Taking their hits

WHENEVER Puerto Rico’s baseball team was on display during the recent World Baseball Classic, the ESPN announcers made time to pay tribute to the island’s greatest player, Roberto Clemente, showing clips of his titanic throws from right field and hitting feats for the Pittsburgh Pirates, the team he twice helped lead to the World Series during an 18-year career that abruptly ended when he died in a 1972 plane crash.

More than three decades after his death, Clemente is a much-celebrated figure, lauded as a humanitarian, an icon in Puerto Rico and an impressive entry in the record books. But he was not so honored in his own time. Difficult, quick to take offense, Clemente’s fierce pride was viewed as peevish arrogance by the sportswriters of his day, who focused more on his pidgin English and frequent aches and pains than on his warmth and humanity. Even as late as 1971, baseball columnist Dick Young, then at the New York Daily News, would render Clemente phonetically, quoting him as saying, “Eef I have my good arm thee ball gets there a leetle quicker than he gets there.”

These slights did not go unnoticed. When Clemente was playing winter ball in Nicaragua, a local sportswriter had the temerity to write that an obscure Cuban outfielder had made a throw “capable of making Clemente blush.” The next day, the writer was summoned to the dugout for a verbal whipping. “I throw to get outs on third from the right-field corner in the huge Pirates stadium, and with Pete Rose sliding in,” Clemente complained. “There is no comparison.”

But as David Maraniss often stresses in his authoritative new biography, “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” available later this month , Clemente wasn’t obsessed only with his image. Just days after berating the Nicaraguan writer, he summoned him again, this time to argue the case that Latin American ballplayers were discriminated against by the American press, which, not knowing the players’ culture or language, seemed more eager to probe their flaws than hail their talents.

Every year, the opening of baseball season is marked by a deluge of new baseball books, many eminently forgettable. But the best of this year’s new books make a persuasive case that for decades after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, African American and Latin American ballplayers were struggling against prejudice and bigotry, from inside and outside the sport. Accustomed to baseball’s white, working-class ethos, the baseball establishment and sportswriters of the day were mystified by a new style born in the barrios and ghettos. They mistook a refusal to show emotion for indifference when it was actually a studied coping mechanism, no different than the inscrutable mask worn by black icons of the era, from Miles Davis and Sonny Liston to Jim Brown and Bill Russell.

As Alex Belth, author of “Stepping Up: The Story of Curt Flood and His Fight for Baseball Players’ Rights,” puts it: “Being cool for a black man ... was a posture, a way of expressing his disgust and anger at what he had to put up with without becoming unhinged. Black athletes couldn’t be brash or outspoken if they valued their lives.”

In sports biographies of the past, writers too often compartmentalized baseball, casting it in an amber-hued nostalgia that made it seem as if the game was always played in elysian fields. These books are less sentimental. In “Black and Blue: The Golden Arm, the Robinson Boys, and the 1966 World Series That Stunned America,” Tom Adelman notes that on July 27, Baltimore Oriole slugger Frank Robinson hit his 30th home run on the way to leading his team to a World Series victory that fall. But far from dwelling on Robinson’s heroics, Adelman describes what happened in Baltimore the following night. After the leader of a segregationist rally promised, “We’re damn sure gonna kill all the [blacks],” several thousand white teenagers went on a rampage in the city’s black neighborhoods, sparking an ugly street battle that was finally quelled by riot police.

Maraniss is the most polished writer here, having written widely praised biographies of Bill Clinton and the late Green Bay Packer Coach Vince Lombardi. But Adelman and Belth tell their stories with more verve and insight than he does, avoiding most of the cliches and conventional wisdom of traditional sports volumes. Eager to connect the events on the diamond with the rising tide of political activism, these books dismantle the wall between the insular world of baseball and the tumult of 1960s America.

Though Adelman and Belth still rely on sports page accounts and interviews with retired players, we hear recollections that go far beyond memories of a pivotal defensive play or late-inning home run. There is the rich detail of seemingly minor moments, as when black St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson, testing his young white teammate Tim McCarver, asks him for a sip of soda on the team bus. After thinking it over, McCarver says, “I’ll save you some.”

