United States Marines

"Clemente, who says Josh Gibson is the best hitter he ever saw, is anxious to see Ted Williams when the slugger comes here a week from Monday for the benefit exhibition between the Pirates and Red Sox."

""I no play so gut yet," the Puerto Rican star tried to explain yesterday. "Me like hot weather, veree hot. I no run fast cold weather. No get warm in cold. No get warm, no play gut. You see." Clemente likes Forbes Field and Connie Mack Stadium the best of all the parks he's played in but has a strong dislike for Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds because of the crazy bounces the balls take as they ricochet off the walls."

"Four years ago he was playing amateur softball in Puerto Rico. "I peetch and play shortstop," he said of his early days. "I no play outfield until pro ball." Roberto turned pro in 1952 with Santurce and last year played winter ball for that team with Willie Mays. Herman Franks, Giant coach, was the manager. "Wee-lee May and Herm Frank help me," he answered when I asked him if he had been given special instruction in the game by anyone. "May show me how to field and throw," he added. Did Mays or anyone show him how to hit? "No," he replied, pride in his voice. "I learn to heet myself. Nobody show me.""

"I had offers from Dodgers, Giants and Braves. Braves offer same amount as Dodgers but I have many friends on Brooklyn team. I feel more at home there and I sign."

"Bobby, it don't matter how you stand; it matter where you end up!"

"When Clemente was out there in right field, there was nothing more a pitcher could want. I figured if the ball was hit to right and stayed in the ballpark, I had a chance. Some way, if it was humanly possible, he would get there. If they had a rally going, I knew he might make an impossible catch and double off a runner and the rally would die. With him, it was like having four outfielders. I hope somebody has the film of a catch he made a few years ago in Houston. He was playing in right center and Bob Watson hit one down the line. Robby went into the wall— not just running but leaping into it—and made a catch that saved the game."

"Sometime this year, somebody is going to go from first to third against us on a single to right. And I’m going to be shocked. It’s never happened before, in all the time I’ve been in the big leagues, because Clemente has always been there. I’ll find myself backing up first base on the play, because Clemente knew the lead runner wasn’t going to try anything against him, so he’d try to pick off the hitter taking too big a turn."

"That shutout belongs to Clemente."

"The thing that amazed me is that sometimes one of his legs would be up in the air and he’d be hitting, and it’d still go out of the ballpark. He was just strong."

"We were teammates at Montreal in 1954 and I was trying to work my way back to the majors. Clemente was an 18-year-old kid [sic] from Puerto Rico who could do everything. The Dodgers gave him a $10,000 bonus in 1953 and tried to hide him at Montreal. Clyde Sukeforth came up to see us in several games, scouting for the Pirates, and I had been told Sukey was looking at me since the Pirates would have first pick in the winter draft. But Clemente took his eye and when Sukey began asking me questions about Clemente, I knew then he had changed his mind and was going to select Clemente instead. There wasn't anything Clemente couldn't do and the Dodgers issued orders not to play him too much so the scouts might feel he wasn't ready. They even used him at third base occasionally to throw off the scouts but anybody who ever saw a ball game could tell this kid had a future."

"I had a deal with Mr. Rickey. Mr. Rickey asked me to go to Pittsburgh with him. And said, I’m sorry I was going to stay with the Dodger group, whom I knew. And he wrote me a letter saying if anytime he could help me, all I had to do was pick up the phone. So, we couldn’t bring Clemente up [from Montreal] because we had to keep him on the club under the old rules if he got more than a $4,000 bonus. And I know that Rickey had first [pick in the] draft, so I flew to Pittsburgh. And he agreed with me that he would take John Rutherford that would have let us keep Clemente. So I’m home free and I call Fresco and we were happy about it. And this was a Friday. The draft is on a Monday. Sunday evening Branch Rickey, Jr. called and said “Buzzie, the deal is off” and I said, “Why?” And he said, “My father and Walter had an argument and he called my father every obscene name in the book therefore he’s going to take Clemente” and that was it."

