Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss Read Free Book Online

school. He was signed for $40 a week, and all he had to do was learn how to hit the breaking ball, low and away.
    Less than a month later, on the Saturday of November 6, the Brooklyn Dodgers held a tryout at Sixto Escobar. On hand was one of Brooklyn’s top scouts, Al Campanis, who was managing the Cienfuegos Elephants in Cuba that winter. Clemente was one of about seventy players at the tryout, and the obvious standout, throwing bullets from center to third and displaying excellent time in the sixty-yard dash. “If the sonofagun can hold a bat in his hands, I’m gonna sign this guy,” Campanis said before Clemente stepped into the batter’s box. On the mound was one of Zorrilla’s crafty old pitchers, Pantalones Santiago. Clemente stroked line drives all over the field.When Campanis filled out the official Brooklyn scouting report, this is how it read:
    SCOUT REPORT
Club SANTURCE
League PORTO RICAN
Pos. OF Age 18
    Hgt 5'11" Wgt 175
    Bats R Throws R
Name
CLEMENTE ROBERT
 
Arm
A+ GOOD CARRY
Accuracy A
Fielding
A GOOD AT THIS STAGE
Reactions A
Hitting
A TURNS HEAD BUT IMPROVING
Power A+
Running Speed
+
Base Running A
    Definite Prospect? YES Has Chance? ____ Fill-In? ____ Follow ____
    Physical Condition (Build, Size, Agility, etc.) WELL BUILT—FAIR SIZE—
 
GOOD AGILITY
Remarks:
WILL MATURE INTO BIG MAN. ATTENDING HIGH SCHOOL BUT PLAYS WITH SANTURCE. HAS ALL THE TOOLS AND LIKES TO PLAY. A REAL GOOD LOOKING PROSPECT! HE HAS WRITTEN THE COMMISSIONER REQUESTING PERMISSION TO PLAY ORGANIZED BALL.
    Report By:
    AL CAMPANIS
    Clemente was “the best free agent athlete I’ve ever seen,” Campanis would say later. Baseball was everything to Roberto then, but even though he had asked for permission to play, he was not quite ready to be signed. The phenom was still in high school, though not at Julio Vizcarrando, which would not let him attend school and practice and play for Santurce at the same time. He had transferred to the Instituto Comercial de Puerto Rico in Hato Rey, a neighborhood between his home and the stadium. It would be fifteen months between the time Campanis first scouted him and when Clemente formally signed a contract with a major league organization. By then he had earned his diploma from the technical school, and was doing a little better with the curveball low and away. And he was still only nineteen.Life was all possibilities: the only sadness in his life involved a girlfriend who stopped seeing him because her family thought his skin was too dark.
    •   •   •
    It was Clemente’s way, throughout his life, to pay tribute to those who came before him. Blessings to his parents, he would say, and to his elders, and to his brothers. Along the path he took to northern baseball, several others went before him.The Three Kings, in a sense, were Hiram Bithorn, Luis Olmo, and Vic Power. Bithorn first, Olmo second, and Power down the line but before Clemente, and paving the way for him because of color distinctions that were made in the United States that had no bearing back on the island.
    Clemente was seven years old when Hiram Bithorn, a right-handed pitcher, became the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. Bithorn made his first start for the Chicago Cubs on April 21, 1942, against the Pittsburgh Pirates, five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color line. That Bithorn had white skin meant very little to fans in San Juan, where he had played with and against the Americans Josh Gibson, Monte Irvin, and Roy Campanella and the great Puerto Ricans Pedro Cepeda and Poncho Coimbre, all of whom had darker skin. But it meant everything to the men who ran organized baseball in the States. It was the only reason they let him play.
    Bithorn was big and burly, a jolly giant and three-sport star in his native Santurce, excelling in basketball and volleyball as well as on the mound. The first story on him in the Chicago Tribune called him an “intriguing rookie,” noting that his parents came from