ALL-STAR FANFEST : Clemente Still a Players’ Player

Roberto Clemente’s effect on major league baseball was as great has his legendary arm.

Twenty years after Clemente participated in his final All-Star Game, former stars Manny Sanguillen and Juan Marichal recalled their favorite player during the Upper Deck All-Star FanFest at the San Diego Convention Center.

Sanguillen and Clemente were best friends on the Pittsburgh Pirates and played in three league championships and a World Series before Clemente died in a plane crash on Dec. 31, 1972, while taking supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. Sanguillen spent many hours diving in the ocean trying to find Clemente’s body, but he--like everyone else--came up empty-handed.

“Manny, he took it hard,” Marichal said.

On Monday, Baltimore’s Cal Ripken, Jr., was named the recipient of the Roberto Clemente Award for best exemplifying Major League Baseball both on and off the field.

Former stars who played alongside and against Clemente had nothing but praise for the Puerto Rican legend whose death shocked baseball.

“It was tough,” Sanguillen said. “Everything you heard (that spring training) was that Roberto’s not here. There was no joking at all that spring. Everyone had so much respect for him.

“We tried to play as hard as we could that year to see if we could win it for Roberto.”

The Pirates finished 80-82. They were 97-65 the previous season, making the National League playoffs for the third consecutive year. Clemente batted .341 with 13 home runs, 86 RBIs and a .993 fielding average.

During the 1971 World Series victory, Clemente extended his Series hitting streak to 12 games (Pittsburgh also won in 1960), batted .414 and was named the Series MVP.

He was selected to 15 All-Star teams and homered in his final All-Star at-bat, 1971.

He was the 1966 NL MVP. Over his 18-year career, he batted .317 and led the league in hitting four times.

“When you have a great player like Clemente play like that for so long and do so many things, it makes a lot of difference,” Sanguillen said of that ‘80-82 campaign. “It’s like I still see him sometimes. I talk like he’s still here, somewhat like my dad.”

Marichal said Clemente was studying to become a chiropractor late in his life.

“He was good,” said Marichal, a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Giants. “I was having trouble with my back and he would come into our clubhouse and work on it. I got three or four adjustments from him. They all helped.”

Clemente, at the time of his death, had the remainder of his career mapped out. He finished 1972 with 3,000 career hits.

“He told me he was going to play five more years in the National League and 10 more in the American League as a designated hitter,” Sanguillen said. “He said, ‘I’m going to get 3,000 hits in the National League and 1,000 in the American.’ Only God knows (if he would have done it) but he had a perfect body.”

Amos Otis called Clemente the best outfielder ever.

“My first base hit in old Forbes Field, he threw behind me and picked me off second,” Otis recalled.

Otis, now a roving minor league hitting instructor for the expansion Colorado Rockies, said he’s noticed that “a lot of (Latin) kids, when they first come in to rookie ball, try to imitate him.”

Minnie Minoso pushed the door ajar for Latin players, but Clemente was the one who kicked it all the way open.

“Roberto told me one of the things in his heart was that he believed someone from La Ciudad de Portiva de Roberto Clemente (Roberto Clemente’s Port City, which is a year-round baseball school for Puerto Rican youths) was going to go to the Hall of Fame,” Sanguillen recalled. “You know who went there? Ruben Sierra. Every time I tell him that story, his body starts to shake.”

Sierra is one of several Latin ball players Sanguillen represents today, including Julio Franco, Luis Polonia and Jose Lind.

“I think he was a great ball player for Latin America,” said former Cincinnati Red pitcher and Dominican Republic native Pedro Borbon, the last pitcher to face Clemente.

Orlando Cepeda, who starred for the Giants, was 12 and Clemente 15 when they played together in Puerto Rico. It was Clemente who brought Cepeda to the U.S. in 1955, and it was in Clemente’s 1956 Chevy Bel Aire that Cepeda learned to drive.

“He was an inspiration to all of us,” Cepeda said. “(Willie) Mays and Clemente were the best. Mays was a better long-ball hitter and ran the bases better, but Roberto wasn’t second to anybody. I would give them the edge over Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron.”

FanFest Notes

Actor Tom Selleck, who will star in “Mr. Baseball,” a film about a former major leaguer struggling to succeed in Japan, will be at the Upper Deck booth in the All-Star Bazaar at 2 p.m. today. . . . Relief pitchers Dennis Eckersley and Rick Aguilera had blown opportunities on Monday, failing to appear at a round-table discussion with Jeff Montgomery, Norm Charlton and Doug Jones in the Diamond Theater. . . . Hockey players Wayne Gretzky (Kings), Brett Hull (St. Louis Blues), Jaromir Jagr (Pittsburgh Penguins) and Brent Gretzky (Tampa Bay Lightning) toured FanFest. Hull showed an affinity for the game in the batting cages, and Jagr, a Czech who had never held a bat before, stroked the ball with a hockey swing. Crowds of about 100 swarmed, and Hull slowed the procession by signing everything in sight.