""O’Malley said flatly that winter he didn’t want any more colored players on the team. It was complicated, but it was a combination of what he thought the fans would accept, what he thought the team could handle and the fact that he got heat from some of his partners who worried that the more integrated the Dodgers became, the more pressure they felt to hire blacks in their own businesses." Bavasi said that Jackie Robinson himself expressed misgivings about Clemente. [...] In the case of Clemente, Bavasi said that Robinson was concerned that if the Dodgers activated him, he would take the roster position of George "Shotgun" Shuba – a journeyman outfielder and pinch-hitter who was popular, white, and once Robinson's 1946 teammate on the Montreal Royals."

"Walter O’Malley had two partners who were concerned about the number of minorities we would be bringing to the Dodgers...The concern had nothing to do with quotas, but the thought was too many minorities might be a problem with the white players. Not so, I said. Winning was the important thing. I agreed with the board that we should get a player’s opinion and I would be guided by the player’s opinion. The board called in Jackie Robinson. Hell, now I felt great. Jackie was told the problem, and, after thinking about it awhile, he asked me who would be sent out if Clemente took one of the spots. I said George Shuba. Jackie agreed that Shuba would be the one to go. Then he said Shuba was not among the best players on the club, but he was the most popular. With that he shocked me by saying, and I quote: ‘If I were the GM [general manager], I would not bring Clemente to the club and send Shuba or any other white player down. If I did this, I would be setting our program back five years."

"Bavasi said he had similar regret over his inability to protect Roberto Clemente on the Dodgers' major league roster in the Rule 5 draft of 1954, and that it was basically a racial decision by a club that had broken baseball's color barrier with the signing of Robinson. Bavasi said two O'Malley partners, Jim Mulvey, then president of United Artists Studio, and John Smith, chairman of Pfizer, were reluctant to put more minorities on the club. "Mulvey and Smith operated companies that had a lower minority ratio," Bavasi said. "They felt that if the Dodgers went to 40% it would have reflected badly on their own companies." Clemente, who had played only one season in the Dodger minor-league system, was selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose general manager was former Dodger general manager Branch Rickey. He might have upheld a private arrangement with Bavasi to allow Clemente to slide through, according to Bavasi, if Rickey and O'Malley had not engaged in a heated argument during a National League meeting before the draft. Clemente, of course, went on to produce a Hall of Fame career, and the Dodgers could only grieve. "We would have won four more pennants," said Bavasi, still pained by the would-haves, the regrets, but insistent that his passion for the game and love of talking about it remain stronger than ever."

"Bavasi thought he would be a star. Whatever O’Malley thought of Clemente’s talent, however, did not matter as much as the matter of his color. He made it clear to Bavasi that bringing Clemente to Brooklyn would be a problem – less for the fans, he explained, than for the players, who might think that too many black men were taking jobs. Bavasi suggested they put the question to one of the players – Jackie Robinson. Bavasi explained the situation to Robinson, who asked who the team would trade or sell to make room to bring Clemente up to the Dodgers. Bavasi thought George Shuba, a white player, would be the one to go. Shuba was an outfielder, a good, though not in Bavasi’s estimation, great player. He was, however, a popular one. Dropping him to bring up Clemente, who might not even be ready to start, Robinson suggested, would not be wise – to bring up Clemente now, he advised Bavasi, would set back by five years the effort to truly integrate the game."

"Clemente, who was right-handed, was allowed to hit only against right-handed pitchers. "We figured he'd hit .120 and nobody would be interested," said Buzzie Bavasi, then the Dodgers general manager. "He hit anyway. You can't hide the great ones." In Pittsburgh, ex-Dodgers boss Branch Rickey knew all about the young slugger and Brooklyn brass knew that Rickey knew. "When Mr. Rickey left for Pittsburgh, he wanted me to go along," Bavasi said. "I told him I wanted to stay with the Dodgers and he said if there was ever anything he could do for me to let him know." Now, there was something. Bavasi flew to Pittsburgh. "I went in to see Mr. Rickey and I told him he sort of owed me a favor. I said I was going to leave a young pitcher, John Rutherford, available for the draft and would appreciate it if the Pirates would take him instead of Clemente. Mr. Rickey agreed." Bavasi's coup fell apart the day before the draft during National League meetings in New York when Rickey and Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley got into an argument over--what else?--money. "They called me and said, 'The deal's off,'" Bavasi said. "And that's how they got Clemente.""

