[ Last Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of
baseball superstar Roberto Clemente.The fascinating story of a
baseball superstar who is now remembered as much for his off-the-field
activism.]
[[link removed]]

EIGHT THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ROBERTO CLEMENTE ON THE 50TH
ANNIVERSARY OF HIS TRAGIC DEATH  
[[link removed]]


 

John Tarleton
December 31, 2022
The Indypendent
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Last Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the death of baseball
superstar Roberto Clemente.The fascinating story of a baseball
superstar who is now remembered as much for his off-the-field
activism. _

Roberto Clemente starred in the major leagues from 1955-1972.,
Trading Card Database // The Indypendent

 

Roberto Clemente and four others died in a plane crash shortly before
midnight on New Year’s Eve 1972 attempting to bring relief supplies
to the victims of a massive earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua. He was
38 years old. 

Great athletes come and go, and the memories of their feats usually
fade with time. In Clemente’s case, his legend has only grown both
inside and outside of baseball. The combination of his athletic
brilliance, humanitarian ideals and tragic death at a young age made
him a national hero in his native Puerto Rico and a Latin American
icon. His major league career from 1955-1972 coincided with a period
of dramatic social change that he embraced. Here are a few highlights
from what made Clemente such a remarkable figure. 

1. HE CAME FROM A HUMBLE BACKGROUND AND DIDN’T FORGET IT

Clemente was the youngest of seven children who grew up in Carolina,
Puerto Rico. His father, Melchor Clemente, worked on a sugar cane
plantation and starting at age eight, Roberto cut cane alongside him
during the harvest season. In the final television interview
[[link removed]] he gave before his
death, Clemente recounted taking a job delivering large cans of milk
that paid a penny a day and saving the money for three years to buy a
second-hand bike. “I like people who are not big shots,” he said.
“I like common people. I like workers. I like people who suffer.
Because they have a different approach of life than the people who
have everything and sometimes get bored.”

2. ONE HELLUVA BALLPLAYER

During his 18-year career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Clemente won
four National League batting titles and 12 Gold Gloves as the best
defensive right fielder in the league. He racked up 3,000 career hits
and was the MVP of the 1971 World Series. Clemente sprayed line drives
across the field, ran the bases with barely-contained zeal and fielded
his position magnificently. According to advanced modern statistics,
Clemente’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) of 94.8 is the 25th best
[[link removed]] for
a position player in baseball history. But more than any statistic,
it’s the grainy, half-century old YouTube footage
[[link removed]].

3. LATIN AMERICAN TRAILBLAZER

Clemente wasn’t the first Latin American to play in the big leagues.
But, he was the first to become a star and set a standard; he paved
the way for the waves of great Latin American players who would follow
him and transform the game. 

As a dark-skinned Afro-Latino man, Clemente had to overcome racial and
linguistic barriers. Early in his career, Pittsburgh sportswriters
would quote his broken English phonetically (“Me heet the ball
hard”) to make him sound like a baseball Tarzan. Clemente suffered a
serious back injury in a car accident early in his career. He played
in pain the rest of his career. When he sat out games, sportswriters
implied he was a hypochondriac who didn’t want to play hurt and
lacked the toughness and fortitude of his white teammates. 

_By the time this 1971 baseball card was released, Roberto Clemente
had largely prevailed in his struggle to be called by his Spanish name
and not “Bob” or “Bobby.”_

4. CULTURAL PRIDE

Clemente played in an era when Black and Latino ballplayers were
expected to be quiet and grateful to have a job in the big leagues.
Clemente was outspoken and always demanded respect. Sportswriters and
broadcasters tried to Anglicize his name by calling him “Bob” or
“Bobby” Clemente. He would respond by saying “My name is Roberto
Clemente.” 

Clemente’s epic performance
[[link removed]] in the 1971 World
Series carried his team to victory. After the Pirates clinched the
seventh and final game of the series, he was interviewed on national
television. At the moment of his greatest baseball achievement with
millions watching, he responded by first speaking in Spanish and
thanking his parents back in Puerto Rico. It marked the first time in
the United States that Spanish was spoken on national television. 

5. IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Clemente was shocked when he first encountered the U.S.’s racial
caste system and embraced the Civil Rights Movement. During the
Pirates’ 1961 spring training in Florida, Clemente demanded that the
team end the practice of making Black and Latino players wait on the
team bus after spring training games while their white teammates dined
inside segregated whites-only restaurants and brought them their food
afterwards. Team officials backed down. They gave Clemente and his
teammates of color a station wagon they could use to travel in and go
to restaurants that would serve them. Clemente’s flex came about a
month a​​fter a wave of lunch-counter sit-ins began in Greensboro,
North Carolina and swept across the South. 

