segregated Florida, but in many ways it proved more difficult for him than his first camp at Dodgertown.

There was no dormitory housing for the team, and while the white players were put up at the Bradford Hotel downtown, Clemente and other black prospects were shuttled off to board in private homes in the historically black Dunbar Heights neighborhood across the railroad tracks on the east side of town. Dunbar was its own world, and though some back streets were unpaved and strewn with shacks that lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, there was also a bustling black merchant cla.s.s along Anderson Avenue, where residents shopped at B&B grocery, ate at Clinton's Cafe, and took in movies at the King Theater. Many of the residential streets in Dunbar Heights were named for citrus fruits. Clemente found a room at the home of Etta Power, widow of Charley Power, who lived on Lime Street. Lime and the next street over, Orange, were alive with children who tagged after Clemente whenever he was in the neighborhood. Jim Crow segregation was everywhere: in the schools, gas stations, hotels, restaurants. The white players and their families relaxed at beaches and pools where black teammates could not go. There was a golf outing at Fort Myers Country Club-Bob Rice, the traveling secretary, nearly got a hole-in-one on the water hole-but Clemente and the black Pirates were not allowed to play. There was a designated "colored night" at the Lee County Fair when white residents stayed away.

If blacks wanted to watch the Pirates, they were penned in their own pavilion section of the bleachers at Terry Park. The bathrooms and water fountains at the ballpark were labeled Whites and Colored.

Before the first intrasquad game on March 2, Branch Rickey, wearing his signature polka-dot bow tie and straw hat, delivered a long lecture to the players. He told them about what would be expected of them in training camp, and his aspirations for the season, and then briefly discussed the realities of race in Fort Myers. This was the South, he told them. They were all Pittsburgh Pirates, but upon leaving the confines of the field, conditions were beyond the team's control. G.o.d knows it was d.a.m.nably wrong, he said, but so it was. There would be no trouble here. The ladies and gentlemen of Fort Myers were peaceful citizens. Then Rickey left the clubhouse and walked over to the box seats, which were only folding chairs, and took his place in the front row amid a lineup of luminaries that included Connie Mack Sr., owner Galbreath, and Benjamin F. Fairless, the soon-to-be-retired president of United States Steel.

Far to the side, in a section cordoned off for customers who did not have white skin, Pat McCutcheon, the No. 1 baseball fan on Orange Street in Dunbar Heights, found a seat in the bleachers and began urging the team on with his foghorn voice. As it turned out, most of the cheering that day, black and white, was for Clemente. In the sixth, he fired a throw to third that would have nailed a runner if only the third baseman had been ready. Then in the seventh he made two consecutive shoestring catches, the first on a dead run, the second while sliding gracefully to his right, and two thousand fans roared and rose for a standing ovation as Clemente galloped to the dugout after the third out. "The sight of him in spring training encouraged all of us," said Bob Friend, the pitcher. "After all the lean years, to have a player of that talent on our team was pretty heady stuff."

Beautiful weather, buoyant crowds, good play-it all seemed so free and easy, but of course it was not. Fort Myers in the mid-fifties might have seemed serene to the businessmen who ran it and to the visiting sportswriters from Pittsburgh ("a beautiful little Florida town," Al Abrams wrote), but to young Clemente the prevailing culture was an affront. At home in Puerto Rico, his family seldom talked about race. It was not an issue when he played baseball in the winter league, but here it was unavoidable. Three memories from that first Fort Myers spring stayed with him. He remembered the subdued behavior of black players who feared they might be cut or sent to the minors for the smallest act of a.s.serting themselves. He remembered the way blacks were kept on the bus whenever the team stopped to eat on the road. And he remembered, or thought he remembered, a derogatory description of him that appeared in the local paper. Years later, in a reflective interview with Sam Nover, a Pittsburgh broadcaster he trusted, Clemente said: "When I started playing in 1955 . . . every time I used to read something about the players, about the black players, [the writers] have to say something sarcastic about it. For example, when I got to Fort Myers, there was a newspaper down there and the newspaper said, PUERTO RICAN HOT DOG arrives in town. Now, these people never knew anything about me, but they knew I was Puerto Rican, and as soon as I get to camp they call me a Puerto Rican hot dog."

It is not clear where Clemente saw that derogatory reference. A study of every edition of the Fort Myers's newspaper in 1955 from before training camp opened until the team headed North shows no story or headline where Clemente was called a hot dog. In his "Keeping Score" column, Len Harsh once called him "a fiery young Puerto Rican," and another time said he "has some rough edges that need to be smoothed out" but Harsh liked Clemente and was invariably complimentary. The front section of the paper was indeed full of racist stereotypes. The January 22 front page, published more than a month before Clemente arrived, featured two stories that belittled Puerto Ricans. CRAZY PUERTO RICAN GIVES COPS WILD RUN read the headline of the first story, about a young man who led local police on a high-speed chase through town. The second story, under the headline NUDITY BANNED FOR PUERTO RICANS, reported on the agricultural town of Immokalee, to the southeast of Fort Myers, where the constable announced that he was banning the practice of letting Puerto Rican toddlers run around without clothes. "In accord with the custom, brought from the island and long practiced by Spanish and Indian forebears, Puerto Rican migrant workers here have been letting their toddler-sized children play up and down the streets naked as jaybirds," the report said. "Constable Joe Brown told parents the kids better wear pinafores, shorts or at least bikini-style diapers. He acknowledged that in his hometown of Tampa Cuban kids go without clothes but only in the Latin neighborhoods where there are no objections." This was the social atmosphere of 1955 Florida, and Clemente hated it.

