Clemente: The Passion And Grace Of Baseball's Last Hero Part 7

The Pirates had a congregation of nervous flyers during that era, including Donn Clendenon, Willie Stargell, Juan Pizarro, and Clemente. Stargell would shout prayers every time their plane flew over the Grand Canyon and encountered any turbulence. Clemente and Clendenon were so shaken during one flight through a Midwestern thunderstorm that they bailed out at a stop in Cincinnati and rode a bus back to Pittsburgh. Pizarro, while playing for the Indians, once got fined by manager Alvin Dark for refusing to fly from Detroit to Cleveland. Clemente usually was too proud to show fear to strangers, but he talked about the perils of flying with his friends. "He used to tell me that he was going to die in a plane crash," Jose Pagn remembered. After coming to the Pirates from the Giants in 1965, Pagn often sat next to Clemente on the team plane, and he noticed that Roberto would never sleep when they were in the air, even during a cross-country flight in the middle of the night. "Then, on one late-night flight to Los Angeles, Clemente somehow fell asleep. "When he was sleeping, he jumped, and I said, 'What is happening to you? What are you jumping for?'" Pagn recalled. " 'What happened, did you eat a rabbit or something like that?' And he said, 'You know what happen, Jose, you know I seldom sleep on airplanes. I went to sleep and I was dreaming that the plane we were traveling on crashed, and the only one that got killed was me.'"

When Juan Pizarro heard that story, in his dry style he said to Clemente, "Well, die when I'm not on the plane, okay?" Pagn took Clemente more seriously and tried to persuade him that dreams were not to be taken literally. "I would say, Clemente, you cannot think about that. That is only a dream. I dream sometimes that I am rich. That does not mean that I will be rich . . . unfortunately."

Vera dealt the most with Clemente's fatalism, though she hated to hear him talk that way. From the time they got married, he had told her that he did not expect to be around too long. "He always had the idea that he would die young," she remembered. "He would say, 'I know that I will die young and never get old, and you will probably remarry.' I would say, 'Don't talk about that. First, don't talk about sad things. Second, G.o.d forbid, if something happens to you, I will never marry again.' He was always talking about that. He measured his time."

At the end of the 1968 season, after the final game in Chicago against the Cubs, he and Vera flew to New York and stayed with their friends Carlos and Carmen Llanos in the Bronx before starting a long European vacation. He did not fear flying with Vera because in his premonitions she would live beyond him. While in New York, they went shopping for furniture to s.h.i.+p down to Puerto Rico. Roberto enjoyed shopping, and was particular in his tastes. He bought his cologne from a little shop in Montreal across the street from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where he could mix his own perfume (a blend of Royal Copenhagen) and keep the ingredients on file. For suits he preferred Clothes of Distinction at the Disco Mart in Chicago (size 38R). His clothes were refined but modish, the collars growing larger and stripes wider with the fas.h.i.+on trends of the era. Much of the furniture in the Ro Piedras house was bought in Pittsburgh, known for its elegant department stores, but he thought they might find some more in New York. What started as a search for furniture ended up as a lesson in sociology that became part of the lore of his life.

The name of the store has been lost to history; Roberto never mentioned the name, nor did Carlos Llanos, who accompanied them, and Vera cannot remember. The rest of the story was unforgettable for them all. Vera was pregnant with their third son, Roberto Enrique, who would be called Ricky. In his wallet, Clemente carried a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills and traveler's checks, all totaling about $5,000. When a sales clerk met them at the door, Roberto said they intended to look through the showroom on the main floor. The clerk asked him to wait until a salesman was found who could take them to another floor of inexpensive furniture. "So they took us to a place where they showed me furniture that wasn't the furniture in the showroom," Clemente said years later in an interview with broadcaster Sam Nover. "And I said, 'We would like to see the furniture downstairs that we saw in the showroom.' And they said, 'Well, you don't have enough money to buy that . . . that's very expensive.' And I said, 'Well, I would like to see it because I have the right to see it as a human being, as the public that buys from you.'"

At Clemente's insistence, they returned to the cla.s.siest showroom. Clemente took out his wallet, nodded toward a furniture set he liked, and snapped, "Do you think this could buy it?" Vera noticed that another clerk was staring at them, puzzled. "I know who you are," he said finally, but couldn't bring up the name. When Clemente reluctantly identified himself, the store clerk's att.i.tude changed. Now he was solicitous, taking the arm of the pregnant Vera as he showed them around. As Clemente remembered the scene later: "When they found out who I was they said they had seven floors of furniture and we'll show it to you and don't worry about, you know, when you walked in we thought you were like another Puerto Rican."

Nothing could have more infuriated Clemente, who carried his intense pride for his people, especially the poor of Puerto Rico, with him everywhere. "I said, 'Look, your business is to sell to anybody. I don't care if I'm Puerto Rican or Jewish or whatever you want to call me. But you see this is really what gets me mad-because I am Puerto Rican you treat me different from other people. I have the same American money that you ask people for, but I have a different treatment. Right now you are giving my wife different treatment, and my friend, because we are Puerto Rican. And I don't want to buy your furniture!' So I walked out."

Since coming to work in the United States in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights era, Clemente had grown more a.s.sertive on questions of racial equality. Martin Luther King Jr. was at the top of the list of people he admired. They had met several times, and King once spent part of a day talking with Clemente at his farm in Puerto Rico. When King was a.s.sa.s.sinated in April 1968, Clemente led the way in insisting that the Pirates and Astros delay opening the season in Houston until after the slain civil rights leader's funeral. The schedule called for games in Houston on April 8 and 9. King was buried April 9. The Pirates and Astros, at the players' insistence, held off playing until April 10. Al Oliver, a black teammate who considered himself one of Clemente's disciples, said Clemente would draw him into long discussions, more about life than baseball. "Our conversations always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along well, no excuse why it shouldn't be . . . He had a problem with people who treated you differently because of where you were from, your nationality, your color, also poor people, how they were treated . . . that's the thing I really respected about him most, was his character, the things he believed in."

What Clemente admired most about King was not his philosophy of nonviolence, but his ability to give voice to the voiceless. "When Martin Luther King started doing what he did, he changed the whole system of the American style," Clemente said. "He put the people, the ghetto people, the people who didn't have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that n.o.body listened to. Now with this man, these people come down to the place where they were supposed to be but people didn't want them, and sit down there as if they were white and call attention to the whole world. Now that wasn't only the black people, but the minority people. The people who didn't have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn't have any power, they started saying things and they started picketing, and that's the reason I say he changed the whole world . . ."

