Roberto Clemente

Roberto Clemente came to Pittsburgh in nineteen fifty-five as a twenty-year-old right fielder from Carolina, Puerto Rico. He would play eighteen seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, win four batting titles, twelve Gold Gloves, one Most Valuable Player Award, and two World Series rings. He would record his three thousandth hit on the last day of the regular season in nineteen seventy-two. He would die three months later, on New Year's Eve, at thirty-eight years old.

Clemente had learned of a massive earthquake that had struck Managua, Nicaragua on December twenty-third, nineteen seventy-two. He organized a relief flight himself, frustrated that earlier shipments of supplies had been stolen before reaching the victims. He believed that if he was personally on board, the aid would get through. On December thirty-first, his cargo plane, overloaded by its ground crew, took off from San Juan's international airport and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after liftoff.

The baseball world was stunned. The Hall of Fame changed its rules so that a player who had died could be inducted after just six months rather than waiting the standard five-year period. Clemente was inducted in nineteen seventy-three, the first Latin American and Caribbean player so honored.

What is harder to quantify is what Clemente meant to Pittsburgh, to Puerto Rico, and to the millions of young Latin American players who came after him. He had faced racial discrimination throughout his career, including being treated as less than equal in the early years in a sport that had only integrated eight years before he arrived. He had insisted on his dignity, on being treated as a full human being, and had won that argument on the field every single day.

The Roberto Clemente Award, given each year to the major league player who best combines excellence on the field with service to the community, carries his name. That is appropriate. He died trying to help strangers.