People From San Juan

"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.""

"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."

"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 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.""

"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 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."

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

"“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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

""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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"That shutout belongs to Clemente."

"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."

"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."

"You saw him going all out on every day at 38 and it embarrassed you if you didn’t try as hard as he did. Whether you’d been playing 12 years or you were a rookie, a little bit of that rubbed off on you. And he was consistent; day in and day out he led us. You knew that if you didn’t pitch well or didn’t hit well, he would be great almost every day. In his last three years, we went to the ballpark every day expecting to win. His consistency was a big part of that."

"Robbie and I had become very close, so that I really leaned on him. We had fun in the clubhouse, but he meant more than that to me. He was the Pirates. Robbie had grown so much. He really kept up the spirit of the team—by the way he played, and by the way he helped everyone. Everything seemed out of order this season [1973]—Robbie was gone."

"He was different … he wasn’t like the rest the rest of us. He took professionalism to a higher degree. After a game, we all wanted to go out for a beer. He wouldn’t go. He was compelled by baseball."

"It passes into a phase where it’s just such a delight to watch him play, and a delight to have him in right field when you’re pitching. He had that gift – he was an exciting enough ballplayer that he could turn a 10-year veteran into a 10-year-old kid watching baseball. Most times in between innings, when I'd come off the field from pitching, I'd go into the clubhouse and wander around because I was always kind of high strung. But when Clemente was going to bat, I'd make sure I was out on the bench watching."

"I all but tackled him and at my age I'm glad I didn't. I knew we had the game tied and I was afraid Clemente would be thrown out at the plate. At that stage, I wanted to play it safe with the winning run on third and none out. But Clemente evidently didn't hear me or simply had his mind made up he could go all the way. Now I'm glad he did. What a finish that was."

"Bragan smiled about it yesterday afternoon. He was asked if Clemente had been thrown out at the plate and had the Pirates lost in extra innings, would he have fined Clemente? "How could you fine a player for driving in three runs we needed to tie?" That seemed like a rather good explanation."

"He's worth every penny of a half-million dollars to me. That's what the other clubs would have to give in cash or equivalent player material to get him."

"The best way to describe Roberto Clemente is to say that if he were playing in New York, they’d be comparing him to DiMaggio. I would say his greatness is limited only by the fact that he does not hit the long ball as consistently and by the fact that he is not playing in New York – or even in Chicago or Los Angeles."

"Dear Sirs: I feel compelled to write you concerning your article, "The World's Toughest Batting Orders—As Selected by Ten Star Major League Pitchers," which appeared in the March 31 Family Weekly. I think it is a shame that such unproven players such as Dave Concepcion are placed in a lineup of "toughest outs." I agree that Hank Aaron, Billy Williams, Rod Carew and Willie Stargell are among the greatest hitters the game has ever known, but it certainly did not take your panel long to forget Roberto Clemente."

"Clemente was just a kid then, his second year up. He was a real introvert – very quiet, morose almost. But he performed – man, did he perform! And he had tremendous pride. But I learned one thing about him early on – if he didn't feel like playing, you'd better let him sit. Wherever I managed, two hours before the game started, that lineup was posted on the board. I always wanted a man to know if he was starting. Now and then Clemente would come to me and say, ‘I don't feel like playing.’ If it had been somebody else, I would have asked him what the hell he was talking about. But not Clemente. When he didn’t want to play, he wouldn’t play – and that’s all there was to it. It didn’t happen very often, but it happened. It was usually a backache that he complained about. How serious it was, I don’t know – but I do know that he believed it was serious and that he was sincere about it. Remember – this was before he was a great star, so you had to believe he was sincere about his aches and pains and not trying to take advantage of his status."

"Roberto Clemente was the best right fielder I saw play in the majors. Not the best hitter, but the best right fielder!"

"The quality of his play was directly indicative of his values. He gave all he had every game. He was kind and helpful to all of us younger players. He had a desire to be appreciated and drove himself to higher levels of performance than others. He recognized the need to excel in all phases of the game, and he encouraged everyone to do the same. Some others could do what he could, but nobody matched his flair. I loved watching him play because he loved playing."

"We loved him. There were times he would get frustrated because we didn’t play at the level he expected us to play. I’ll never forget the time he decided to play to prove his points. He was a hero down there, the people went crazy and it helped attendance. [...] He was a wonderful man and a great player, but as far as running a game he didn’t do a great job. He had a very short temper at times about the way we played, because let’s face it – he took it very seriously. It was his team, and he was going to get the credit or the blame for how the team played. As a result of our lackluster play at times, he used to get very mad at us and the guys would put the towels over their faces and kind of laugh a little bit – not at him, as a reaction to what was happening."

"We’d cut up all the time. We used to psyche him up for a game by kidding him about being a hypochondriac. "Hey," we’d say, "did you hear what so-and-so wrote about you?" "Who? Where’d he write it?" Sometimes, on buses to the airport, I’d use my impersonations to loosen up the club. Impromptu songs, with just the rankest of lyrics, the ranker they are the funnier it becomes. I’d do it sometimes when the club was uptight. Not too many people notice when you do things, but Roberto came up to me and said, "You do things when they’re needed.""

"Clemente’s death made a tremendous difference, because he carried a big load by producing consistently. Everything other guys used to do was gravy. They were the icing on the cake. Their runs didn’t count in a situation; they just put the game out of reach. This year, those guys could not be the icing. They mean the game. The pressure is on them to produce in key situations time after time after time. That is a far greater mental discipline than having to produce when it doesn’t count."

"Roberto used to say, "People pay to see me perform. If I go out there 75 percent, I’m not giving them the performance they paid to see." What Roberto didn’t understand was that his 75 percent was better than other guys’ 100 percent."

"Clemente can do so much for the Pirates. I don’t think there’s a more colorful player in the league and he’s probably the most popular player in Pittsburgh. He has as much ability as any player in the game, yet, great as he is, he could be greater. He could be our leader, the man we need to show us the way. I’m trying to get him to realize how good he is. You know, Clemente is very emotional and sometimes he’s controlled by the way the team is going. If we’re winning, he’s hitting and doing everything expected of him. But when we hit a slump, Clemente’s spirit gets down, too. If he can get the idea he’s the real leader, he can do the job for us. This [1963] isn't a good year for Clemente. He can be better, much better. With his ability, I feel any time he bats under .350, it isn’t a good season. He shouldn’t settle for anything less than that. When they talk of potential .400 hitters, they never mention Clemente, yet he has all the tools to reach that figure. He hits line drives, he hits to all fields and he has power. And he can run. There’s no question of his arm and his fielding. When you take all of this in consideration, you can see he hasn’t reached his potential."

"Clemente will not be one, two or three among the top hitters. He will be one. Period."