Could it have been a Pittsburgh paper that called him a hot dog? The archives show no such reference there, either, though some descriptions came close. In one of his columns, Al Abrams wrote: "From the standpoint of showmans.h.i.+p and crowd appeal, this Clemente will be the right Forbes Field ticket. The dusky Puerto Rican . . . played his position well and ran the bases like a scared rabbit. It seemed that every time we looked up there was Roberto showing his flas.h.i.+ng heels and gleaming white teeth to the loud screams of the bleacher fans." Abrams most likely was unaware of how loaded those words might seem to his subject, meaning it only as high praise, and certainly not trying to imply that he was turned off by Clemente's flair. So it was close, but still no hot dog. Perhaps a heckler in the stands or a sportswriter after a game called Clemente a hot dog for making a basket catch and he conflated that oral account with a newspaper story he didn't like. In any case, he was deeply troubled by the stereotypes and sought out more experienced Latin players to see how they felt. Carlos Bernier and Lino Donoso, who were trying to make the Pirates, urged him to contain his anger. His friend Vic Power, who arrived in Fort Myers with the Kansas City Athletics, told him about an incident where the team bus had been pulled over by cops and Power had been dragged off because he had taken a Coca-Cola from a Whites-only roadside service station.

The message, according to Clemente was the same. "They say, 'Roberto, you better keep your mouth shut because they will s.h.i.+p you back,'" But Clemente did not want to stay silent. His sense of fairness overtook his innate shyness. "This is something that from the first day, I said to myself: 'I am the minority group. I am from the poor people. I represent the poor people. I represent the common people of America. So I am going to be treated as a human being. I don't want to be treated like a Puerto Rican, or a black, or nothing like that. I want to be treated like any person that comes for a job.' Every person who comes for a job, no matter what type of race or color he is, if he does the job he should be treated like whites."

As much as the sport itself, it was the issue of basic human dignity that drove the Pittsburgh Courier in its intense coverage of the Pirates camp that spring. With a vibrant sports section featuring columns by Wendell Smith and Bill Nunn Jr. and cartoon sketches by Ric Roberts, the Courier, Pittsburgh's black weekly newspaper, reported on the integration of major league baseball with a depth and pa.s.sion that equaled any other publication in America. Al Dunmore, the paper's correspondent covering the Pirates in Fort Myers, filed regular dispatches on the ups and downs of the team's non-white prospects. In the headline jargon of black newspapers of that era, these players were often called "tans." Along with four minor leaguers who had been in Fort Myers for Mr. Rickey's training school earlier in February, there were six major league prospects in camp that year, the most in the team's history: Curt Roberts, a second baseman, pitchers Lino Donoso and Domingo Rosello, and outfielders Carlos Bernier, Roman Mejias, and Roberto Clemente.

It seemed to the Courier correspondent that only Clemente, among the six, was secure in his position with the club. "The highly publicized Roberto Clemente must be retained a full year as a drafted player," Dunmore stated in an early spring training report. And from his observations, the young Puerto Rican's play merited a job in any case. "Clemente is just about everything promised, lacking only major league polish," he wrote. The artist Ric Roberts, in his first sketch of the spring, drew "Rookies and Robins," a collection of promising black rookies, with Clemente prime among them. There he was in Pirates uniform, charging a ball in right field at full speed, with a balloon caption of him saying, "EXTRA BASE? NO!" Certainly no hot-dog portrayal from the Courier.

If the Courier men were impressed, old man Rickey remained uncertain about the prize he had s.n.a.t.c.hed from the Dodgers. On the afternoon of March 23, he sat in the stands at Terry Park and kept up a running commentary as the Pirates played the Chicago White Sox on Merchant Appreciation Day. The day before, Clemente had poked his first home run of the spring, and against the White Sox he cracked out two singles and a triple. But Rickey was concerned. He thought that Clemente's running was improving after days of tutoring from coach George Sisler, who taught the rookie how to take sharper turns around the base paths. But at the plate, Rickey observed, Clemente seemed off balance, stepping away from the ball, trying to pull it too much. It could be a fatal flaw, Rickey feared. "I will not be surprised if Mr. Clemente gets to the place where he will be permitted only to play against left-hand pitchers. When the pitchers in the National League know his terrific weakness on sidearm pitching, he will not get anything else to hit." He asked Sisler to work his magic on Clemente at the plate.

