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Clemente

By Dr. John D. Eigenauer
June 9, 2006

In the final days of the 1969 season, I agonized every day over the batting race between my boyhood idol, Pete Rose, and the great Roberto Clemente. Each day that it seemed that Rose would win the crown, Clemente matched him. Rose hung on to win and I was jubilant, but I never forgot Clemente. With Rose out of the race in 1970, I rooted for him against Rico Carty; and I cheered his every play during the 1971 World Series when his Pirates defeated the unbeatable Orioles and he captured the Series MVP. I was young; I didn’t realize that these amazing performances came at the end of a great career.

His greatness inspired imitation—my friend and I pitched bottle caps to each other and tried to hit them with a broomstick because we had heard that Clemente learned to hit that way. The broomstick and bottle cap story found its way into David Maraniss’ marvelous biography, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero. Relying on hundreds of marvelous details like that one, his book unites memories with fresh material into a wonderful narrative that is also outstanding history.

Unlike many biographers, Maraniss scrutinizes his subject's history and dispels myths through critical analysis. For example, he relates the commonly accepted story that Branch Rickey—General Manager of the Pirates when Pittsburgh claimed Clemente from the Dodgers in the Rule 5 Draft—immediately recognized Clemente's potential and told him that he would be a star. Maraniss presents Rickey's own notes on Clemente, which clearly declared Rickey's reservations about Clemente's base running ability and his excessive cautiousness in the outfield. Although impressed with Clemente’s potential as a batter, those notes indicate that Rickey thought that Clemente was years away from being able to help a Major League club. In a beautiful piece of investigative history, Maraniss points out that Rickey missed the fact that Clemente's tenuousness may have been the result of a recent car accident in which he hurt his neck and back.

This attention to detail allows Maraniss to tell with great ease the story of Clemente’s early baseball days. He weaves anecdotes about Latin baseball, life in Montreal, the Dodgers hiding Clemente on the bench, and shifting racial tensions seamlessly into a neat narrative.¹ He even retells the story of the 1960 World Series—which most baseball fans know by heart—with enough freshness to make it interesting in its own right, while revealing much about Clemente’s athletic prowess and unique psychology.

Clemente That Roberto Clemente is a revered figure in American history is evident by the fact that he is one of the few non-presidents to appear on multiple USPS stamps.

Only rare biographies present psychological insight without degenerating into speculation. Maraniss succeeds by using Clemente’s intensity as a motif to depict his deep sense of justice, his aloof preparation, his persistence in courting his wife, his longing to be valued, his occasional and unexplained quick temper, and virtually every other aspect of his character and personality. The descriptions work because Maraniss is not trying to show that Clemente was intense, passionate, and graceful; they work because he lets the stories of Clemente’s life demonstrate his intensity, passion, and grace.

Clemente gained his grace with years. One fulfilling aspect of Maraniss’ biography is that he allows the reader to see Clemente mature, growing from a hot-headed, brooding youngster to a wise, complex, and motivated leader. Again, Maraniss never tries to make that point—he is consistently unobtrusive—but he effectively conveys the process that made Clemente into a captivating, simple, yet heroic person. He never devotes a chapter to Clemente’s growth—it is simply part of the narrative that makes you want to see who Clemente will become next. Even simple stories about his approach to hitting grow from details of raw talent to iconic fables of wisdom and obsessive patience.

Maraniss gained fame for his prize winning When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi; his Clemente biography should bring him equal recognition. It is well-written, well-researched, balanced, and compelling. It will probably be remembered as one of baseball’s twenty greatest biographical works, a classic that will rank with Robert Creamer’s Babe, Charles Alexander’s Ty Cobb, and Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man.

John Eigenauer can be contacted at jeigenauer@yahoo.com. A complete list of his reviews and more about him can be found here.