The Clementes spent twenty-two days in Europe. Roberto loved Spain and Italy. Every day, he went off through the streets, talking to strangers, listening to their life stories. In Rome, renewing his boast that all Clementes were part Italian, he ordered boldly from the menu without knowing the language, realizing only when his meal came what he had done. "When they brought that piece of raw meat . . . hah! We were laughing. You're not so Italian! Raw steak," Vera remembered. Before the trip, Clemente had talked several times with his friend Les Banos, the Pittsburgh photographer, about what it would be like. "Clemente wanted to know how people were treated in Europe," Banos said later. "Whether there was prejudice in Europe." Banos, who spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, had worked as a spy during World War II, infiltrating the Hungarian SS and secretly helping Jews escape. It was after listening to Banos and visiting Germany that Clemente began having nightmares about hiding under a house as the boots of a German soldier marched back and forth. At the airport arrival gate in Berlin, he and Vera were stopped and questioned by five men who did not identify themselves and vanished once the tour guide approached and said, "Mr. Clemente?" They must have been looking for someone else. When his tour group pa.s.sed Checkpoint Charlie, Clemente told Vera he was afraid they would be detained. "There was a Mexican on our tour, and when we stopped to get some sodas he was asking questions of the communist guide and the guide was getting nervous," Vera remembered. "The Mexican started shouting, 'Viva Mexico, Libre!' . . . and Roberto said, 'He better stop or I will punch the Mexican!'"

Throughout his career, Clemente was known for making good first impressions on the field. At the start of the 1960 champions.h.i.+p season, he drove in five runs in the first home game. In his first at-bat in the World Series, he singled in a run and knocked the starting pitcher out of the game. Even during his first year of organized baseball, when the Dodgers were trying to hide him in Montreal, he hit an inside-the-park home run in his first spring training game. All during that time, he also luxuriated in the warm embrace of the fans. The occasional volatility of his dealings with sportswriters seemed to have little effect on the people in the stands. That changed, if briefly, on the Sunday afternoon of April 13, 1969. The lost year of 1968 was behind him, but now in the first week of a new season, he was making a bad first impression, and it was not going over well with the fans. The Pirates had won their first three games on the road against the Cardinals, and then came home for a series against the Phillies. Earlier that spring, Clemente had been criticized in the press for bailing out of spring training for several days to have his sore back worked on by Arturo Garcia, a ma.s.seur in San Juan. Joe Finegold, the team doctor, had suggested in private conversations with baseball writers that this was medically unsound and one step above sorcery, an a.s.sessment that only lent more weight to the notion that Clemente, for all his skills, was an individualist rather than team player and borderline nutcase on health issues. Now, in two uncharacteristic games, Clemente hit into three double plays and misplayed a ball hit to right into a two-base error. Roy McHugh, then sports editor of the Pittsburgh Press, watched the games from the press box, and heard something he had never heard before-the fans greeting the great Clemente with a shower of boos.

"Love and hate, goes a folk saying, are the opposite sides of the same coin," McHugh wrote in his column the following day. "It explains, if nothing else, the pa.s.sionate booing of Roberto Clemente at Forbes Field Sunday afternoon." Under the headline FICKLENESS IS A VERY NORMAL THING, McHugh placed Clemente in the company of other great players booed at home: Ted Williams at Fenway, Mickey Mantle in New York, even Joe DiMaggio, jeered early in his career for diffidently refusing to tip his cap. But Williams, Mantle, and DiMaggio, McHugh wrote, all became "deities in their declining years. Clemente, instead of achieving grace slowly, fell from it all at once."

McHugh was a sharp, subtle writer, a professional in every respect. His observation about the booing was accurate, yet there was something deeper to Clemente's story. Clemente, at age thirty-four, was booed for a day, but in fact he was that rare athlete who was slowly achieving grace, not just as a ballplayer but as a human being. The reality of many athletes, even those who become hailed as deities, is that they diminish with time; Clemente was the opposite, becoming more sure of himself and his larger role in life. As a keen observer, McHugh picked up on some signs of this. He noted that Clemente was now able to poke fun at himself and his reputation for complaining about his aches and pains. That same week that he heard his first boos, Clemente showed up at the batting cage displaying a "horribly swollen finger" that turned out to be a slip-on practical joke. And his response to the boos also showed maturity. Rather than making any obscene gestures, like Ted Williams, or complaining about being misunderstood, Clemente waved his batting helmet, as if to say thank you. In the trainer's room after the game, Tony Bartirome came to Clemente's defense. "Those dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, booing you like that," Bartirome said. "I deserved to be booed," Clemente responded. "I stunk out there."

Later, talking to Bill Mazeroski, his oldest teammate, Clemente confided that it hurt him to think the fans would boo him "after all this time." But he would not criticize them in public. They had given him a lift so many times in his career. They were like his parents, always there for him. They were only judging his actions on the field, and hitting into three double plays and making an error were deeds that deserved boos. He would never play for any other fans, he said.

There was a distinction in any case between rooting for Pittsburgh and being a Clemente fan. The real Clemente fans, many of them young people, never booed him. One such fan was Juliet Schor, a tenth-grade student at Winchester Thurston School in the Shadyside neighborhood, who described herself as such "an obsessive Roberto Clemente idolizer" that she took pictures of him on television and clipped every mention of him in the Pittsburgh papers. Schor also possessed a baseball that a friend of her father's brought back from spring training and delivered to her at Children's Hospital when she was undergoing preoperative treatments for scoliosis. It was a Wilson ball, Pony League, horsehide cover, signed in blue ink: "To Juley, I hope that when you get this you are feeling much better. I hope to see you when I get to Pittsburgh. Love, Roberto."

Schor's attachment to Clemente eventually became so overwhelming that she rode a city bus across town early one morning just to stand in the parking lot of his apartment complex in hopes of seeing him. As luck would have it, he came out to his car carrying a basket of laundry. She worked up the nerve to approach him and blurted out exactly how she felt. "I am more in love with you than any person in the world!" Clemente smiled. She thought he must have heard this a million times. He said that he was going to the laundry. Did she want to come along? "I was totally undone by this, that I could just . . . go to the laundry with him," she recalled. "What a mensch. He was so unbelievably sweet and kind and nice to me. And so matter of fact, too. He was talking to me like any other person . . . When it came down to it, it was too overwhelming and I said, 'Oh no.' And he left. He drove off to the laundry." Schor never saw her hero again. She grew up to become a professor of sociology at Boston College. Among the clippings in her Clemente sc.r.a.pbook was a story about people booing him that long ago April Sunday at Forbes Field. "I remember cutting out an article from the Post-Gazette," she said later. "Clemente booed! I kept it for a long time, it was so upsetting to me that it happened."