Most of the attention in the Courier all spring was directed not at Clemente and the question of whether he could hang in there against sidearming righties, but on Curt Roberts and concerns about whether he could keep his job at second base.

Roberts was another of the baseball elders who paved the way for Clemente, a lineage that began with his fellow Puerto Ricans, Hiram Bithorn, Luis Olmo, and Vic Power. Only a year earlier, seven seasons after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, Curtis Benjamin Roberts made history in Pittsburgh by becoming the first black Pirate. None other than Mr. Rickey, the engineer of baseball integration, had recruited Roberts, who like Robinson had played in the Negro American League for the Kansas City Monarchs. But Roberts was no Jackie Robinson. He was an unprepossessing middle infielder from the East Texas timber town of Pineland with a slick glove but not much of a bat. Listed at 5'8'' but probably at least two inches shorter, Roberts played three years with the Pirates' minor league affiliate in Denver. During his stay in the minors he was switched from shortstop to second base and earned the admiring nickname "Little Man" from his manager, Andy Cohen, who was Jewish and sympathetic to the black ballplayer's situation. Roberts had good range, excelled at charging slow-rolling grounders, and led minor league second bas.e.m.e.n in fielding percentage and a.s.sists.

By the time he reached Pittsburgh in 1954, Roberts had received the Rickey tutorial on how to survive in the dominant white sports culture, advice that boiled down to three words: ignore the abuse. Easier said than done, of course. Christine Roberts, the player's wife, told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Ed Bouchette that when she attended games at Forbes Field she heard constant shouts of "Knock the n.i.g.g.e.r down!" and "Hit him in the head." It got so bad that she preferred sitting in the upper deck. "The people in the front were the most vicious. They wanted to make sure [Curt] heard them." But she never turned to look at the bigots. "I had to ignore them like Branch Rickey told us," she said.

Roberts began his major league career with a bold stroke. With a bitter April wind slicing across the diamond as the Pirates opened at home for the first time in sixty-one years, he belted a triple in his first at-bat off the accomplished Phillies right-hander Robin Roberts, leading the woeful Pirates to an unexpected victory. He went on to start 134 games that year under Fred Haney, the rookie manager, with mixed results. In the field, some local writers said he was smoother than any Pirate second baseman in decades. But at the plate his average was a meager .232. It was his inability to hit that found him fighting for his life in the spring training camp of 1955, a struggle chronicled in detail by the Courier.

ROBERTS PLAYS BALL IN SPITE OF RUMORS, read an early headline from spring training. "The pre-spring ballyhoo about Gene Freese with the Pirates hasn't fazed little Curt Roberts in his bid to retain the second-base job on the club. The little fellow with the slick glove has been his usual self hounding ground b.a.l.l.s around second," correspondent Dunmore wrote. Freese, who came from Wheeling, West Virginia, considered Pittsburgh's southern backyard, was nearly as short as Roberts (his common nickname was Augie, but college teammates called him the Microbe). But he had more pop in his bat. After starring in the minors for the New Orleans Pelicans, he came to spring training with glowing publicity. As Dunmore described Freese, he seemed "desperate in his madness to take over the job." He had also impressed the starting shortstop and quiet team leader, d.i.c.k Groat, just back from two years in the Army, who invited Freese to room with him. But Roberts was "a determined little cuss" who would not give up without a fight, Dunmore said. In his next article under the headline NINE MORE HITS ALL HE NEEDED, Dunmore noted that with those extra nine hits Roberts would have been a .250 hitter the previous year instead of "a wretched .232" and wouldn't have to worry about losing his starting role. Branch Rickey himself had made the p.r.o.nouncement that "all Roberts has to do is. .h.i.t .250."

What a fine line between success and failure those nine hits were, as Dunmore presented the dilemma: "Sixteen times did enemy gloves rob him of potential hits. Five times was he called a dead duck at first when in the opinion of his mates, at least, he might have been given the nod."

In the larger scheme of baseball, the battle for the second-base job on a perennial last-place team was not much of a story. But from the perspective of the Courier and its readers.h.i.+p, Curt Roberts and all his hopes and sufferings were telling drama. "Back in Pittsburgh the question of Curt, with reference to the immediate future, is household conversation," Dunmore wrote. "Day by day the question mounts: Did Curt play yesterday?" The question mounted, if nowhere else, back at the Courier's office on Centre Avenue in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and perhaps in black neighborhoods in eight other cities where editions of the influential weekly circulated. One day, Dunmore confronted manager Haney about Roberts's lack of playing time. His report on the interview was filed under the headline WE ASK HANEY "WHY?" Haney explained that hitting was not the only weakness he saw in Roberts; he also questioned the strength of his arm on relay throws from the outfield. Then Dunmore went to the white sportswriters-Hernon and Biederman and Chilly Doyle-and asked them why they were ignoring Roberts: "Pittsburgh reporters, questioned about a charge that they were 'freezing' Roberts out"-wordplay on the last name of the second-base compet.i.tion-"said they could write little about a man they didn't see play. They said that even during the winter the Pirates talked about Freese in discussing spring plans." In the end, Roberts made the regular season roster, but lost his starting job.