"At the time, the Dodgers were so well stocked, the club simply did not have room for Clemente, despite his immense ability. So we attempted to hide him at Montreal. We did everything in our power to ensure that Clemente would not shine. We did not play him against left-handed pitchers, we played him only against the best right-handed pitchers; he was benched the day after hitting three triples in a game. It worked to an extent – we kept his average down to .257."

"We once owned Clemente. We signed him for a $10,000 bonus and sent him to Montreal for seasoning. He was a 19-year-old kid, right out of the winter leagues, and there wasn't any room for him on the roster of the big club. We ordered Montreal to keep him under wraps any way they could. Up there he was eligible for the baseball draft, and we didn't want to lose anybody as promising as this kid. On the other hand, we didn't realize how great he was or we'd have put him on the big club right away and protected him from the draft regardless of who we'd have to unload. At Montreal, to keep Clemente from looking too good, our manager, Max Macon, kept moving him in and out of the lineup. Poor Roberto! He'd strike out and Max would let him play the whole game. If he hit a home run, Max would get him out of there quick. He was benched one game because he had hit three triples the day before. He was taken out for a pinch hitter with the bases loaded in the first inning of another game. You can imagine how this must have puzzled the kid. The net effect was to hold down his betting average down to .257, and we figured we were safe from the draft. [...] That year Pittsburgh finished last last in the league and had the first draft choice. There goes Clemente! Am I admitting that we blew it? I certainly am. But then I always say: of all the different kinds of sight, the best kind is hind."

"Leo's right. We didn’t want the Giants to have Willie Mays and Clemente in the same outfield and be the big attraction in New York. The main point was to keep the Giants from claiming him... The main point is that the Giants don't have him. We were very friendly with the fellow who owned Clemente's contract in Puerto Rico and had to give Clemente what he wanted because the Braves were after him also."

"We knew we were going to lose him in the draft, so why should we spend the time developing him for another team? We used the players who would belong to us, and Clemente played defense in the late innings or went up as a pinch hitter."

"That's right. We didn’t want the Giants to have Clemente and a fellow like Willie Mays in the same outfield. It was a cheap deal for us. The Giants wanted him badly but didn’t want to make him a bonus boy and have him sit on the bench. But we didn’t care as long as we nailed him. We put him on the Montreal roster, exposing him to the unrestricted draft, figuring we could get back our original investment. We have a letter from the commissioner’s office to the effect that we could get back our investment if he were drafted, but we then we later learned that all we could collect was $4,000. So, all right. It cost us $6,000, actually; but the Giants didn’t get him, which was the important thing."

"We were afraid that would happen. But we had to take the chance. We just couldn't let the Giants or Braves get him. It was worth the $6,000 to make sure. Clemente can't hurt us as much with the Pirates as with the other two."

"He has these huge, strong hands. People always thought that because he hit with such power, he was this big guy. He wasn't, especially by today's standards. He came into spring training at 185 pounds. By the end of the season, he was 181. The power came from those hands."

"He played with injuries other guys wouldn’t have come to the ballpark with because he knew his presence made a difference. I’ve seen him play with Achilles tendons stretched tighter than a drum. One year he had a bad knee, all swollen and stiff. I told him not to play, that he could be out for weeks if he did, or jeopardize his whole career. ‘No, we need a few wins,’ he said. And that kind of thing was not unusual. He got hurt by the drive he put into a game. He didn’t know how to pace himself. He played every game the same: hard. A lot of guys played winter ball too, but for them it was a vacation – good money, their wives came down, a chance to sit in the sun. They don’t give a damn – win, lose, or draw. He played a whole season down there every year, and for him there wasn't any difference between the winter league and the big league. Hell, he played twice as many games as Aaron or Mays. Aaron's one of the greatest, but I’ve seen him hit a thousand ground balls and then trot down the line. You ever seen Clemente do that – even once?"