Aside from that early double-play-and-error skein, Clemente gave fans little reason to boo the rest of 1969. The previous season's .291 average was an aberration, not the typical slide of an aging ballplayer. Clemente began rapping the ball with his trademark ferocity again. No National League pitcher wanted to face him. Ferguson Jenkins, the ace of the Cubs, said that it seemed every time he looked over "there was No. 21 in the on-deck circle, scaring the h.e.l.l out of me. I never liked seeing him there. Didn't I just pitch to him? The lineup always seemed to come around to him too quickly." The only way to pitch Clemente, Jenkins decided, was "right down the middle"-he could reach anything outside, even as far off the plate as he stood. That had been the shared wisdom of most National Leaguers throughout the sixties decade. When Larry Jackson pitched for the Phillies, he once became so frustrated trying to get Clemente out that in exasperation he decided to knock him down. Clemente got up and smacked the next pitch over the center-field fence. That is when Gene Mauch, then manager of the Phillies, established the Clemente rule. As second baseman Tony Taylor remembered: "Mauch would say, 'Let him sleep. Don't wake him up. Don't pitch him inside, he'll kill you. Just throw it right down the middle of the plate and let him hit it.'" But there was no way to get Clemente out, according to Taylor. "I would watch him hit and hit and hit. He was the best I'd ever seen at setting pitchers up. He'd look bad one at-bat and then kill them with the same pitch the next."

Don Drysdale, the fearsome Dodgers right-hander, acknowledged that his fear of a screaming line drive off Clemente's bat helped drive him from the game. In a reflective conversation about retirement with Bill Curry, the former Green Bay Packers center, Drysdale said that he could not see Clemente making that slow walk to the plate without "thinking of that terrible thing that had happened to Herb Score, the Indians' pitcher, when Gil McDougald hit the ball back into his face and almost blinded him." Big D would "stand on the mound and look down at Clemente and the Score thing would pop into his mind and he'd give an involuntary shudder," Curry remembered Drysdale telling him. "It got so bad . . . that when he delivered the ball, he flinched at his follow-through and tucked his head down a bit."

The moment that finished Drysdale's career came on August 5, a Tuesday night in the dog days of the summer of 1969. He was on the mound at home at Chavez Ravine. Clemente came to the plate and smacked a line drive to center, the ball leaving the bat with such velocity that Drysdale could hear it buzz past him. As Curry described the scene later, Drysdale then "had the sensation of a bug crawling on his neck; he reached and flicked at it. Leaning down for the resin bag, he noticed a runny substance on his finger, and still feeling the irritation, he reached up and discovered his ear was bleeding. The ball had actually taken the skin off the top of his ear on its way out to center field." He stayed in to pitch to one more batter, the young catcher, Manny Sanguillen, who was a Clemente disciple. The gopher ball that Drys-dale threw to Sanguillen was his last pitch in the major leagues.

On that same West Coast trip, Clemente had another of his occasional power surges, rapping home runs in three consecutive at-bats against the Giants in San Francisco. (That game, which the Pirates won 105, marked the second three-home-run game of his career, the first coming in May 1967 against the Reds when he drove in seven runs but the Pirates still lost, 87.) Clemente ended the 1969 season with a .345 average, nineteen home runs, twelve triples (his eighth season of ten or more of those rare but beautiful hits), and ninety-one runs batted in. He lost another Silver Bat on the final day of the season to Pete Rose, who bunted for a base hit in his final at-bat to overtake Clemente for the batting t.i.tle. At the end of the 1960s, a brilliant era of National League baseball illuminated by Mays, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Banks, Cepeda, McCovey, Koufax, Drysdale, Marichal, and Gibson, Clemente finished at the top of the game, with the highest batting average of any player over the entire decade. His Pirates, who started the sixties as champions, spent the decade futilely trying to return to those heights, but appeared at least to be on a winning track again. With a crew of young players including Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Dave Cash, Bob Robertson, Gene Alley, and Al Oliver supplementing steady old Mazeroski and the hitting machine trio of Clemente, Matty Alou (231 hits), and slugger Willie Stargell, the Pirates finished 1969 fourteen games over .500, in third place of the newly created NL East behind the Mets and Cubs.

One other event that season was kept quiet at the time but eventually became part of Clemente lore. Aside from a crew of brutes who for obvious reasons never came forward to talk about it, he was the sole witness to the incident, so history has only his version, as pa.s.sed down to Vera, Jose Pagn, Post-Gazette writer Bill Christine, and eventually the San Diego police. It happened during a West Coast road trip after a game in San Diego. As Clemente told the story, he saw Willie Stargell coming back to the Town and Country Motel with a box of take-out chicken, and asked him where he got it. Stargell directed him to a nearby restaurant on the other side of an eight-lane highway. A short time later, as Clemente was walking home with his dinner, he noticed a man walking toward him. A car suddenly swerved onto the sidewalk, a door opened, and the man rushed toward Clemente and pushed him inside. He had been kidnapped by four men: two Mexican nationals and two Mexican-Americans. One was driving, one put a gun to Clemente's mouth, a third held a knife at his back, and a fourth sat on his legs so that he couldn't move. According to Vera's account, which correlates with what Clemente later told Christine, the kidnappers drove Clemente to an isolated park above Mission Valley and ordered him to take off his clothes.

"Once they arrived at the park, they took his wallet and divided up the money," Vera recounted. "They took his clothing, his tie, and he was only left with his pants and one shoe. Roberto was silent at first . . . anesthetized by fear. But he thought he ought to do something. When he said, 'I am Roberto Clemente and if you kill me the FBI will find you,' they didn't believe him." Clemente told a slightly different version to Christine, saying that he informed the men that he played for the San Diego Padres (figuring they had never heard of the Pirates). In both versions, he urged them to look at the ring they had taken from his finger. It was from an All-Star game and had his name on it. And look at the cards in his wallet, he said. When the robbers realized that they had in fact chosen the famous baseball player as their prey, everything changed. "They returned everything to him," Vera remembered him telling her. "They put together the money they had divvied up and put it in his wallet, which they gave to him. They gave him back his s.h.i.+rt . . . and told him to put on his tie so that he would look normal. They took him back to the place where they had swiped him from . . . and his heart jumped again when he saw they were returning. One of the thieves told him, 'Here, you left your food.'"

It would not be unusual if this story, like many stories, became more dramatic with every retelling. Whatever the hidden reality, it fit perfectly into the mythology of Roberto Clemente as a man of the people, respected even by urban desperados.

Nineteen sixty-nine is remembered in baseball as the year of the Miracle Mets. In their eighth season, the Mets overtook the Cubs in August, defeated the Braves in the divisional playoffs, and then shocked the favored Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series. Their champions.h.i.+p was a perfect bookend to the upset victory of the Pirates in 1960, two sc.r.a.ppy underdog teams beating the establishment. From a long-term perspective, the Mets accomplished something even more unlikely than the Pirates did in defeating the Yankees. The expansion Mets became the best club in baseball in 1969 following seven straight sad-sack seasons during which they lost 737 games-an average of more than one hundred defeats a year-and won only 394. Their stunning rise has taken its justifiable place among the great stories of modern baseball. Yet one could argue that in terms of baseball history it was the second most important story of the year. The most significant event in baseball in 1969, and perhaps of the entire decade, might have taken place after the season, on December 13 and 14, inside a conference room at the Sheraton Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players a.s.sociation held its annual winter meeting. There professional athletes took the first step toward freedom.

