Had a strong arm as a kid-- something I mimicked from Clemente’s game-- the pivot and throw.
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Uh, the runner in that clip did run on Clemente, since the ump called him safe.
I remember a driving trip to the West Coast when I was a kid when I brought a biography of Clemente I bought at a scholastic book fair in my elementary school. It was the first full length book I read, and I was fascinated by it. Clemente was such a larger than life figure, and the book introduced me to so many things about the adult world I knew nothing about. A hero who dies valiantly — dang, just reading this brings back such memories.
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Great piece! Some inspiration is very helpful today
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Your pain is ours @birdford! And NOT off topic because the malicious, racist, fascist idiocy we see before us IS who many USAers ARE. The sameness between what Latino players faced, Blacks, poor folks, anyone different from white people face today, could not be more blatant than killing suffering women because of some 1864 ‘law’ in Arizona resurrected to punish and ‘shame’ to death, today. And in the name of life itself! How hateful, ignorant, disgusting is this current and apparently worsening disaster.
I too love baseball, and thankfully, my Dad took me to many MLB games in Cleveland. We revered the ‘underdogs’ who were Black, Latino AND white, because baseball was a great leveler then. We had to sit in the nosebleed section because we couldn’t afford anything more expensive, but by God we had fun and at one point got to meet many players when one of the players moved in behind us for the summer.
On to medicine, and that plus music was my career. I am so eternally grateful to the real sportsmen among us, to the true heroes who toil away in our hospitals, cliniics and ICU’s, caring for people day and night, regardless of their status in a racist nation, or their distrust of the miraculous care they are getting in spite of their hopeless brainwashing at the hands of these ruthless, SHAMELESS politicians.
We must not lose this battle!
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Got to see him - a father- son little league game …Pirates vs Houston Colt 45s (renamed- Astros)
at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
He was my hero - I also played right field … but for an entirely different reason!
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My family were huge Pirates fans back in the day, and we routinely listened to Pirates games on the back porch of my grandfather’s house. I remember a play Clemente made from right field which was one of the greatest plays I had ever heard. Ironically, Clemente was charged with an error on it.
A sharp hit by a SF Giants batter went to right field, and Clemente muffed the ball, and it ran all the to the fence. Clemente runs back, and in one motion, grabs the ball, turns and throws to home plate. He threw out a stunned Orlando Cepeda (at least that is my memory, who at the time was one of the most feared hitters) by 3 feet.
One of the greatest throw-outs ever, and Clemente was charged with an error!
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PBS had a good doc on him.
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One of Clemente’s very few errors and he corrected for it. Cepeda was a great hitter but I don’t think he was a speedster.
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For sure. My recollection was that Cepeda was on first base. I remember seeing replays of the throw…Clemente never even looked. He threw from the wall (I think it happened at old Forbes Field, which had the ‘moon deck’ down the right field line and a shorter field on that side. Center was over 450 feet), and threw a perfect strike to home plate, from 300 feet.
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This reason, amirite?
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100% … and …
Geez, if only I could have taken my strikes & applied them to bowling!
How great I could have been!
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Nobody ran on Roberto Clemente.
More like that.
Also, I saw him hit a one-handed line drive into the bleachers at Dodger Stadium. Off a Koufax curve ball that like to fell off the face of the earth.
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Clemente obviously had an outsized impact not only as a baseball player but as a humanitarian. You would be surprised at the number of landmarks named for Clemente in just the Bronx alone. His story is pretty much required reading in most grade school history curriculum.
I remember the day that he perished on the flight to Nicaragua to deliver humanitarian assistance. I was with my family on our yearly Christmas holiday trip to Florida and heard about it on the radio. To me and probably others his tragic passing became far more relevant than the Dolphins undefeated season.
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Yeah, well-- I don’t write the headlines…
It was the only clip I could find that showed what I wished to describe.
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Clemente once observed: “If you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.”
I volunteer for a local senior assistance outfit. They drive seniors to doctor apts, the grocery store etc. They also help with fix-it things like changing an inaccessible light bulb or a leaky drain. I once built a ramp for a gentleman who was wheelchair bound but my normal contribution is groceries. There are 10 two people teams in our outfit who gather behind a local grocery store early on every other Saturday morning. Our buyer goes in and buys mass quantity. The stuff gets trundled out behind the store and we divide it up into grocery bags. My partner and I have a list of 19 people we take the goodies to. Fruits and veggies. All together our outfit feeds around 130 households. It’s volunteer…I don’t do it for money. Something trump would never understand.
As Roberto said… we should help each other,
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Our conversations always stemmed around people from all walks of life being able to get along.
The simplest thing in the world.
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A kid in Pittsburgh growing up in the 60s. Roberto was my idol.
When we saw the report on TV about the accident, Mom and I both cried…
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Well, I would think there has to be some penalty for the woman. Sure.
– Donald Trump, circa 2016
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As a New Yorker in 1960 when world series time rolled around if you wanted to make any bets you had to bet against the Yankees. After watching that bet of seven I became a lonely Pirate’s fan. I got to see him play when the Mets played in the old Polo Grounds. IIRC a ball was hit to the wall in right and being New York it hid itself in beer cups and hot dog wrappers. When 21 found it he turned and threw to third, but the ball slipped out of his hand and landed twenty rows back, entirely across that field. At least that’s how I remember it.
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