Good morning, it’s Friday, Oct. 18, 2024, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation intended to be uplifting or enlightening. Inspired by last night’s thrilling playoff game between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians, I’ll be quoting a baseball player today – one of the greatest of all time.
On this date in 1898, the U.S. flag was raised in Puerto Rico, signifying to the island’s residents and the world that Spain’s time as a colonial power was coming to an end. Thirty-six years later, in the sleepy town of Carolina, a farm worker named Melchor Clemente and his wife, Luisa Walker, welcomed a boy into their family. They named him Roberto Enrique Clemente Walker.
Today, Carolina has been subsumed by San Juan’s urban sprawl. In those days, it was pastoral and somewhat isolated. Melchor Clemente worked hard, often in the sugar cane fields. Although named for one of the Three Kings in the Bible, Melchor wasn’t religiously observant. Nor did he have any time for baseball, a sport he didn’t play or follow.
Roberto’s mother was a committed Christian, however. And as Roberto Clemente himself would later note, she had a cannon for a right arm. The boy grew into a man who referred to God easily and who displayed skills on the ballfield that made baseball lifers swoon. Roberto Clemente also became a man whose concern for the poor and less fortunate informed his existence. He literally gave his life in service to others, a story I’ve told before in this space. I’ll revisit the end of Roberto Clemente’s life in a moment.
Roberto Clemente would have attained legendary status even if his exploits had been confined to the baseball diamond. As his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown notes, over his 18-year career as a Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder, Clemente had a lifetime batting average of .317; he led the league in hitting four times, won 12 Gold Glove awards and earned Most Valuable Player awards in the 1966 regular season and the 1971 World Series.
He thrilled Forbes Field fans with his combination of power, speed on the bases, and an unworldly throwing arm. He collected his 3,000th career hit on Sept. 30, 1972, at the end of the Pirates’ second full season in Three Rivers Stadium. Although they’d won the World Series in 1971, they lost in the playoffs to Cincinnati in 1972. But there was always next year, right? And surely Clemente would be back. Although he was 38 years old, he was showing little sign of slowing down: He’d hit .312 that season.
In November, Clemente spent time in Nicaragua managing the Puerto Rican national team in a winter ball tournament. There, as Clemente biographer David Maraniss documented, he’d do the types of things he always did: converting, for instance, his $20 per diem for meals to quarters, which he doled out to poor kids while strolling the streets of Managua.
Clemente was back in Puerto Rico when a devastating earthquake hit Nicaragua the following month. He personally dispatched three planeloads of relief supplies. Upon hearing that the aid wasn’t reaching the poor, he contracted a fourth airplane and decided to fly along. Perhaps because he had lost siblings, some tragically, Clemente had always had premonitions about his own mortality. He never took anything for granted. Asked by Richie Ashburn at the 1971 All-Star Game whether he expected to get his 3000th hit in 1972, he replied, “Well, you never know. If I’m alive – like I said before, you never know because God tells you how long you’re going to be here. So, you never know what can happen tomorrow.”
Roberto Clemente had no more tomorrows after boarding that overloaded, poorly maintained relief plane on Dec. 31, 1972. It crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff. But he left American baseball fans, all Puerto Ricans, and the citizens of the world, the gift of his example.
“I want to be remembered,” he said, “as a ballplayer who gave all he had to give.”
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics
@CarlCannon (X, formerly Twitter)