At ten on the morning of the thirteenth, Marvin Miller, executive director of the players a.s.sociation, called the meeting to order. Seated next to him was Richard Moss, a Pittsburgh native who served as legal counsel. Miller, an economist, and Moss, a lawyer, were skilled organizers who had come to the players a.s.sociation from the steelworkers union in 1966. At the table around them were representatives from each team: Bernie Allen of the Senators, Max Alvis of the Indians, and Ron Brand of the new Montreal Expos; Moe Drabowsky of the Royals, Eddie Fisher of the Angels, and Reggie Jackson (sitting in for Catfish Hunter) of the Athletics; Ed Kranepool of the Mets, Denny Lemaster of the Astros, and Bob Locker of the new Seattle Pilots (about to become the Milwaukee Brewers); Jim Lonborg of the Red Sox, Dal Maxvill of the Cardinals, and Tim McCarver of the Phillies; Mike McCormick of the Giants, Milt Pappas of the Braves, and Jim Perry of the Twins; Gary Peters of the White Sox, Phil Regan of the Cubs, and Brooks Robinson of the Orioles; Tom Sisk of the Padres, Joe Torre of the Cardinals, and Woody Woodward of the Reds; Tom Haller for the National League, Steve Hamilton for the American League, and Jim Bunning for the Pension Committee. And representing the Pittsburgh Pirates, Roberto Clemente. Bunning and Clemente, Pirates teammates at the time and two future Hall of Fame players, had the most seniority among the players, fifteen years apiece, each making the majors in 1955. Clemente, who had replaced Donn Clendenon as player representative after Clendenon was traded, was the first Latin on the board.

Three years into Miller's leaders.h.i.+p of the union, the players had started to a.s.sert themselves. In 1968, they had reached the first collective bargaining agreement with the owners, which among other things raised the minimum salary to $10,000. Now they were negotiating a new contract, and Miller spent the first part of the meeting a.s.sessing the latest management offer. The players wanted to cut the number of regular season games from 162 to 154, but the owners rejected any reduction. The owners also refused to discuss all proposals that would allow players freedom in moving from one team to another, and would not consider the concept of submitting salary disputes to arbitration. They agreed "in principle" to allow players to bring agents into contract negotiations, but refused to include that language in the basic agreement. Their proposal would raise the minimum salary by $500 for each of the next three seasons to an eventual $11,500. They would increase the daily meal money by 50 cents a year to $16.50. By unanimous vote, according to minutes of the meeting, the players rejected the offer but urged the negotiating committee to continue bargaining with the owners.

The players then returned to the central issue of the negotiations, the restrictions on player movement imposed by what was known as the reserve clause, which allowed teams to maintain the rights to players beyond the length of a contract, in effect binding them to a single team unless they were traded or released. For generations of ballplayers, the reserve system had been an accepted part of major league life; all control rested with the owners. Now, slowly, the imbalance of power was being challenged. Miller noted that in the 1968 Basic Agreement the owners had promised to partic.i.p.ate in a joint study of "possible alternatives to the reserve clause as presently const.i.tuted"-but since signing the agreement had "not advanced one single idea of their own for reform." Player representatives agreed that the reserve clause was the most serious issue they faced and had to be resolved in future negotiations. Then Miller introduced an invited guest, Curt Flood, the veteran center fielder who had played twelve seasons for the St. Louis Cardinals. In a blockbuster deal at the end of the 1969 season, Flood had been traded by the Cardinals along with Tim McCarver, outfielder Byron Browne, and pitcher Joe h.o.e.rner to Philadelphia for first baseman Richie Allen, infielder Cookie Rojas, and pitcher Jerry Johnson. The trade infuriated Flood. He did not want to play for the Phillies and started thinking about challenging the system.

As he was introducing Flood, Miller recalled a conversation they had had shortly after the October trade. Miller said he gave Flood "the third degree" to test his convictions. The stakes for an individual ballplayer challenging the system, Miller said, were so great that he was "concerned that any player doing this understand all the consequences-personal and otherwise."

Flood then presented his case. Regardless of what the players a.s.sociation decided to do, he said, he would go ahead with his challenge. He had not yet made public his decision, but was about to announce that he was taking the owners to court to contest the legality of the reserve clause. He said that he was no longer willing to be bought and sold as a piece of property. All players were being treated like slaves, he said. "We are all under the same yoke." Someone had to challenge the system, he added. "I feel I'm qualified and capable of doing it."

According to official notes of the meeting, along with more detailed handwritten notes taken by a partic.i.p.ant, Miller offered two reasons why the players should support Flood. First, when a member of the union undertook a fight of concern to all players "the players a.s.sociation should give a.s.sistance to its full ability." More important, he argued, they should join Flood to ensure that the case was argued effectively and did not result in bad law.

Jim Bunning asked Flood whether he would be taking action if he had not been traded.

Flood responded that his feelings were "brought to a head by the trade." It made him feel like he was being "treated like chattel."

Tom Haller asked whether being black was one of Flood's motivations, given the social situation in the United States.

"I am a black man and we have been denied rights," Flood said. "But in this situation, race should not make the difference. We're ballplayers, all with the same problem."

Tim McCarver, who had been moved from St. Louis in the same trade, asked what might happen if Flood won the case.

The courts would only determine whether the system was legal or not, Marvin Miller answered. It may also award damages, but the real solution had to come from collective bargaining with the owners.

Bob Locker asked what dangers might arise if Flood won.

No danger, Miller said, "so long as all of us understand that our aim is not to wipe it [the reserve clause] out, but to make appropriate revisions."

Milt Pappas asked whether chaos would ensue if Flood won and twenty other players decided to follow him to court.

Clemente spoke up in Flood's defense, pointing out that to that point he was the only player with the courage to take action. "So far," Clemente said, "no one is doing anything."

If they supported Flood, Bunning said, picking up Pappas's train of thought, what would they tell the next player who wanted their support for a similar case?

"We must say to the second player that it is not in the interest of the players a.s.sociation to have multiple cases," Miller said. "We're supporting a test case."

"What other thing can we do?" asked McCarver, making his position clear. "I think there is no choice [but to support Flood]."

"I agree," said Miller. "It is the cleanest way to establish a position."

