If you are a baseball fan, you know the name Roberto Clemente. If you aren’t, you still need to know his story and why it matters. His life was uplifting to many, yet had a tragic end. Furthermore, the story of Roberto Clemente’s death, and life, reveals much about America during the middle of the last century.

Before Roberto Clemente’s Death – His Baseball Career

Clemente was a right fielder who played his entire career, 1955 to 1972, with the Pittsburgh Pirates. And he had a great career. We remember him now as an iconic player. His career ended with 3,000 hits (only ten players had more when he retired), twelve Gold Glove awards, fifteen appearances in the All-Star game, and one Most Valuable Player award. Baseballreference.com ranks him #37 all-time in the all-encompassing statistic Wins Above Replacement. Clemente was a prodigious hitter, a skilled baserunner, and his throwing arm was legendary.

Everyone, it seems, remembers Roberto Clemente fondly today. Major League Baseball has an award named for Clemente that honors one player from each team with a strong community service and humanitarian record. Writers lionize him while old-timers gush about his talent and magnanimity.

But before Roberto Clemente’s death, things weren’t always that way.

Outside the Lines of His Playing Career

When Clemente came to Pittsburgh in 1955, Major League Baseball had only a handful of non-white players. A few Hispanic players had appeared in baseball prior to Clemente, but not many. To make things tougher, the city of Pittsburgh was not an easy place to gain fan support. Fewer than 1% of its population was Hispanic at the time.

The sportswriters of the day didn’t make things much easier for Roberto Clemente. Being only twenty and from Puerto Rico, his English was not strong at first. Some called him Bob or Bobby rather than Roberto. Some of his early baseball cards did the same. When writers quoted him, they often did so in broken English, a discourtesy typically not inflicted upon white players with questionable grammar.

Because he played hard, he suffered injury at times. The press, and even his own organization, sometimes accused Clemente of faking or being lazy because of it. (The team trainer could’ve set them straight, had anyone asked.) This follows a well-known and regrettable stereotype of Hispanic people.

Furthermore, Clemente wouldn’t accept this poor treatment meekly. He once said that “Mickey Mantle is God, but if a Latin or black is sick, they say it is in his head.” (Mickey Mantle was another amazing baseball talent who suffered his share of injuries, often playing while in pain.) Clemente called out prejudice where he saw it.

This did not endear him to all his contemporaries. And by speaking out against poor treatment, he invited another common stereotype that afflicted people of color at the time—that they were emotional, had big mouths, were ungrateful, were not patient enough, and so forth. People of color were supposed to be humble and grateful, not asking for too much too soon. (I remember watching interviews with African-American sports figures in the 1980s—this attitude remained alive and well, even then.)

Click Here to Subscribe to My History Blog!

Roberto Clemente and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had not known this before reading through the new book about Clemente from the Society of American Baseball Research (!Arriba! The Heroic Life of Roberto Clemente), but Clemente became friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whom I blog about frequently. They first met in 1962, and King visited Clemente at his home in Puerto Rico that year.

Many parallels exist in their lives. Both died before age 40. They both experienced segregation in the U.S., in Clemente’s case during spring training in Florida. Both were humanitarians who sought to improve the world. Yet, despite this, both had a number of enemies during their lives. They generated fear in those who influenced society because they gave a voice to people who had none. This was what drew Clemente to King, even more than his philosophy of nonviolence.

Clemente said of King: “He put the people, the ghetto people, the people who didn’t have nothing to say in those days, they started saying what they would have liked to say for many years that nobody listened to. . . . Now that wasn’t only the black people, but the minority people. The people who didn’t have anything, and they had nothing to say in those days because they didn’t have any power, they started saying things and they started picketing, and that’s the reason I say King changed the whole world.”

When King was murdered in 1968, it was Clemente, among others, who convinced Major League Baseball to postpone its Opening Day games for two days, until after King’s funeral. Many owners wanted to go on as planned. It took a two-day strike by many professional players to convince them otherwise.

Other Social Justice Causes

Clemente also supported the rights of workers. He backed Curt Flood during Flood’s efforts to eliminate the reserve clause in baseball. Some credit his speech at a union meeting with the decision of the players’ union to back Flood in his lawsuit against Major League Baseball.

Not only that, he visited children in hospitals and ran baseball camps for children in low-income areas. Clemente also hoped to use sports to counter increasing levels of drug addiction.

It is ironic, then, that perhaps his greatest humanitarian effort was the cause of his death.

Roberto Clemente’s Death Causes

The story of Roberto Clemente’s death is tragic in almost every respect. In 1972, a major earthquake struck the Latin American nation of Nicaragua. Thousands died, and about half the Nicaraguan capital of Managua was destroyed. Aid came in from around the world.

But that aid didn’t always reach the people of Nicaragua. The dictators who ran Nicaragua, the Somoza family, stole much of the aid to enrich themselves. America’s president, Richard Nixon, sent paratroopers, but they ended up helping the Somozas steal rather than getting the aid where it should have gone. (Nixon claimed the paratroopers were to prevent communist influence.)

The U.S. gave strong support to many dictators in Latin America and South America during the middle decades of the 20th century. Dictator Anastasio Somoza was, in fact, a graduate of West Point. It seems that America would support any dictator, no matter how terrible, murderous, and repressive, as long as they were not communist while being terrible, murderous, and repressive.

Roberto Clemente’s connection to Nicaragua was that he’d recently been in the country, managing a team for the World Amateur Baseball Championships. During his time there, Clemente made friends and sympathized with the poverty that many Nicaraguans faced.

Click Here to Get Your Free Ebook of Rob’s First Novel!

Roberto Clemente’s Death Plane

After the earthquake, Clemente organized a relief effort in Puerto Rico. However, he soon learned of the corruption. He found out that an American medical team that went to Nicaragua had had to fight government officials, lest they steal the supplies the medical team brought with them.

Consequently, he vowed to deliver the supplies he’d gathered himself. Clemente hoped that his personal prestige and popularity would make sure they reached the people of Nicaragua rather than lining someone’s pocket.

But the plane chartered for delivery was overloaded and not in good shape to fly. Clemente boarded anyway.

Roberto Clemente’s death happened on December 31 of 1972. He died when his plane went down at sea. No one ever found his body. Roberto Clemente’s death happened while bringing aid to the people of Nicaragua, a country that wasn’t his own, but whose people he wanted to help.

Clemente’s death and life have inspired many people since 1972. I fear, however, that like with Martin Luther King, Jr., people have forgotten an important part of Clemente’s legacy. We cannot question his humanitarian credentials. Everyone associated with baseball remembers that, along with his talent.

But it’s easy to forget that during his life, he had many enemies because he took a public stand for justice. Clemente challenged racial and geographic stereotypes. He believed in justice and equality for everyone at a time when many people did not. One baseball historian ranked him second only to Jackie Robinson in regard to his social impact on the game. I hope that we can remember his entire legacy, not only the parts we like to remember.

Please Subscribe!

If you enjoyed this blog, please sign up to follow it by scrolling down or clicking here, and recommending it to your friends. I’d love to have you aboard! You can also join the more than 1,000 members of my Readers Club for Rob Bauer Books by clicking here or like me on Facebook and Instagram. Please check out my historical fiction novels, too. If you find this information valuable, supporting me helps keep this blog going. As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!