Hairs vs. Squares Read online

  Bench noticed Pete’s “square jaw” thrust out farther than ever. The two stars went a long time without saying a word to one another. A season-long slump, nagging injuries, cascades of boos on his home turf, bad business deals, and now a fractured relationship with Rose had all been heaped on Bench in the space of a season.

  But what lay ahead was far worse. In September 1972, as the rejuvenated Reds were rolling toward the Western Division title and Bench had bounced back from his problems and was en route to a second NL MVP award, he was rocked to his heels.

  Following what was supposed to be routine physical examinations the Reds receive every September, Bench was given shocking news by one of the doctors: “We’ve found a spot on your lung.”

  A million thoughts raced through the reeling mind of the Reds’ catcher. Why? How? I’m strong as a bull, Bench thought. I’ve never smoked.

  Finally, he was left with just one thought: “What now?”

  It was a question Bench would carry with him as the Big Red Machine made a push to take care of unfinished business.

  Bench’s and the Reds’ biggest challenges to National League supremacy, Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates, had taken care of business the previous October, beating Baltimore in a classic seven-game World Series. After the Bucs won Game Seven in Baltimore, Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger entered the lathery Pittsburgh locker room, sought out Clemente, and told the Pirates right fielder, “You’re the best of all.”

  Hoffberger’s words carried weight with a man who felt he had been denied the acclaim given to other great outfielders of his era—Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Frank Robinson.

  Pirates teammate Bill Mazeroski called Clemente “the total ballplayer.” Maz thought some players were considered superstars when they were really just super hitters. In Maz’s mind there were only three true superstar outfielders in the National League in Clemente’s era—Mays, Aaron, and Roberto. While people talked about the homers Mays and Aaron slugged, they forgot that for most of his career Clemente played home games in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, where center field was the deepest of any park in the league.

  Despite their many years of playing in the same league at the same time, Clemente, Mays, and Aaron had combined to form a dream outfield on just three occasions, three magical midsummer days—the 1965, ’66, and ’67 All-Star Games. Together the three legends would patrol the same expanse a total of twenty-three innings. Clemente and Mays, however, did play in the same outfield in 1954 in the Puerto Rican Winter League for the Santurce Cangrejeros.

  In 1954 Mays was a twenty-three-year-old sensation with the world champion New York Giants and was only recently removed from his stunning over-the-shoulder catch of Vic Wertz’s deep drive to center field in Game One of the World Series in the Polo Grounds. Clemente was fresh off his rookie season with the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top farm team. It had been a frustrating campaign for Clemente, whose playing time was limited by a Dodger organization trying to hide their prospect from opposing scouts.

  A rule at the time (Rule V) stated that any player who received a bonus of at least $4,000 had to be placed on the major league roster within a year or he could be drafted for $4,000. Thus though Clemente batted just 148 times for the Royals and hit only .257 with 2 home runs and 12 RBIs, he was chosen by the Pirates with the first pick of the Rule V draft the following winter.

  Had he not given his word years before to Dodgers scout Al Campanis to sign with Brooklyn, Clemente might instead have been a member of the Milwaukee Braves, who had offered him a $30,000 bonus, three times what the Dodgers offered. Clemente and Aaron had come that close to sharing the same outfield for the Braves.

  In their brief time on the same Winter League team, Clemente and Mays contributed to a lineup nicknamed El Escaudron del Panico (the Panic Squad) and, together with a young shortstop and eventual Most Valuable Player named Don Zimmer, helped Santurce go 5-0 to win the round-robin tournament.

  Six years later, in the Pirates’ 1960 World Series season, Clemente, shortstop Dick Groat, and third baseman Don Hoak were the three players who contributed most to Pittsburgh’s pennant. Clemente was a five-tool player whose career path had been guided in part by Mays’s advice: “Listen, Robbie, don’t let the pitchers show you up. Get mean when you go to bat. If they try to knock you down, act like it doesn’t bother you. Get up and hit the ball. Show ’em.”