Clemente then returned to the emotional heart of Flood's case, the imbalance of power that allowed owners to control a player's fate. He told the story of how he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers fifteen years earlier because he wanted to play in New York, even though the Milwaukee Braves offered him three times more money. But the Dodgers decided not to protect him on their major league roster and tried to hide him on the bench with the Montreal Royals. Clemente had no say in this, and was helpless when the Pittsburgh Pirates took him away from Brooklyn in the supplemental draft. With the owners having all the power, he told his fellow player reps, his initial decision to choose location over money was rendered meaningless. It cost the Pirates only $5,000 to draft him, Clemente said, and for that meager sum, as he said of general manager Joe L. Brown, "He had me." Over fifteen years, by Clemente's conservative estimate, if the Pirates made an extra $300,000 by having him on their team, their profit was $295,000.

d.i.c.k Moss, the counsel, said later that when Clemente spoke everyone listened. Even though he was relating his own story, the point Clemente was making was not the complaint of a wealthy super-star-among the few players in the room then making more than $100,000 a year-but a statement of solidarity for younger players. "Roberto was respected by everyone," Moss said. "He was very important to us."

After Clemente's story, the players returned to the specifics of taking up Flood's case. Max Alvis wanted to know how quickly it would get into court. Reggie Jackson asked whether the situation would have been different had St. Louis consulted Flood about a trade. "Basically, yes," Flood said. Jim Bunning asked how Flood and the players a.s.sociation would split the court costs. Haller said there was no problem with the union's finances. Joe Torre said that as long as Curt Flood was serious, and he seemed to be, they had to back him.

The discussion had gone on for more than an hour when Flood was excused from the room. "Are there people here who feel we should not a.s.sist?" Miller asked.

There were none. Brand made the motion to support Flood. McCarver seconded. Clemente, Bunning, and all their younger colleagues voted aye-unanimous, 250. In the minutes of the meeting, the Executive Board made a point of emphasizing that it was not seeking radical change. "The Board reiterated the position of the a.s.sociation that our goal is not to do away with the entire reserve system and subst.i.tute nothing in its place-rather, we seek to make appropriate revisions which will enhance the players' position but which, at the same time, will not endanger the integrity and appeal of the game and will not affect the value of the franchises." It was the modest first step into a new world, though none of those players could then realize how long the journey would take or how different that new world would be. How could Cardinals player representative Joe Torre, in the prime of his playing days, imagine that three-and-a-half decades later he would be managing a $220 million payroll of mercenary Yankees, many of whom made more in a year than he would earn his entire career?

Clemente had intended to take a break from winter baseball in 1969, just as he had the previous year. But he received a call in early December from his old friend and first professional boss, Pedrin Zorrilla, the original owner of the Santurce Cangrejeros, who had returned to the winter leagues as general manager of San Juan. "Would you consider playing here?" Zorrilla asked, knowing that Clemente's contract with the Pirates provided a bonus if he did not play winter ball. "Don Pedro, whatever you say, I will play," Clemente answered. His respect for Zorrilla was so deep that he signed a contract without looking at the salary-different culture, different history, different circ.u.mstances from the major leagues and his disdain for the dominance of owners.

The San Juan Senadores had several top major leaguers, including Indians outfielder Jose Cardenal, Reds first baseman Lee May, and Orioles pitcher Miguel Cuellar, but even with Clemente in the lineup they struggled as a middling .500 team, far behind the Santurce Cangrejeros, who were managed that season by another of baseball's great right fielders, Frank Robinson. At lunch one day during a weekend road trip to Mayagez on Puerto Rico's west coast, Clemente was talking with Zorrilla about the team's troubles and how they could improve things. Listening in on the conversation, Zorrilla's young son Enrique, named for his grandfather, the nationalist poet Enrique Zorrilla, blurted out to Clemente, "Well, that's what we have you there for!" The father gave his son a stern look, and Enrique felt embarra.s.sed for talking without thinking and saying something so embarra.s.sing.

At the stadium that night, before the game, Clemente found Enrique and said softly, "Come with me." Enrique was anxious, still ashamed of what he had said. Clemente led him into the clubhouse and started to change into his uniform as he talked about what it took to be a great baseball player. Enrique was thirteen, standing in front of the great Clemente, who was in his underwear. "You know," Clemente said, "everybody thinks it's easy to go out there and hit and run. But you have to be in good physical condition, because you have to play this game well, especially if you love this game. And if you want to do what you love most in life, you have to be prepared for it. And also, you are playing for people who pay to see you. You are giving entertainment to people. So you have to be the best. So that's why I keep in shape."

Clemente then stretched and asked Enrique to feel his calf. It was rock hard. "A baseball player is just legs. Strong legs. You have to run every day." Clemente had now changed into his San Juan uniform. "Come with me," he said again, and Enrique followed him into the dugout and sat next to him the entire game.

"I had felt so bad for my comment," Enrique Zorrilla said decades later, the memory still fresh in his mind. "And I know that my father must have told him, 'My son feels so bad, so ashamed.' And for at least two or three hours Roberto Clemente dedicated his time to give me some peace of mind. And he gave me the best day of my life, because I will never forget that. It was so heartfelt."

This was typical Clemente. In his world, kids and sportswriters were at opposite poles. Sportswriters rarely understood him, he thought. When they were nearby his tendency was often to retreat to the trainer's room or berate them for a few minutes to release his frustrations. But he sensed that young people understood him intuitively, and he wanted to be around them. Over the Christmas holidays that winter, the Clementes invited another thirteen-year-old to their home in Ro Piedras. It was Nancy Golding, who lived on Fair Oaks Street in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. A few months earlier, Clemente had visited his accountant, Henry Kantrowitz, who lived a few houses down from the Goldings. Kantrowitz's wife, Pearl, adored Roberto and often invited him over for meals. On one of his visits, Nancy had been urged to stop by and play catch with him in the driveway. That experience was unbelievable enough, but then seemingly out of nowhere came a letter from Vera Clemente saying that they would love for her to visit them in Puerto Rico. Nancy's parents agreed, and she found herself flying alone to San Juan at the Christmas break.

"I don't know why they invited me," Golding said decades later. "I wasn't a peer. Not a babysitter. I didn't bring with me anything special to them. I hardly knew them, and they invited me." These are her memories: They were extremely nice to her. She had her own bedroom. One room in the house was just for his trophies. Four silver bats and all those gold gloves: 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968. Always visitors at the house in Ro Piedras. Lots of parties. Commotion, laughing, late into the night. Everything gracious and warm. Clemente busy playing baseball. He took her to Hiram Bithorn Stadium and showed her where he played. She knew little Spanish. Vera spoke a little English with a thick accent. But there was no trouble communicating. She had never before seen someone so revered as Clemente. He was stunningly handsome, extremely soft-spoken, charismatic. You got the sense that he was the king. It awakened her to the realization that there were special people in this world and things happened around them. When she was trying to fly home, Pittsburgh was buried in a snowstorm and she was having a hard time arranging a flight back to the States. Clemente came with her to the ticket counter and in a flash she was on a plane. From then on, Nancy Golding's favorite number was 21. Later in life, she even used it for her garage code.