"It used to really piss me off when the writers called Clemente a hypochondriac. I tried over the years with many writers and announcers to clarify a lot of those things about Roberto’s injuries, but it seems to have gone right over their heads. Every time he was injured – every time – you would read this hypochondriac bit, about him always being injured, always being out of the lineup. Well, any man that can hold the Pirates’ all-time record for games played in no way can be called a hypochondriac. A hypochondriac is a man who is constantly afraid of illness, who can’t perform. Mr. Clemente performed – and he performed as well as, if not better than, any player in this game’s history."

"What Bobby does I want to do. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't be where we are."

"I never saw him loafing to first. He used to run hard every ground ball, every fly ball. It was amazing the way he played the game. Because sometimes you just don’t feel like running hard when you think it’s going to be an out. If you see him before the game, you didn’t believe he was so tough a player. He used to play hurt every day. Used to complain he didn’t sleep. But when the game started, he was just marvelous."

"Most Latin players don’t look for the walk. They go up to the plate aggressively. It’s a basic thing. You try to throw the ball past me; I try to hit the ball. Clemente did – how do you say? – what comes natural. He developed his talents. Almost everybody in our country is like that but Roberto, with the way he hit, made the American scouts leave us alone and let us play the game our way."

"Roberto Clemente, National League batting champion the past two seasons, is helping teammate Matty Alou wrest the crown from him. "Roberto has helped my hitting," said Alou, a left-handed swinger acquired by the Pittsburgh Pirates last December from the San Francisco Giants. Alou, who has been leading the league since mid-May, said Clemente offers advice when he goes into a slump. "Roberto tells me what is wrong. He and manager Harry Walker have helped me. I used to be a pull hitter at Candlestick Park. Now I can hit to left field because Clemente and Walker have shown me how.""

"“I doubt if they’ll have any left for me," the National League All-Star shortstop said. Alley referred to the Pirates' signing Roberto Clemente for $100,000 and giving raises to Donn Clendenon, Bob Veale and Manny Mota. "I don’t know how much money they have to give out, but I do know that Clemente is worth $100,000 if those other fellows are," he said, in reference to Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Frank Robinson and Mickey Mantle."

"I sent eleven people there. All of them have families in Puerto Rico. The least I can do is be with them tonight."

"I felt kind of bashful when the fans cheered. I'm a very quiet, shy person, although you writers might not believe it because I shout sometimes."

"They call my people 'Spics' in New York. These are poor people struggling to make a living and should be treated like people and not animals."

"I had a couple of endorsements but they never came to nothing. I don't want any. I don't need them. If the people who give them don't think Latins are good enough, I don't think they are good enough. The hell with them. I make endorsements in Spanish countries, and give the money to charity.""

"You see a skeleton in a lab, and they need wires to hold the spine in place. Well, in your body the wires are muscles. When there is a loosening on one side, your pelvis tilts. A spasm occurs when this tilt results in one side of the body supporting more weight than the other. Look at a telephone pole. If the supporting wire on one side is slack and loose, then the wire on the other side becomes tense and tight. In the case of the body, this is the muscle. And it will give you pain. If a man weighs 180 pounds and one side of him supports 90 and the other side 90, he is able to function. If one side supports 110 and the other supports only 70, a problem arises. For one thing, your leg on one side is shorter than the leg on the other."

"I would like to be remembered as a player who gave all he had to give. I am no idol, but America needs idols. And don't talk 'Latin America' to me because I was born in Puerto Rico and that is America."

"He is a proud man. Proud of Puerto Rico, his native land, and proud to be a professional baseball player. He is a strong believer in the dignity of man and that all people, no matter their color, should work together. "I don't want to be a big shot. From head to toes, Roberto Clemente is good as Richard Nixon. I believe that. And I think that every man should believe that about himself. I am not dumb. I went to school. I made grades. But when I came here, I couldn't speak English. All I could say was, 'Me, Roberto Clemente.' Some of them laugh and say it sounded like, 'Me Tarzan, you Jane.'" He is a self-made man. He took his natural talents and made the most of them, in baseball and in his personal life. He's never abused them. "Some players are wild on the field and off the field. They are made to look like heroes. I get nothing but sarcasm. And people take me for a fool.""