Race is always a factor. According to Donn Clendenon, one of Clemente’s younger teammates, the Pirates for years had a two-person racial quota -- Clemente and a Spanish-speaking roommate. In 1964, Gibson won a shiny new Corvette as the World Series MVP. He was promptly pulled over by police who found it suspicious that any black man would be driving a fancy sports car. After Dodger ace Don Drysdale had established a new record for consecutive scoreless innings, Gibson was asked if he could handle the stress of trying to best it. His reply: “I face more pressure every day just being a Negro.”

Even the rites of spring training, which have been glorified by generations of baseball lovers, come out looking a lot less bucolic. In the 1960s, black and Latin American players still faced humiliating second-class treatment reporting to spring training in Florida. In 1961, 14 years after Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, black players were still victims of Jim Crow segregation, forced to stay in separate, very unequal lodgings. When the Pirates had booster luncheons in Fort Myers, Clemente was not allowed to participate since, as Maraniss dryly puts it, he couldn’t have gotten into the building “unless he worked as a waiter or dishwasher.”

A few enlightened owners, notably Bill Veeck, pulled their clubs out of segregated motels. But most were silent, as was the white sports press. Spring training was finally desegregated after a persistent campaign by black sportswriters, led by Wendell Smith, who prodded the owners into action. Even then, the players had to be content with half measures. On road trips, black players had white teammates bring back food to eat on the bus, because they couldn’t be served in restaurants across the South.

Longtime St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood had a similarly rude introduction to the big leagues when he reported to the fancy Floridian hotel for his first spring training with the Cincinnati Reds, only to be brusquely dispatched to Ma Felder’s boarding house, where the Reds’ young black players were forced to stay.

As Flood later discovered, all ballplayers, regardless of color, were second-class citizens. Flood is a tragic figure in baseball history, his career and life cut short by his fight against baseball’s reserve clause, which prevented players from refusing trades or becoming free agents. Warned that he would probably never be allowed to play again, Flood pressed his case anyway, convinced that the reserve clause violated his civil rights. He was a man of the 1960s: Having seen his brothers marching for freedom across the South, having watched the Kennedys and the Rev. Martin Luther King assassinated, he said: “I could not ignore what was going on outside the walls of Busch Stadium.... All of those rights that these great Americans were dying for, I didn’t have in my own profession.”

Flood’s suit went all the way to the Supreme Court. Even though the court ruled against him, its 5-3 decision in 1972 gave the owners such a shaky victory that, three years later, players were allowed to become free agents after six years of major league service. Flood took the loss hard, leaving the country for a time, eventually dying of throat cancer in 1997 at age 59. His bitterness is understandable. During the trial, he not only was criticized by owners and sportswriters but also was left to twist in the wind by his peers -- not one active player had the courage to show up and support him in court.

It is easy to bemoan a free-agency era that has helped spawn today’s sullen superstars, but these books offer bracing reminders of a time when players, owned in perpetuity by a ballclub, were treated somewhere between millworkers and slaves. It took years for players to triumph over the hardball tactics of general managers like the Dodgers’ Buzzie Bavasi, who boasted of bamboozling players during salary talks by drawing up fake contracts to convince them that their teammates were getting less money than they actually earned. It’s no wonder that Clemente and Flood became admirers of King, whose vision of freedom must have resonated in many ways with a black ballplayer shackled to an unbreakable team contract.

If there is one especially inspirational figure here, it is Clemente, who, like Flood and Jackie Robinson, died long before his time. Ever the crusader, Clemente perished taking humanitarian supplies to Nicaragua, which had just been devastated by a massive earthquake. He’s a tantalizing figure because it is just as easy to imagine him, had he lived, being governor of Puerto Rico as being manager of the Pirates. Burning, as Maraniss describes it, “with the anger of the underappreciated artist,” Clemente got his full due only after he was gone from the game.

The same could be said of Flood. When he needed support during his historic court battle, Flood found himself on his own. But in 1994, when he met with a large group of player representatives during the most bitterly fought strike in baseball history, one that eventually wiped out the World Series that year, he was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation. He was not a forgotten man after all. *