When Danny Murtaugh made his first comeback as manager of the Pirates, replacing Harry Walker in the middle of the 1967 season, Clemente was so distraught that he closed the door to the trainer's room and asked Tony Bartirome for advice. "I'm in trouble, Dago, what should I do?" he asked. Bartirome told him to forget the past. In the old days, Clemente had felt hurt that Murtaugh considered him a malingerer. The second managing go-round didn't last long; Murtaugh finished out the season and then retired again. A few years later, when the Pirates looked for a manager again before the 1970 season, many people thought the choice would be Don Hoak, the fiery third baseman from the 1960 champions.h.i.+p team. Hoak had been campaigning for the job, and that would have been fine with Clemente, but instead, Joe L. Brown turned a third time to his old reliable, Murtaugh. On the very day that Murtaugh was chosen, Tiger Hoak died of a heart attack on the streets of Pittsburgh, chasing after a thief who had stolen his brother-in-law's car. And so-Murtaugh and Clemente, again. Would it be more of the same for the manager and his star player? Both said no. "As a man and a player, we didn't communicate," Clemente said of their previous relations.h.i.+p. "But as a person I think I'm different now and as a manager I think he's different." Murtaugh, in his own way, agreed. "Clemente's Clemente," he told the press. "He's the best player I've ever seen."

Clemente was thirty-five now and had some physical and psychological b.u.mps during the season. In early May, he bruised his left heel when he caught it on the back of first base rounding the bag in a game against the Atlanta Braves. That injury kept him sidelined for a week. He also suffered from a sore neck, and was in and out of the lineup, but Murtaugh appreciated it when he played and told him to sit-no hard feelings-when his body was overwhelmed. In early July, when he was not elected to the starting All-Star team, but named as the fourth outfielder (behind the Giants' Willie Mays and Hank Aaron and Rico Carty of the Braves), he made the mistake of saying publicly that he would rather take the three days off to rest his shoulder. One reporter quoted him as saying, "To h.e.l.l with the All-Star game." This was not a misquote-Clemente could sound profane and petulant-but he said it as a means of emphasizing that he cared more about the Pirates and the pennant race than about an exhibition game. He said it the wrong way in the wrong year. This was the first year in decades that the starters were chosen by popular vote, making his remarks seem directed at the fans, the very people he courted a.s.siduously. In the end, Clemente did partic.i.p.ate in the All-Star contest in Cincinnati, and helped the National League prevail again. In a legendary game that ended 54 in the bottom of the twelfth with Pete Rose, the h.e.l.l-bent hometown hero, barreling over Indians catcher Ray Fosse for the winning run, Clemente set the stage by driving in the tying run in the bottom of the ninth.

In Pittsburgh two days later, a new era began with the opening of Three Rivers Stadium. Forbes Field, with its ivy-covered wall in left, and stylish fourteen-foot Longines clock above the scoreboard, and center field so vast they stored the batting cage out there . . . Forbes Field, with its high screen at the flagpole in right, and cement-hard infield, and obstructed seats, and dingy and dank locker rooms, and tunnel rats, and Forbes Avenue trolleys, and hucksters and peanut men on Bouquet-old Forbes was obsolete. Now, near where the Monongahela and Allegheny converge to form the Ohio, here rose Three Rivers, a sleek concrete bowl with a record sixty-one turnstiles and sophisticated scoreboard and synthetic playing field and synthetic, zipperless, b.u.t.tonless lightweight stretch uniforms to match-all the latest in modern artificiality. Forbes Field served the city well for more than sixty years, noted the Pittsburgh Press. "Here's to the next 60 at Three Rivers Stadium." (But they didn't build them the way they used to-only thirty years and Three Rivers was gone.) The Pirates were in a pennant race that July, leading the Mets and Cubs in the NL Eastern Division, but even with a solid team and a new stadium they were not attracting big crowds. On July 23 against the Atlanta Braves, they drew only 14,327 fans. One night later, the stadium was packed, 43,290 in attendance. It was not the game that brought them, but the man being honored. July 24 was Roberto Clemente night at Three Rivers Stadium. In the crowd were several planeloads of Puerto Ricans who had been flown up for the event, many of them wearing pavas, the traditional straw hats of Jibaros, the island's rural peasants. Ramiro Martnez, the Cuban-born announcer and jack-of-all-trades who had moved to San Juan in the early 1960s, and had first met Clemente when the Montreal Royals played the Havana Sugar Kings in 1954, helped organize the ceremonies, which were bicultural in every respect, half conducted in Spanish, half in English.

There were tables of plaques and gifts, but at Clemente's request fans who wanted to show their appreciation were asked to donate money to Children's Hospital. Juliet Schor, his devoted young fan, wearing a body cast from her back operation, was one of the youths who took the field to receive the charitable check for the hospital. Vera and the three little boys, all wearing suits, were there, along with Doa Luisa and Don Melchor, who had turned to a psychiatrist to help him overcome his fear of flying so that he could visit Pittsburgh for the first time at age eighty-seven. His friends Carol and Carolyn came over from Kutztown, along with Carolyn's new husband, Nevin Rauch, and sat with Stanley and Mamie Garland, Phil Dorsey, and Henry and Pearl Kantrowitz, his American extended family.

The Puerto Rican side of the ceremony began more than an hour before game time, as the park was still filling with fans. The snug, new Pirates uniforms did not flatter all who wore them, but Clemente came out looking perfect, even in their new tight-fitting synthetic clothes. His family sat on folding chairs behind him on the side of the field as Ramiro Martnez took the microphone and began the proceedings, which were being broadcast on radio and television back to Puerto Rico. He introduced the entire family. Melchor said he was very proud. Luisa said it was an honor to be in Pittsburgh with all the Puerto Ricans who came to honor Roberto. Vera said she was very touched and grateful. Robert.i.to said his daddy was the best baseball player in the world. One by one, the Latin players, Jose Antonio Pagn, Orlando Pea, Manny Sanguillen, and Matty Alou, came out and embraced their friend. Then Martnez invited Clemente to speak. Clemente stood silent, hands on hips, his hat off, looking down. "Oh, Ramiro, before we get started, I'd like to send a big hug to my brothers . . ." His voice was soft, surprisingly sweet and lyrical to those who had not heard it before. He tried to continue, but choked up. Martnez, a showman never at a loss for words, filled the silence.