From the perspective of the black newspaper, this was unfortunate, but only a lost battle in a larger war for racial equity that was being won, however slowly. In the same edition that announced pitcher Lino Donoso's demotion to the Hollywood Stars and Roberts's place on the bench, the Courier ran a story accompanied by a Ric Roberts sketch about the economic gains blacks had made in baseball. PAID 45 TAN STARS SUM OF $1,596,500 trumpeted the headline. The paper's study of salaries paid Jackie Robinson and the forty-four blacks who followed him into the majors from 1947 to 1955 showed that they had been paid an aggregate sum of more than a million and a half dollars. If Robinson had remained with the Kansas City Monarchs, the Courier estimated, his total pay over seven years would have been no more than $35,000. Instead, with the Dodgers, he had earned a total of at least $252,000. Behind Robinson in the salary rankings, a list that included active and retired black players, were Larry Doby of the Indians, $182,000; Roy Campanella of the Dodgers, $125,000; Satchel Paige of the Indians, $105,000; Luke Easter of the Indians, $103,000; Monte Irvin of the Giants, $97,000; Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas (Minnie) Minoso of the White Sox, $77,000; Hank Thompson of the Giants, $76,000; Don Newcombe of the Dodgers, $73,000; Sam Jethroe of the old Boston Braves, $57,000; and Willie Mays of the Giants, $40,000. The twenty-eight veteran black ballplayers in the league were expected to earn $445,000 in 1955. If thirteen rookies stuck with their clubs, the total would jump to $549,000.

Roberto Clemente did not add much to the total. On February 3, while he was still in San Juan, he had signed his first major league contract for $6,000.

When the decade started, the Pirates asked for patience. It was a five-year plan, fans were told. Then it was Operation Peach Fuzz, the force-feeding of young players who were not ready. As the fifth season approached, Rickey was feeling the harsh sting of skeptics. "I am by no means perfect," he wrote in a private memo in his own defense. "I am not a baseball G.o.d. I have never pretended to be so. I do not claim perfection. Far from it. But I am not G.o.d d.a.m.ned and I will never be. No series of articles from writers anywhere can divert me from the job at hand or dull the edge of my courage to do the things I think ought to be done to bring a great team to this town. Cicero had his Cataline, Abraham Lincoln had his Vallandigham, and even ordinary individuals like myself can have detractors." But the future will answer all critics, Rickey said. And the future was now. Nineteen fifty-five, he boasted, would be the time when "the bells will start ringing as the red wagon comes down the street. That's when the Pittsburgh folks will shout, 'By George, this is it!'"

In fact, once the team went North, the fifth season of Mr. Rickey's five-year plan was over almost as soon as it began. The Pirates lost their opener at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and never looked back. They just kept on losing, eight losses in a row. A few games were close. The scoring totals for those opening eight against the Dodgers, Giants, and Phillies were: Opponents 54, Pirates 16. Rickey's judgment that Clemente would have trouble with right-handed pitchers was pa.s.sed along to Fred Haney, the manager, who kept him on the bench as the season began, despite his productive spring. It was not until the fourth game that Clemente made his debut, on the afternoon of April 17 at Forbes Field against the Dodgers. Johnny Podres-a southpaw who later that year pitched Brooklyn to its finest hour, shutting out the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series-was on the mound when Clemente rapped a bounding shot to the left side of the infield. Shortstop Pee Wee Reese knocked the ball down but could not make a play at first. A ground ball single in a losing game with a lame last-place team; no way to know then that someday people would look back on that hit as a piece of baseball history.

In the clubhouse under Forbes Field, dank and ancient, Clemente was given a locker next to another rookie, none other than Gene Freese. There was no animosity between them, although Clemente felt that Curt Roberts had not been given a fair chance to keep his second-base job. Freese liked to tease Clemente about the rats that roamed the encrusted tunnel between the clubhouse and dugout. Had 'em for pets down in West Virginia, he would say, knowing that Clemente could not stand the sight of them. Clemente and Freese were not strangers. They had competed against each other in the Puerto Rican winter league. Freese had played for the San Juan Senadores in 1954, and had made the All-Star team, where he met Clemente and Willie Mays. One of his proudest moments, as he would recall it decades later, came before the All-Star game when several players took part in a sixty-yard dash. There is no official record of the event, but by Freese's account Hal Jeffcoat won, George Freese, his brother, playing for Mayagez, finished second, he came in third, and trailing behind them were the Santurce club's two speedsters, Mays and Clemente. "They would look fast, but in a straight dash, we beat them," he said.

