"It was my first year in the Pirate organization; I signed with them in ’71. I lived in Pittsburgh, so when our season was over the Pirates let me come out for batting practice and take ground balls. So I took BP with those guys. Just to watch him take batting practice was something that youngsters should watch and learn. Because with his first round, he would just inside-out the ball and hit everything to right field. Then the next round, he’d move the ball around and start hitting the ball up the middle a little bit. And then in his last few rounds, he’d just start turning on the ball and stinging the ball. He used such a big bat, I recall – a big, long, heavy bat. He was so strong with his hands; the ball just jumped off the bat. When him and Stargell hit – when they were in the cage – you actually didn’t even have to be around the cage to know that one of those two was in the cage hitting. The ball had a different sound coming off their bats. It was like a rifle shot. When the rest of us were in there hitting, it didn’t sound quite like that."
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Baptists from the United StatesPresidential Medal of Freedom recipientsUnited States MarinesPeople from San Juan
Original Language: English
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Sources
Art Howe in Roberto Clemente: The Greatest (1998) by Bruce Markusen, p. 220
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roberto_Clemente
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Roberto Clemente
baseball player
1934 – 1972 · United States
Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker (August 18, 1934 – December 31, 1972) was a Puerto Rican Major League baseball player from 1955 through 1972, exclusively with the Pittsburgh Pirates. A posthumous inductee to the National Baseball Hall of Fame (following his fatal plane crash on December 31, 1972, en route to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua), Clemente became both the first Latin American and the first C
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