Clemente
The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

by David Maraniss

IN BALTIMORE ON THE EVE OF THE 1971 WORLD SERIES, Vera Clemente was deeply concerned about her husband. She had seen Roberto this sick only once before, when he was bedridden, delirious, and losing weight in the spring of 1965. Then it had taken his doctors in Puerto Rico several days to determine that he had malaria. Now the cause was obvious: food poisoning. Earlier that night, Vera, Roberto, and two of his teammates, José Antonio Pagán and Vic Davalillo, had joined a festive party of family and friends for dinner at a restaurant in nearby Fort Meade, where Vera’s brother, U.S. Army Captain Orlando Zabala, was stationed. Roberto had ordered clams, and by the time they returned downtown to the Lord Baltimore Hotel he was so sick the team doctor had the dehydrated star hooked up to an IV at his hotel bed. “I was so worried,” Vera said later. “Tomorrow is the first game of the World Series. He was so weak. I said, ‘Oh, my God, maybe he cannot play.’”

The next morning, after a troubled night, the thirty-seven-year-old Clemente was still weak but determined to play. Only his wife and a few others knew of his illness. The press was preoccupied with the latest discomforts of another Pirate, Dock Ellis, a nineteen-game winner with a sore arm but indefatigable mouth who was scheduled to start the series opener.

During the National League playoffs against the Giants, Ellis had reaffirmed his freewheeling reputation by carping about his hotel bed in San Francisco. Now, before throwing his first pitch in Baltimore, he had switched rooms three times and made headlines by saying whatever entered his mind. He had always been a free-talker, Ellis said, it was just that no one listened until he started winning. “I’m never sorry for anything I say,” he explained. “If you don’t say what you want in so-called America, I might as well go to Russia.” This riff was tame for Ellis, whose eccentricity was amplified by his counterculture predilections for Jimi Hendrix, greenies, dope, and acid, which he once dropped before pitching a no-hitter against San Diego. (The ball appeared to have comet tailings as it soared toward the plate, he said.) None of his beefs about hotel rooms compared with his declaration at mid-season, after he was named to the All-Star team, that he would not be chosen to start because another black pitcher, Vida Blue, was starting for the other league. (In fact, Ellis did start, and was on the mound when Oakland’s Reggie Jackson cracked a memorable early career home run off the right-field light tower at Tiger Stadium.) But in the so-called America of 1971, Dock Ellis was a kaleidoscope of color in what many thought would be a monochromatic World Series.

Pittsburgh and Baltimore were solid baseball towns, but there were no teams from New York or Los Angeles for the media machines to hype, and baseball seemed on a downward trend in any case. A Louis Harris survey released that week showed that among the major American sports, football and basketball were rising in popularity while only baseball had declined from the previous year. Baseball games took too long, people complained, and there was not enough action. The consensus in the sporting press was that Orioles versus Pirates was a onesided matchup that would do nothing to reverse the trend. The O’s came into the series as defending champions, winners of 101 games, riding a fourteen-game winning streak that included four shutouts in the waning days of the regular season and a sweep of Oakland for the American League pennant. The Pirates, after losing to Cincinnati in the playoffs a year earlier, had finally captured the National League pennant this time by defeating the Giants, and had run up a respectable ninety-seven wins during the regular season, yet few gave them a chance against Baltimore. In place of the Murderers’ Row that the Pirates had faced in their last World Series against the slugging Yankees in 1960, this time they were going up against a fearsome quartet on the mound. Good pitching beats good hitting is the first truism of baseball, and Baltimore had superlative pitching, with four twenty- game winners: Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson.

2006 by David Maraniss