It was typical of Pittsburgh teams of that era that Freese was best known for an oddity. To have brothers Gene and George Freese on the same team was uncommon enough, but the Pirates took it a step further. They also had Johnny and Eddie O'Brien, who were not only brothers but identical twins. No team before or since had the brother act going quite like the 1955 Pirates, though the Giants later would have three brothers Alou. And the O'Briens provided another curious dimension. If the team lacked talent in baseball, it could field one powerhouse basketball squad. The O'Briens, known as the Gold Dust Twins, had led the Seattle University Chieftains to the NCAA basketball tournament in 1952 before being recommended as baseball players to Branch Rickey by Bing Crosby, who was vice president of the Pirates board of directors. (On stationery with a Bing Crosby/Hollywood logo, the crooner wrote Rickey: "I think you'll agree that they are colorful performers and one boy has decidedly good form and a hook slide.") Then there was d.i.c.k Groat, the shortstop, who had been an All-American guard at Duke. And for a front line the Pirates could send out d.i.c.k Hall and Nellie King, both 6'6'' (a center's height in those days) and 6'4'' Dale Long. All good for a winter recreation league, but not of much use at Forbes Field.

Gene Freese, playing second base and then moving to third, got off to a great start. It seemed that any ball that blooped off his bat fell in front of the outfielders. No such luck for Clemente, who after a hot first two weeks began las.h.i.+ng the ball right at someone, making him so frustrated that he broke several batting helmets. If a white player broke a helmet, he was considered a fierce compet.i.tor; when Clemente did it some teammates and sportswriters thought it was another manifestation of s...o...b..ating, like his basket catch. (Breaking helmets was a mixed blessing for the man upstairs. It cost the team money, yet profited Branch Rickey at the same time. The fibergla.s.s and plastic batting helmet was one of his innovations, and Rickey and his friends and family owned a company, American Baseball Cap Inc., which manufactured them under Patent No. 2,698.434, issued January 4, 1955. Clemente later would give testimonials to the helmet's effectiveness.) The general impression in the locker room was that the Puerto Rican kid barely knew any English because he didn't speak that often and when he did, in his soft, tenor voice, his words were heavily accented. Local sportswriters, when they quoted him, spelled his comments phonetically, a practice that infuriated him. But he was learning the language quickly from a wide variety of sources, ranging from the cute inanities of television cartoons to the piercing profanities of the locker room.

He called Freese "Magoo," as in Mr. Magoo, because Freese liked to talk like the blind-as-a-bat cartoon character. "Hey, Magoo," he blurted out one day in the clubhouse. "How come you Magoo get f.u.c.king bloop hit and I hit line drive out?"

Freese had an answer. "You got an unlucky number, Clemente," he said.

His number was thirteen. "Hey, Hoolie!" Clemente called out to the locker room attendant. "Find me another s.h.i.+rt!" A legend grew later that Clemente had counted out the number of letters in his first name, last name, and mother's maiden name, Roberto Clemente Walker, and had used the total for his new number. In fact, it was just random: No. 21 was available.

Every two weeks of the season, the Courier ran a special box called "What They Are Doing," which listed the batting statistics of the black starting players in both leagues. A month and a half into the season, Clemente's name was in the top-ten batters on the paper's list. His pal Vic Power was number one, sprinting to a .359 average in Kansas City, just ahead of Elston Howard, the man the Yankees chose to make their first black player instead of Power. Roy Campanella was tearing up the National League with ten home runs and thirty-nine runs batted in. And then came a trio whose names would be linked many times over the years as they combined to form an All-Star outfield that could not be surpa.s.sed: Willie Mays of the Giants, Henry Aaron of the Braves, and Roberto Clemente of the Pirates. Clemente had been at-bat 134 times and was. .h.i.tting .284 with three homers and sixteen runs batted in. He had been hitting well over .300 until falling into the first slump of his career.

Two weeks later, after another hot streak, he was playing well enough that the Courier spread a headline across the top of the sports page: CLEMENTE MAY BRING "ROOKIE OF THE YEAR" LAURELS TO PIRATES. The article by sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. noted that there had been "something different" about the previous season-it marked only the second time since Jackie Robinson broke in that "a Negro didn't win either the Baseball Writers' a.s.sociation or The Sporting News National League 'Rookie of the Year' award." Robinson, Don Newcombe, Sam Jethroe, Willie Mays, Joe Black, and Junior Gilliam had all won in recent years. Then along came Wally Moon of the St. Louis Cardinals, who beat out Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks in 1954. In Pittsburgh, Nunn said, "they think they might have the man" to restore the tradition. "A 20-year-old rookie outfielder who came to the Pirates by way of the Brooklyn Dodgers farm club at Montreal, Roberto Clemente has proved thus far to be one of the cla.s.siest rookies in the loop. He's the gem many experts claim may eventually lead the Pirates to the gold that goes to those teams ending in the first division. Although he speaks only a little broken English, there is nothing about the bat Clemente's been carrying around which doesn't put him near the head of the cla.s.s when it comes to being heard. As this is being written, the speedy Puerto Rican is batting a very respectable .302." And the Pirates, as that was being written, were already dead ducks, twenty games under .500 at 2141.

