"The strongest memories I have of that last summer in Columbus center on the passionate identification I developed with the Pirates’ great rightfielder, Roberto Clemente. Clemente was flirting with a .400 average through the first half of the 1967 season, and getting the kind of national attention that he always craved. I watched him on TV whenever I could, and he was the first performer from whom I derived a satisfaction I would call aesthetic. He was a compact, elegant, laconic presence on the diamond, spare and geometric, with a sprinter’s legs. His fielding and throwing were legendary – even then he was recognized as one of the very best ever at his position. Among his peers, only Willie Mays, from whom he had picked up the famous basket catch when the two of them played winter ball in 1954 for Puerto Rico’s Santurce club, possessed a comparable grace and aplomb in the field. He didn’t have the marvelous Mays liquidity – everything about Clemente was angular and emphatic – but as with Mays, his movements left you with the impression that he lived outside his body and commanded it effortlessly from a great distance. He was a bad-ball hitter – about as far as you could get, in the realms of greatness, from a student of the art like Ted Williams or a street-smart opportunist like – and a fierce, feral protector of the plate. With two strikes on him, he could foul off ball after ball, driving the pitcher crazy, until he got a pitch he could work with."