"That's okay. We understand the emotion," Martnez said. "Roberto is reliving the last forty-eight hours. He has been nervous [with] doubts, emotions, as this moment has been approaching. This is the greatest moment of his existence. We'd like for him to say some words for us. Some words that are surrounded by tears. Men cry, but when men cry it is because their hearts are turning in happiness. And this evening, Roberto Clemente's words for you . . ."

Little Ricky, his youngest son, had escaped from an adult's grasp and toddled toward first base. Robert.i.to, the oldest son, mistook his father's tears for sadness and wondered what had gone wrong. Clemente continued, slowly.

"Ramiro, I would like to dedicate this honor to all the Puerto Rican mothers. I don't have words to express this thankfulness. I only ask those who are watching this program and are close to their parents, ask for their blessing, and that they have each other. As those friends who are watching this program or listening to it on the radio shake each other's hands as a sign of friends.h.i.+p that unites all of us Puerto Ricans. I've sacrificed these sixteen years, maybe I've lost many friends.h.i.+ps due to the effort it takes for someone to try to do the maximum in sports and especially the work it takes for us, the Puerto Ricans, especially for the Latinos, to triumph in the big leagues. I have achieved this triumph for us the Latinos. I believe that it is a matter of pride for all of us, the Puerto Ricans as well as for all of those in the Caribbean, because we are all brothers. And I'd like to dedicate this triumph to all Puerto Rican mothers . . . and Ramiro . . . as I've said, for all those Puerto Rican athletes, for all of those who have triumphed and those who have not been able to. And that is why I don't have words to express this thankfulness. And especially to see my parents, who are already old. The emotion that it gives them. And I want to send a hug to my brothers, Osvaldo, Andres, and Matino, Fafa [his niece, Rafaela], and all my friends in Puerto Rico, thank you."

For the Pittsburgh-oriented half of the ceremony, there were more gifts, an entire yellow pickup truck full of them, and heroic words from his pal the Gunner, Bob Prince, voice of the Pirates. Arriba! Arriba! And when it was over everyone rose and thunderous applause waved across the new stadium and Clemente tipped his cap in recognition. He thanked the fans again during the ball game by the way he played, cracking two hits and making two of his trademark sliding catches, before Murtaugh took him out for another standing ovation in the eighth inning.

In the locker room afterward, reporters jostled around him as Bartirome worked on a cut on his knee. What was going through your mind as you stood out there during the ceremonies? he was asked. Sometimes, the honest answer is, nothing. This time, for Clemente, the heartfelt answer was, everything.

His whole life raced through his mind, he said, going back to the old house in Carolina on Road 887 and his first baseb.a.l.l.s made of socks and bottle caps, and taking the bus to Sixto Escobar to watch Monte Irvin play, and how Roberto Marn believed in him when no one else did, and how Pancho Coimbre and other great Puerto Ricans never got the chance, and how hard he had fought over the years to be understood and recognized for who and what he was, a proud Puerto Rican. Maybe he cried, he was not ashamed to cry, he said. He was not crying from pain or disappointment. But if you knew the history of his island, the way he was brought up, the Puerto Ricans were a sentimental people, and his feelings now were about his island and all of Latin America, and how proud he felt when he stepped on the field knowing that so many people were behind him, and how lucky he was to be born twice, in a way, once in Carolina in 1934 and again in Pittsburgh when he arrived in 1955. "In a moment like this, your mind is a circular stage," he said. "You can see a lot of years in a few minutes. You can see everything firm and you can see everything clear."

11.

El Da Ms Grande

IN BALTIMORE ON THE EVE OF THE 1971 WORLD SERIES, Vera Clemente was deeply concerned about her husband. She had seen Roberto this sick only once before, when he was bedridden, delirious, and losing weight in the spring of 1965. Then it had taken his doctors in Puerto Rico several days to determine that he had malaria. Now the cause was obvious: food poisoning. Earlier that night, Vera, Roberto, and two of his teammates, Jose Antonio Pagn and Vic Davalillo, had joined a festive party of family and friends for dinner at a restaurant in nearby Fort Meade, where Vera's brother, U.S. Army Captain Orlando Zabala, was stationed. Roberto had ordered clams, and by the time they returned downtown to the Lord Baltimore Hotel he was so sick the team doctor had the dehydrated star hooked up to an IV at his hotel bed. "I was so worried," Vera said later. "Tomorrow is the first game of the World Series. He was so weak. I said, 'Oh, my G.o.d, maybe he cannot play.'"

The next morning, after a troubled night, the thirty-seven-year-old Clemente was still weak but determined to play. Only his wife and a few others knew of his illness. The press was preoccupied with the latest discomforts of another Pirate, Dock Ellis, a nineteen-game winner with a sore arm but indefatigable mouth who was scheduled to start the series opener.

During the National League playoffs against the Giants, Ellis had reaffirmed his freewheeling reputation by carping about his hotel bed in San Francisco. Now, before throwing his first pitch in Baltimore, he had switched rooms three times and made headlines by saying whatever entered his mind. He had always been a free-talker, Ellis said, it was just that no one listened until he started winning. "I'm never sorry for anything I say," he explained. "If you don't say what you want in so-called America, I might as well go to Russia." This riff was tame for Ellis, whose eccentricity was amplified by his counterculture predilections for Jimi Hendrix, greenies, dope, and acid, which he once dropped before pitching a no-hitter against San Diego. (The ball appeared to have comet tailings as it soared toward the plate, he said.) None of his beefs about hotel rooms compared with his declaration at mid-season, after he was named to the All-Star team, that he would not be chosen to start because another black pitcher, Vida Blue, was starting for the other league. (In fact, Ellis did start, and was on the mound when Oakland's Reggie Jackson cracked a memorable early career home run off the right-field light tower at Tiger Stadium.) But in the so-called America of 1971, Dock Ellis was a kaleidoscope of color in what many thought would be a monochromatic World Series.

Pittsburgh and Baltimore were solid baseball towns, but there were no teams from New York or Los Angeles for the media machines to hype, and baseball seemed on a downward trend in any case. A Louis Harris survey released that week showed that among the major American sports, football and basketball were rising in popularity while only baseball had declined from the previous year. Baseball games took too long, people complained, and there was not enough action. The consensus in the sporting press was that Orioles versus Pirates was a one-sided matchup that would do nothing to reverse the trend. The O's came into the series as defending champions, winners of 101 games, riding a fourteen-game winning streak that included four shutouts in the waning days of the regular season and a sweep of Oakland for the American League pennant. The Pirates, after losing to Cincinnati in the playoffs a year earlier, had finally captured the National League pennant this time by defeating the Giants, and had run up a respectable ninety-seven wins during the regular season, yet few gave them a chance against Baltimore. In place of the Murderers' Row that the Pirates had faced in their last World Series against the slugging Yankees in 1960, this time they were going up against a fearsome quartet on the mound. Good pitching beats good hitting is the first truism of baseball, and Baltimore had superlative pitching, with four twenty-game winners: Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson.