"That's what I like about the World Series. It gives me a chance to talk with lots of writers, a chance for them to understand me better than in the past. When Roberto Clemente is mentioned, he is always mentioned with injuries. They say I'm moody, selfish, temperamental. That's not the real me. I was born with a serious face. If you know my life, if you know me well by taking the time to learn to know me, then you'll understand me. Most places I go, people say "smile." I don't like that. I don't believe in being a hypocrite. If the occasion is for smiling, I will be smiling. I'm a very happy person."

"I have made a great study of the spine ever since I had my spine trouble, and now I know what to do and it doesn’t involve doctors, operations or anything like that. Why, in Puerto Rico last winter I helped 29 people who had back trouble and one of them was a doctor who couldn’t get medical relief. Ask Willie (Stargell), ask Danny Murtaugh what I did for them. They had back trouble and I fixed them, not by any tricks or anything, but because I know how to manipulate and bring relief. A lot of people think if you have a pain or tightness here, it can be worked out by rubbing that area. It can’t. The way to do it is to know the trigger points. Sometimes you have to manipulate a few inches from the spot that’s hurting because that's maybe where the muscle that controls the soreness is. It’s all very complicated, but believe me, it works. I was suffering so bad I could hardly walk [in 1957]. All the x-rays and medical doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong. Then a man in St. Louis, a chiropractor, called me and offered to help. The ballclub was against it and said they wouldn’t be responsible, but I was desperate and the pain was driving me crazy. But the man, who told me I had a curvature of the spine, was able to fix me up. It was after that I became interested in studying the human back and ever since I’ve never had trouble I couldn't take care of. Back trouble is a painful thing and people who don’t have the problem don’t know how lucky they are."

"Quien Soy? (Who Am I?)I am a small point in the eye of the full moon. I only need one ray of the sun to warm my face. I need only one breeze from the Alisios to refresh my soul. What else can I ask if I know that my sons love really love me?."

"My greatest satisfaction comes from helping to erase the old opinion about Latin American and black ballplayers. People had the wrong opinion. They never questioned our ability but they considered us inferior in our station of life. Simply because many of us were poor, we were thought to be low class. Even our integrity was questioned. I don't blame the fans for that; I blame the writers. They made it look like we were something different entirely from the white players. We're not. We're the same."

"When I came here, you seldom saw a black player get together with a white player and go someplace together after a ball game. Now it is more common. Yes, there has been improvement but some things still remain the way they were. I cannot, for example, go up to a white player and say to him, "Are you for real?" or "Are you concerned with me at all?" But now, once in a while, they will come to you and ask you about it. They don't turn their backs on you like they used to."

"Anytime I feel something is wrong I'm gonna say something. Baseball has changed in many ways since I first came to the big leagues. Ballplayers feel they can speak up much more now than they did then. I spoke up even then. [...] I didn't like some of the things the white players said to Roberts so I said some things to them that they didn't like."

"We must all live together and work together no matter what race or nationality. If you have an opportunity to accomplish something that will make things better for someone coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth."

"If we have respect for our fathers and we have respect for our children, we will have a better life. I watched on TV when America sent men to the moon, and there were a lot of people whose names weren't given who helped make it possible. You don't have the names of those who run the computers and other things. But they worked together and this is what you have to have ... Chinese, American, Jewish, black and white, people working side by side. This is what you have to do to make this a better life. When you can give opportunity to everybody, we won't have to wait to die to get to heaven. We are going to have heaven on earth."

"I am a very proud person. Baseball has helped send my brothers and nephews to school. But more than that, baseball has become my whole life. Accomplishment is something you cannot buy. If you have a chance and don’t make the most of it, you are wasting your time on this earth. It is not what you do in baseball or sports, but how hard you try. Win or lose, I try my best."

"I really don't know if I cried. If I did, it was tears not of pain, but of the sentiments my people are made of."

"We are on the field doing what we love to do. They have to work in the mill or other places eight hours a day, and work much harder than us and they pay their way in."

"I have had two lives: when I was born in Puerto Rico in 1935 [sic] and when I came to play baseball in Pittsburgh in 1955. I have two loves: my family – my mother, my father and my wife and three sons – and my fans."

"A lot of my countrymen are here tonight, and I don't really know whether I love you more or them more, but I do know this: you people in Pittsburgh are the greatest fans in the world!"