One phrase in Nunn's glowing account-"he speaks only a little broken English"-reflected Clemente's precarious position in Pittsburgh. He was black, yet as a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican was somewhat removed from the indigenous black community of Pittsburgh, and even further removed from most of his white teammates, separated by language, race, and age. The Pirates might have been mediocre, but they were for the most part an easygoing lot. Many of the single guys lived in the same apartment complex and went to the same bars. They thought Clemente was shy and wanted to be by himself. They could not see the world through his eyes: the meaning of his family life in Carolina with Don Melchor and Doa Luisa and all of his older brothers and cousins, the pride he felt for his island, the matter-of-fact racism he had encountered every day in Florida, the social isolation of being a Spanish-speaking black kid in a clubhouse of older white men, athletes who seemed from another place and generation, including one, Sid Gordon, who was born when the United States entered World War I. Only a few people were hostile; Elroy Face, the effective little fork-balling relief pitcher and hillbilly musician, had no use for Clemente from the beginning. Jack Hernon, the Post-Gazette sportswriter, for various reasons, felt the same. Most of the guys were cordial, but still there was a distance. "He was very quiet. A gentleman. Always complimentary," Nick Koback, a rookie catcher, said of Clemente. "Sometimes he would come out on the field and bulls.h.i.+t with me. He'd say, 'Hey, you-strong guy!'"

Pittsburgh was advanced well beyond Fort Myers on racial issues, but blacks, who according to census data comprised about 16.7 percent of the population (less than most other major Northern cities), were for the most part confined to the Hill District and Homewood and efforts to move out at times met ugly acts of resistance. GO TO HILL! NEGRO FAMILY TOLD blared a headline in the Courier that summer over a story about the Sanford family, Mahlon and Beatrice and their thirteen-year-old daughter Mary, who were threatened with violence when they moved from the Hill to a rental house in the town of Glenfield. On the door of their house, where windows had been broken by vandals, the Sanfords found a scrawled note that read: n.i.g.g.e.r-don't let the sun set on you here. Your place is the Hill District. Don't mar our town. Clemente did not face anything as nasty as that, but like Curt Roberts a year earlier, he heard racist bench-jockeying from opposing teams during games. Roberto had the same urgent will and strong sense of self as Jackie Robinson, and it was as hard for him as it had been for Robinson to follow Mr. Rickey's advice to ignore the abuse.

In the working-cla.s.s neighborhoods of the old city, there was still much resistance to integration, even on the ball field. Richard Peterson, who grew up on the South Side and went on to become a professor of English and a lyrical essayist about Pittsburgh sports, was just starting to play an outfield position on his high school team that year and later recalled that he was looking for a Pirates outfielder to be his new hero. Clemente would have been the one, except for his race. "The only problem was Clemente himself," Peterson noted a half-century later in a column in the Post-Gazette. "I was living on the South Side, at that time a shot-and-a-beer neighborhood defined by its ethnic enclaves, its steel-mill mentality and its deep distrust of minorities. My working-cla.s.s father and his beer-joint buddies, while diehard Pirates fans, believed that black ballplayers were ruining baseball, and I was my father's son. I had plenty of help in my early prejudice against black ballplayers."

Clemente's first friend in Pittsburgh was Phil Dorsey, who worked at the Post Office and had served in an Army Reserve unit with Bob Friend, the starting pitcher whose name matched his personality. After Friend introduced him to Clemente in the clubhouse after a game, Dorsey gave the right fielder a ride back to his stuffy little room at the old Webster Hall Hotel. Soon they developed a routine, with Dorsey, when he was off work, driving the carless Clemente to and from games and out to eat. The life of a ballplayer comes with oceans of free time, and Dorsey helped Clemente fill them. They played pool and penny-ante poker and ate Chinese food and went to the movies. Clemente loved westerns, and would memorize lines from them as a way to learn more English. (Years later, in the clubhouse several hours before a game, a teammate saw Clemente standing in front of a mirror with a young Latin player, helping the newcomer with English by having him repeat a phrase from The Lone Ranger: "You go into town, I'll meet you at the canyon.") Realizing that Clemente was miserable at the hotel, a setting so depressingly different from his home life in Puerto Rico, Dorsey found an apartment that Clemente could share with Roman Mejias, the other Latin on the club. But Mejias stayed up late and made a lot of noise with the hangers when he put away his clothes, and part of the building turned out to be a brothel. Finally, Dorsey set up Clemente with his friends Stanley and Mamie Garland, a childless black couple who had an extra room available at their trim red-brick house at 3038 Iowa Street in Schenley Heights, a middle-cla.s.s black neighborhood up the hill from the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Garland worked at the Post Office with Dorsey, and his wife held a supervisory job at Allegheny General Hospital.