  Clemente showed them, and in the summer of ’60 he, Groat, and Hoak were MVP candidates. Groat won the award, and Hoak finished second. Clemente finished eighth. Maz thought the snub affected Clemente on a personal level and made him bitter.

  Some believe it took Clemente several years to get over it. The reality was that Roberto never got over it. He refused to wear his 1960 World Series ring, preferring instead his All-Star ring from the same season. It wasn’t that Clemente felt he should have won and didn’t that bothered him. It was that he couldn’t see how he had finished eighth in the voting.

  While Clemente rarely set goals, the snub made him set one in 1961. “I made up my mind,” he said later, “to win the batting title in 1961.”

  Opposing pitchers paid the price for the MVP slight. Clemente raked enemy hurlers, leading the league in ’61 with a .351 batting average while banging 23 homers, driving in 89 runs, and scoring 100. Writer Larry Bortstein thought it a violent reprisal from Roberto. Clemente, perhaps still leaning on the advice from Mays, did not disagree. “I play better,” he stated then, “when I am mad.”

  He led NL outfielders with 27 assists and gained a Gold Glove award for his fielding excellence. He would win a Gold Glove every year for the remainder of his career.

  Clemente’s outfield play was almost without peer. His cannon-like throws—he squeezed a rubber ball to strengthen his throwing arm—terrorized base runners. Fans around the league loved it when a ball was launched deep to right field and would lean forward in anticipation as Clemente, sometimes out of sight of viewers if he was chasing a drive deep into the corner, would retrieve the ball, whirl, and unleash a laser-like throw from the deepest recesses of the outfield. Still the proud Clemente took it as a slight when people said he had “one of the best arms” in the game. “If you can find one better,” he would say, “let me know where.”

  Like teammate Manny Sanguillen, Clemente was an exceptional bad-ball hitter. Roberto lashed at pitches outside the strike zone but made contact while doing so. Beginning in 1961 he had started using a heavier bat to slow down his swing. He often hit off his front foot, and replays show Clemente’s back foot completely off the ground.

  When Clemente crushed a drive to deep right-center off Detroit’s Mickey Lolich in the 1971 All-Star Game, NBC color analyst Tony Kubek broke down the mechanics of Clemente’s swing: “Here’s that Clemente swing once again. . . . Look at that bat stay back, cocked. . . . Now a trademark: hitting off the front foot. Look at that right foot, the rear foot, a foot off the ground, something that is not advisable as a hitter. But don’t tell that to Clemente or Hank Aaron.”

  Teammates and opponents knew Clemente could hit and knew also that he didn’t need a strike to swing the bat. He was rambunctious at the plate, in the field, and on the bases. Jack Hernon of The Sporting News noted fans in ballparks “oohing” and “aahing” as Roberto raced around the base paths in his signature style.

  “Robbie was something special,” teammate and second baseman Dave Cash recalls. “In the outfield he was exceptional; there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. He was great in the locker room as well, especially with Latin players like Jackie Hernandez.”

  For all his daring play, Clemente was considered by some a hypochondriac. It was a charge he hotly disputed. He insisted he was a great player because he could perform despite the assorted aches that afflicted him over the course of his career: a severed ligament in his thigh, fever, left shoulder injury, intestinal virus, strained tendons in both heels, and in particular a lower back pain due at least in part to having had his car rammed at sixt
y miles per hour by a drunken driver.

  Clemente would roll his neck and stretch his chronically bad back before taking his place deep in the batter’s box. Bobby Bragan, who played for the Phillies and then the Dodgers, said once that the case history on Clemente was that the worse Roberto felt, the better he played.

  Entering the 1972 season, Clemente was closing in on the club record for games played set by Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman. Wagner led at the time 2,432–2,331. Roberto noted that it had taken Wagner eighteen years to reach his number while Clemente was just beginning his seventeenth season. It should be noted that in the Flying Dutchmen’s era full major league seasons ranged from 139 to 154 games while Clemente’s campaigns were 154 to 162 games.