Clemente and Martin Luther King Jr. became personal friends. In
February 1962, King visited Clemente at his farm on the island, and
the two discussed the shared struggles of Black and Puerto Rican
people. When King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee in April 1968
while aiding striking sanitation workers, Clemente was moved to act
[[link removed]].
The Pirates’ first game of the season was scheduled to be played in
Houston on April 8. King’s funeral was slated for the next day and
Clemente, and his Black teammates threatened to not play unless
opening day was moved back to April 10 after King was laid to rest.
Pirates and Astros team officials agreed to the players’ demands.
Major League Baseball then headed off the prospect of more player
boycotts by moving opening day back to April 10 for all teams. The
players’ actions took place against the backdrop of riots in more
than 100 cities and the largest deployment of U.S. troops on U.S. soil
since the Civil War. 

“He never spoke to me directly as to the stoppage,” his longtime
friend Luis Mayoral told _The Washington Post_
[[link removed]].
“But we in Puerto Rico knew since it happened what he had
accomplished.”

The next time professional athletes refused to play en masse in
protest of racial injustice would be 52 years later in August 2020
following the police shooting of Jacob Blake
[[link removed]] in
Kenosha, Wisconsin. 

Speaking in his final television interview
[[link removed]] in October 1972,
Clemente described  King’s impact. “[King] put the people, the
ghetto people, the people who didn’t have nothing to say in those
days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many
years that nobody listened to. Now with this man, these people come
down to the place where they were supposed to be but people didn’t
want them, and sit down there as if they were white and call attention
to the whole world. Now that wasn’t only the black people but the
minority people. The people who didn’t have anything, and they had
nothing to say in those days because they didn’t have any power,
they started saying things and they started picketing, and that’s
the reason I say he changed the whole world.”

[[link removed]]

Watch here [[link removed]]

6. LEADER Of BASEBALL’S MOST INTEGRATED TEAM

Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color barrier in
1947. By the late 1960s, the Pittsburgh Pirates were baseball’s most
thoroughly-integrated team with Clemente as its leader. On Sept. 1,
1971
[[link removed]],
the Pirates became the first and only non-Negro League team in major
league history to field a starting lineup in which all nine players
were of African descent, mostly due to management’s willingness to
seek out the best talent regardless of color in order to field the
strongest possible team. Clemente played in right field that day as
usual. 

“The 1971 Pirates showed that you could have stars that are Black
and whose clubhouse culture was rooted in accepting everyone on equal
footing,” says Adrian Burgos, author of _Playing America’s Game:
Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line_. “That’s Clemente’s
influence.”

7. HUMANITARIAN AND INTERNATIONALIST

As his fame grew, Clemente’s personal motto later in his life became
“any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world
and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” 

Clemente supported the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs and
health clinics. He was a magnet for children. He visited them in
hospitals as he traveled from city to city during the baseball season.
He put on baseball clinics for kids in the United States and Puerto
Rico and dreamt of building a _Ciudad Deportiva_, “Sports City,”
in Puerto Rico that would provide the kinds of sports facilities for
the island’s youth that he never had access to growing up. He also
played an important role as a mentor to his younger teammates. 

“He preached like a Baptist minister,” his Pirate teammate Al
Oliver recalled
[[link removed]].
“He would say, ‘How can the rich have so much (money) and there
are people starving?’ This was his mindset… His spirituality.”

Clemente managed the Puerto Rican national team when it played in an
international tournament in Nicaragua in November 1972. He made many
friends in the country. When Nicaragua’s capital city of Managua was
rocked by a massive earthquake on Dec. 23, 1972, he launched the
Roberto Clemente Committee for Nicaragua. He went on national
television in Puerto Rico and raised $100,000 to purchase food,
clothing and medical supplies for Nicaraguan earthquake victims. 

8. HE WAS KILLED BY GREED

At that time, Nicaragua was ruled by U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio
Samoza. When Clemente learned that Samoza’s troops were stealing
relief supplies and reselling them on the black market, he vowed to
personally deliver his aid. The DC-7 cargo plane he acquired for the
mission had mechanical problems and never should have passed FAA 
inspection. The overloaded plane plunged into the sea off the coast of
Puerto Rico shortly after take-off. Clemente’s body was never
found. 

“It is ironic that the profession in which he achieved
‘legendry’ [status] knew him the least,” read a line from
an obituary
[[link removed]] in _The
Black Panther_
[[link removed].] newspaper.
“Roberto Clemente was simply a man, a man who strove to achieve his
dream of peace and justice for oppressed people throughout the
world.”

_THE INDYPENDENT IS A NEW YORK CITY-BASED NEWSPAPER
[[link removed]] AND WEBSITE. OuR INDEPENDENT,
GRASSROOTS JOURNALISM IS MADE POSSIBLE BY READERS LIKE YOU. PLEASE
CONSIDER MAKING A RECURRING OR ONE-TIME DONATION
[[link removed]] TODAY OR SUBSCRIBE
[[link removed]] TO OUR MONTHLY PRINT EDITION AND
GET EVERY COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME. _

* Roberto Clemente
[[link removed]]
* sports
[[link removed]]
* Sports Activism
[[link removed]]
* baseball
[[link removed]]
* Puerto Rico
[[link removed]]
* Puerto Ricans
[[link removed]]
* Culture
[[link removed]]
* race
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Internationalism
[[link removed]]
* Latin ball players
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]