The Garlands had let rooms to college students before, but never to a major league ballplayer. Mamie Garland had qualms about the idea. Roberto was young, single, and gorgeous. Women jostled to get near him before and after every game, and one of Dorsey's roles became that of the gatekeeper for Clemente's women. Mrs. Garland, before taking in Clemente, wanted to get it straight that there would be no women in the house. Clemente a.s.sured her that he did not like to party at home and that he was quiet and always trying to get his rest. He was a very peaceful person, he said. She would have no problems with him. It was just a room at first, nothing more. He went out for meals. But Mamie Garland was a good cook, and the aromas drifting up to his room from her kitchen were too much for him. One day he stocked her freezer with steaks and other cuts of beef that he had brought home from the butcher shop. They are for you, he told Mrs. Garland, as she recalled the story. Do what you want with them. But I'd like to eat at the table if it's okay with you because I smell those steaks that you prepare. I would appreciate it if you would fix one for me. Please, one of these days, fix one for me. From then on, he ate at the table with the Garlands, and the bond deepened so that he would call them his parents in America and they thought of him as their son.

Looking south and downhill from the rear window of the Garland house, beyond the treetops, Clemente could see the Pitt skysc.r.a.per, the Cathedral of Learning, and to its right his baseball cathedral, Forbes Field, which was only a short if steep walk down the curving streets. Around the block on Adelaide was the house of singer Billy Eckstine's sister. Bill Nunn Jr., the sports editor of the Courier, lived four blocks away on Finland, across from the Williams Park reservoir, and nearby on Anaheim, Dakota, Bryn Mawr, and Cherokee were many of the city's leading black judges, ministers, and nightclub owners. A quarter-mile down the slope to the north ran Centre Avenue, with the Courier offices and presses taking up a half-block at the corner of Francis Street, across from the YMCA, whose pool tables served as a social hub for the Hill, and beyond that came Wylie Avenue and an undulating three-block stretch of nightclubs surrounding the Crawford Grill No. 2, where Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe would go when the Dodgers came to town, and where the musicians entertaining on weekends included John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and Art Blakey. The Crawford Grill had been founded by Gus Greenlee, who also owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball club in the Negro National League and made his money running the local numbers racket along with Boogie Harris, the brother of Charles (Teenie) Harris, the talented photographer for the Courier.

The black Pittsburgh that Clemente entered was a small, tight world. He became a familiar figure on Wylie Avenue, according to Nunn, who ran with the ballplayers when he was not at the office putting out the paper, but as a black Puerto Rican who spoke another language Clemente was somewhat apart from the crowd. The Latino population in Pittsburgh then was minimal, less than 1 percent. "I think it was always tough for Clemente," Nunn remembered. "For years in the black community there was a little tension with blacks from other countries. There were no Puerto Ricans in Pittsburgh to speak of, not like New York. The thing here was steel mills, which didn't draw workers from the Caribbean." Nunn noticed that when Clemente went out his female companions were as often white as black. "Some of the black women just didn't understand him," Nunn said.

In 1955, with no help from the baseball team, not yet, the city of steel was undertaking what civic leaders called the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Mayor David Lawrence, with the cooperation of the corporate elite, had already pushed through smoke ordinances to clean the air, which had grown so thick during the industrial frenzy of World War II that a photograph showed cars driving through town at noon with headlights on. Now they were cleaning the rivers, clearing land, razing buildings, and remaking downtown and nearby neighborhoods, for better and for worse; better for some businessmen and merchants, largely worse for displaced residents. Pittsburgh was a city of neighborhoods, with a rich ethnic mix. Every immigrant group was said to have its own hill, and newspaper. Along with the three dailies and the black-owned Courier, there was also the Jewish Criterion, the Sokol Polski weekly, the Italian Unione, the Nardoni Slovu for Ukrainians, and the Serbian Daily.

It was only at the top that everyone appeared the same. Margaret Bourke-White, the great Time-Life photographer, came to Pittsburgh and took a picture of the manufacturers and financiers who ran the city in the mid-fifties. They posed inside the Duquesne Club on Sixth Avenue, some standing, others settled comfortably in plush leather chairs, with portraits of successive generations of Mellon men looking down from the back wall. Gray and black suits, dark ties, crossed legs, manicured fingers, scrubbed faces, hair combed back-here was the power of Pittsburgh a.s.sembled for an executive session of what was known as the Allegheny Conference: United States Steel, Pittsburgh Plate Gla.s.s Company, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Mellon National Bank, Mine Safety Appliances Company, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, Aluminum Company of America, Consolidation Coal Company, Gulf Oil Corporation, H. J. Heinz Company, Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, Fisher Scientific Company, Duquesne Light Company, Oliver Tyrone Corporation, Carnegie Inst.i.tute, Mellon Inst.i.tute. World-cla.s.s fortunes were made in Pittsburgh, most from the days when it was called "h.e.l.l with the lid off."