"Now they'll learn about agony," a San Francisco writer, reflecting the common wisdom, said of the Pirates after they had defeated the Giants. "Now they have to play the reigning champions of the Universe and the light and dark sides of the moon."

Clemente entered the World Series overshadowed again. His magnificent talents as a hitter and fielder were duly acknowledged (Right Field: Roberto is there, and what do you say about a player who can do it all? read a position report in the Baltimore Sun), yet he was not at the center of the discussion. While writers quoted Dock Ellis, many Orioles talked about how much they feared Willie Stargell, who was coming off a career year of forty-eight home runs and 125 runs batted in. That Stargell had gone hitless in the playoffs against the Giants only made Baltimore fear him more. "Willie scares the h.e.l.l out of me," said catcher Elrod Hendricks. "Hitters like him don't stay in a slump very long." Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore third baseman who had made a lifetime's worth of spectacular plays against Cincinnati in the last World Series, said he had watched the Pirates on television several times and was impressed by the power of Bob Robertson. He would "cheat a little," Robinson said, and move a step or two closer to the line when the strapping young infielder came to the plate, since he tended to pull everything.

This lack of attention was exactly what Clemente needed to prepare himself for the occasion. Phil Musick, a Pittsburgh writer who had endured Clemente's wrath and come out on the other side, respecting him, considered him "headstrong and prouder than a lion," and always thought that his enemies "real or imagined, weren't worth the pa.s.sion he invested in them." Perhaps they weren't, but the key phrase was "real or imagined." The truth is they were mostly imagined, and they were imagined for the very purpose of stirring pa.s.sion. Roy McHugh, the Pittsburgh Press columnist, had studied Clemente for years and struggled to understand him, and concluded that he used every perceived slight to his psychological advantage. "Anger, for Roberto Clemente, is the fuel that makes the wheels turn in his never-ending pursuit of excellence," he reasoned. "When the supply runs low, Clemente manufactures some more." And so, offered another chance to show his genius to the world, here came Clemente, at age thirty-seven the oldest player in the World Series, fueling himself with the anger of an underappreciated artist. Hours before the first game, even as he recovered from food poisoning, he told some teammates not to worry, this was his moment, and he was ready for it, and he would not let them down. Jose Pagn heard him recite precisely what he would do to win the champions.h.i.+p for Pittsburgh.

In the final days of the season, Orioles scouts Jim Russo and Walter Youse tailed the Pirates. They traveled on the National League club's plane and stayed at the same hotel. If an opposing player were caught stealing signs from second base, or a team hid someone behind a center-field scoreboard hole for the same purpose, all h.e.l.l could break loose. But scouts were allowed to infiltrate the very bloodstream of another team. It was part of the code of baseball. The Orioles gave the same courteous treatment to Howie Haak and Harding Peterson of the Pirates organization.

Russo and Youse returned from their scouting mission with several tips for Orioles manager Earl Weaver and his staff. One strong recommendation was that the Orioles throw lefties at the Pirates, even though Pittsburgh had a 2919 record against left-handed pitchers during the regular season. They felt that lefthanders might handcuff Stargell and encourage Danny Murtaugh to keep two tough young Pirates. .h.i.tters, Richie Hebner and Al Oliver, on the bench. And no NL team had a pair of southpaws the quality of Dave McNally and Mike Cuellar. Weaver tabbed McNally to start games 1 and 4 or 5, and Cuellar to pitch Game 3 and be ready if necessary to pitch Game 7. Among the Orioles aces, young Jim Palmer, who would pitch games 2 and 6, had the most flash and brilliance, but McNally indisputably was the leader of the staff. Over the past four years he had been the best lefthander in baseball, winning nearly three of every four decisions. He had won twenty or more games each of those years; this year, a McNally cla.s.sic, he had finished with twenty-one wins and only five losses.

Game 1, on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon of October 9, followed predictable form. Clemente doubled in the first off McNally-had he recovered fully from the food poisoning or was he just once again reinforcing the belief that he played best when sick? In either case, Stargell stranded him by striking out, and the Pirates were able to scratch out only two more hits off McNally all day, another by Clemente and a run-scoring single from Dave Cash, the young second baseman whose stellar play had relegated Maz to the bench. Stargell was now 017 in the postseason; Clemente had extended his World Series. .h.i.tting streak to eight games. Aside from a few uncharacteristic blunders in the second inning that allowed the Pirates to score three runs, the Orioles looked smart and dominant. Ellis, his arm as zipless as the double-knit uniforms, failed to survive the third, giving up two home runs and four runs before being yanked. Fans at Memorial Stadium, remembering his insults of their town's hotels, showered him with boos, which Ellis said was nothing because he had once played winter ball in the Dominican Republic.

The key hit came in the third with Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger on second, left fielder Don Buford on first, and center fielder Merv Rettenmund at the plate. At breakfast that morning, kidding around with his nervous father, who supervised a body shop in Flint, Michigan, Rettenmund had boasted that he would hit a home run. Steady rains and football games had made such a mess of the stadium recently that groundskeeper Pat Santarone resorted to dyeing barren spots in the outfield. Now, as Buford led off first and studied Ellis on the mound, he detected a wide splotch of dark green on the baseball and shouted down to the plate urging Rettenmund to ask for a new ball. Rettenmund did, and the bright white replacement never touched dyed ground, flying from Ellis's right hand to Rettenmund's bat and over the fence for a three-run homer.

Solo homers by Buford and Frank Robinson, the great Orioles right fielder, made the final score 53. Ellis, the loser, was out for the rest of the series, his sore arm beyond the help of the finest bed in Baltimore. The star was McNally, with his three-hit complete game. Only three days earlier, his eight-year-old son Jeff had been injured in a bike accident near their home in Lutherville. Once McNally was a.s.sured that his son had not suffered brain damage, he had been able to focus on the Pirates, his powers of concentration aided on this day by the best fastball he had shown all year.

In the locker room after the game, reporters asked Clemente whether he had ever faced such a pitcher as McNally. Given his compet.i.tive nature, his determination to show the world his greatness once and for all, this was not a question he wanted to hear. His answer sounded ungracious if not egotistical, with a touch of Muhammad Ali or Dock Ellis to it. It was not so much a boast as an a.s.sertion of will. "I faced lots of good pitchers," he said. "Another good one don't mean anything to me. Ask him what he thought about me. I got two hits off him so I say we're even."

Eleven years earlier, before the second game of the 1960 World Series, it had rained all night and kept raining until an hour before the first pitch, but the bad weather system rumbled past Pittsburgh just in time and the game was played as s