  Hypochondria was one complaint critics leveled at Clemente. He knew there were others, knew people said he complained and that he was moody and selfish and didn’t get along with teammates. But he played the game the way it is supposed to be played. He wanted to be remembered, he said, for the kind of player he was. “I give everything I have,” he told reporters, “according to my ability.”

  And yet that wasn’t enough to silence the critics of a man who would win four batting titles; compile non-league-leading averages of .320, .317, .345, .352, and .342; and carry a .318 lifetime average into the ’72 season. Still the snubs continued. Clemente recalled a 1965 All-Star publication that carried a feature on the fading Mantle and omitted Clemente: “I hit .329 that year and Mickey Mantle hit .255 and they put Mickey Mantle in right field just to get him on the team,” Clemente said then. “Why wasn’t I put on the team in right field?”

  Clemente knew the answers. He played in Pittsburgh, not in New York or Los Angeles. Sportswriters and fans failed to appreciate the nuances of his game. He was a Latino who spoke broken English, and he was a Puerto Rican in a city in which just a small part of the population could identify with him. “I have to come to New York for the fans to give me a night,” he said in September 1971, when the Puerto Rican community honored him with a night at Shea Stadium.

  The native of Puerto Rico was a proud and dignified man, handsome with noble features that appeared to be carved from marble. Then baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn said Clemente had about him a “touch of royalty.” He was the Great One, “El Magnifico” to his Latino fans, and a man of fierce ethnic pride. Clemente was of mixed descent. Both black and Latino, he saw himself as a representative of Latin America.

  As a Spanish-speaking man of color, Clemente encountered racial discrimination throughout his life and career. Just as Jackie Robinson had opened the door for African American athletes by breaking the color barrier in 1947, Clemente believed the way he played baseball helped make the lives of Latin Americans, and in particular underprivileged Puerto Ricans, better.

  “Always, they said Babe Ruth was the best there was,” he said after edging Dodgers great Sandy Koufax for the NL’s MVP award in 1966. “They said you’d really have to be something to be like Babe Ruth. But Babe Ruth was an American player. What we needed was a Puerto Rican player they could say that about, someone to look up to and try to equal.”

  In 1970 Clemente and the Bucs led baseball into the modern era from a sartorial standpoint. Their two-tone caps—mustard gold with a black bill—set the standard for the seventies and beyond. The new uniforms earned national attention as Pittsburgh broke a ten-year drought by winning the East and advancing to the postseason for the first time since 1960. In 2013 the Pirates channeled their predecessors and unveiled alternate uniforms that would be worn for Sunday games and were a throwback to the 1970–75 teams. Once again the uniforms helped usher in a change in the franchise’s fortunes. Just as Clemente, Stargell, Sanguillen, and company had done decades before, Andrew McCutchen, Francisco Liriano, Pedro Alvarez, and the 2013 Bucs broke extended droughts by earning the Pirates’ first postseason appearance since 1992 and snapping the longest stretch of consecutive losing seasons—twenty—in the history of North American professional sports.

  Clemente’s second world championship came in October 1971 and was the product of his MVP performance. Against a reigning world champion Orioles squad that flashed four 20-game winners that season, Clemente batted .414, hit two homers, and sent Baltimore base runners scurrying back to their bases with his rocket-like pegs from right field.

  The triumph over the Orioles came before a massive television audience and, together with a victory over Mays and the San Francisco Gants in the NLCS, finally earned for Clemente the national recognition he deserved. The Sporting News previewed the 1972 major league season with cover art of Clemente alongside the title “Pirates’ Mister Big.”

  Bruce Kison was a teammate of Roberto’s in 1971–72. “Besides being a hell of a ballplayer, he was an interesting character,” says Kison. “He was a leader, a showman the way he performed.”