A losing baseball team played a minuscule role in the economy of Pittsburgh, but it was one of the few inst.i.tutions that everyone in the city could get behind. Old Forbes Field, built in 1909 and named for a general in the French and Indian War, was easily accessible by bus and trolley. It was located in the Oakland neighborhood, at the edge of the University of Pittsburgh, two miles east of downtown along Forbes Avenue. Across the street, visible over the left-field fence, were the trees of Schenley Park, where the city had just unveiled a new eighteen-foot-high statue of Honus Wagner, shortstop for the first seventeen years of the century, the first and then the greatest of all great Pittsburgh Pirates. Most of the 34,361 seats inside Forbes were affordable for steelworkers as well as executives. Bleacher seats along the left-field line went for a buck. General admission seating in the lower and upper decks of right field cost $1.40. The most expensive season ticket package, known as Plan E, which included field level box seats for seventy-seven games plus a throw-in of sixty-six general admission tickets, went for $143. It was almost enough to draw crowds, but that was something only a better team could make happen. Attendance in 1954 had been the worst since the war years, and 1955 was showing little improvement, under a half-million for the entire home season.

For those who did attend, the rookie stationed in right field offered full entertainment value, whether he was. .h.i.tting or in a slump. Opposing teams kept trying to run on him, and consistently ran themselves out of innings as he compiled eighteen outfield a.s.sists. Deep in the summer, Monte Irvin, Momen's childhood hero, was sold by the Giants to their minor league club in Minneapolis, his career nearing an end. At about the same time, Clemente-beset by nagging injuries: the wrenched spine and neck from the car accident, a sore ankle, a banged-up s.h.i.+n-fell into a slump that would find him struggling at the plate for the rest of the season, with his average eventually dipping to .255 (with five home runs and forty-seven runs batted in). The Pirates would slip with him, finding solace only in the fact that they avoided losing a hundred games. But there was something about Clemente that went beyond results. His little underhanded flips and basket catches, the way he ran hard and threw harder and swung hardest, even the elan with which he wore the traditional cut of the white Pirates uniform with black sleeves, all of this was absorbed and appreciated by patrons who sat down the right-field line, and by the knothole gang youngsters and families who gazed down on him from the stands above the high right-field wall.

From the beginning, there was a bond between Clemente and many baseball fans, especially kids. If they were not bound by prejudice, if they could appreciate Clemente for what he was, they were his. As Branch Rickey said, the law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exact.i.tudes. Sportswriters would almost always frustrate Clemente; either they couldn't see his perspective or he didn't think they could. The system, whatever it was, whatever was holding him back-that ticked him off. Seeing other people get more recognition upset him. The stereotypes of Puerto Ricans made him mad. Being told where he couldn't sit or eat or sleep infuriated him. All of that angered him so much he once called himself a double n.i.g.g.e.r, resorting to a word that also irritated him. But the fans were something else. As a young ballplayer, lonely and burning, he found relief with the fans, and after games, with no wife or children to go home to, Momen loved nothing more than to stand surrounded by admiring strangers-moment.i.to, moment.i.to-and sign his autograph in a sweet-flowing cursive scrawl on their scorecards and baseb.a.l.l.s for as long as they wished.

5.

Arriba! Arriba!

BOB PRINCE, THE PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER ON PIRATES radio and television broadcasts, had a nickname for everyone. That included Prince himself, who was known in Pittsburgh as "the Gunner." Where that nickname came from is a matter of dispute; either it was descriptive of his announcing style or-an equally likely story-his friends started calling him the Gunner after an unhappy husband pulled a gun on him for talking to the man's wife. With his deep, raspy voice, goofy, bespectacled face, skinny legs, ugly plaid sport coats, unbridled home-club s.h.i.+lling, keen sense of humor and intelligence, and bottomless supply of nicknames, metaphors, jinxes, good-luck charms, and idiomatic sayings, Prince was not just the voice of the Pirates, he was in many ways their creator. Baseball teams live in the public imagination, and the Pirates came to life as imagined first by Bob Prince.

At his side in the broadcast booth was Jim Woods, who in Prince's world was called Possum. For those who grew up listening to Prince, there were phrases that transcended cliche because they were embedded so deeply in the cultural fabric of Pittsburgh during that era. We had 'em all the way. Said only after a tense game when it seemed that the Pirates would lose. You can kiss it good-bye. Prince's defining call for a home run. How sweet it is! Proclaimed after a particularly satisfying victory or winning streak. The bases were not loaded but F.O.B., full of Bucs. A ball was not barely foul but foul by a gnat's eyelash. He also had colorful names for the players. Bill Virdon, who roamed center field in wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, was Quail. Smoky Burgess, the rotund catcher, was Shake, rattle, and roll. Vernon Law, the clean-living Mormon pitching ace, was Deacon. Third baseman Don Hoak, aggressive and fearless, was Tiger. Bob Skinner, the lanky, sweet-swinging lefty who played left field, was Dog, or Doggie. Little Elroy Face, the forkball artist who had an unhittable season in 1959, going 181, was The Baron of the Bullpen. He tried calli