  Clemente believed he had been born to play baseball and that God had given him the talent to play the game at its highest level. But baseball did not define him. When Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Clemente was distraught. To honor the slain civil rights leader, Clemente convinced teammates to stand with him and not play the scheduled season opener against Houston on April 8—the day before Dr. King’s burial. Due to Clemente’s extraordinary stand, the Pirates and Astros agreed to postpone their opener to April 10 in observance of Dr. King’s memorial service.

  Like Dr. King, Clemente championed racial equality and social justice. Roberto was angered when his friend Vic Power, “El Gran Señor” and the first black Puerto Rican to play in the American League, was dragged off the team bus by local authorities for buying a Coke at a whites-only service station. Clemente himself was the subject of racial slurs and taunts, some by his own teammates. Sportswriters watched his basket catches and referred to him in print as the “Puerto Rican hot dog.” At times they exaggerated his accent when quoting him.

  Some writers who covered him considered Clemente to be anything but perfect. To them Clemente was vain, occasionally arrogant, and often intolerant and unforgiving, and there were moments when they thought for certain Clemente had cornered the market on self-pity. Critics believed the Bucs’ star acted as if the world had declared all-out war on Clemente, when in fact Roberto was lavished with affection.

  At the same time no one would deny that through all of Clemente’s battles there was about him an undeniable charisma. Perhaps that was Roberto’s true essence. Pirates writer Phil Musick thought Clemente won so much of people’s attention and affection that they demanded of him what no man can give: perfection.

  Clemente knew the world was far from perfect, but the racial barbs and insults confused a man who insisted he didn’t see color. “I see people,” Clemente said then. “I always respect everyone and thanks to God, my mother and father taught me never to hate, never to dislike someone based on their color.”

  As the Pirates prepared to defend their World Series title, Clemente commented that a goal of his was to get his three thousandth career hit. But he had a larger destiny in mind. He wanted to help build a utopian sports city for the children of Puerto Rico. “If I get the money to start this, if they tell me they’ll give us the money and I have to be there to get it started,” he said then, “I’ll quit right now.”

  He was one of the game’s greatest players, but more important, he was a great humanitarian. If you have the chance to make things better for people and you don’t, he would say, you are wasting your time on earth.

  Clemente was speaking of issues bigger than baseball. But the Bucs’ clubhouse leader was about to strike a blow for solidarity in the players’ union and make things better for generations of players who followed.

  3

  The first strike in Major League Baseball history didn’t last long—thirteen days, to be exact, from April 1 to 13, 1972. Eighty-six games were canceled, never to be made up. Most clubs lost six to eight games; San Diego and Houston had nine games erased, the highest number in the National League.
r />   While the strike wasn’t long-lasting, its impact was. It set the stage for future labor disputes in each of America’s four major sports.

  What took place in those thirteen days was as intriguing as much of what would happen on the field in the 1972 season. The principals on the front lines of the strike—Marvin Miller and Dick Moss; John Gaherin and the hard-line owners—waged a war as engrossing as the pulse-quickening confrontations that would take place in October when Roberto Clemente dug in against Don Gullett and Vida Blue fired fastballs to Al Kaline.

  Miller, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) from 1966 to 1982, had grown up in Depression-era Brooklyn. His father Alexander was a garment salesman; his mother Gertrude, a schoolteacher. Miller rooted for the Dodgers as he worked his way through school. He graduated from high school by age fifteen; by nineteen he owned a BA degree in economics from New York University. Newly married, he took a job with the New York City Welfare Department. It was with that department that he joined his first union—the State, County and Municipal Workers of America. Disqualified from serving in the military in World War II due to a shoulder damaged at birth, Miller joined the National War Labor Relations Board. The federal agency had been created to settle labor disputes and ensure that there would be no strikes or lockouts to slow FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy.”

  Miller later worked for the International Association of Machinists and United Auto Workers. In 1950 he joined the staff of the United Steelworkers, becoming its principal economic adviser and assistant to its president. In time he became the United Steelworkers chief economist and negotiator. He was appointed to labor-management panels by President John Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson.