Roberto Clemente
1934 – 1972 · Puerto Rico
Known for: Baseball great who died bringing aid to strangers
“Three thousand hits, and a last flight flown for strangers.”
Biography
Roberto Clemente grew up in Barrio San Antón in Carolina, Puerto Rico, the youngest of six children born on 18 August 1934 to Melchor Clemente, a foreman in the sugar cane fields, and Luisa Walker. The family had little, and the boys worked beside their father, loading and unloading trucks. He played ball against neighbouring barrios from an early age and at fourteen was recruited by Roberto Marín for the Sello Rojo softball team. At high school in Carolina he was a track and field athlete of Olympic promise in the high jump and the javelin, which he credited with the arm that later made him famous. At eighteen he chose baseball for good and signed with the Cangrejeros de Santurce of the Puerto Rican winter league.
The Brooklyn Dodgers signed him in February 1954 and sent him to their affiliate in Montreal, a decision that cost them his contract: the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him after that season and kept him for all eighteen years of his major league career. In right field he became the standard by which the position was judged, winning a Gold Glove Award for twelve consecutive seasons from 1961 to 1972. He led the National League in batting in 1961, 1964, 1965 and 1967, was its Most Valuable Player in 1966, batted over .300 in thirteen seasons and reached exactly three thousand hits. He won the World Series with the Pirates in 1960 and again in 1971, when he was named the most valuable player of the series. He was the first player from Latin America and the Caribbean to win a World Series as a starting position player, to be named league Most Valuable Player and to take a World Series award, and he spoke plainly about the prejudice that Spanish speaking players met in the United States.
What he did in the winters mattered as much to him. Alongside winter ball at home he ran relief work across Latin America and the Caribbean, and when an earthquake devastated Managua in December 1972 he chartered an aircraft to carry supplies himself, having learned that earlier shipments were not reaching the victims. The overloaded Douglas DC-7 went down in the sea off Isla Verde on 31 December 1972. He was thirty eight, and his body was never recovered. The Baseball Hall of Fame set aside its waiting period and elected him in 1973, the first player from the Caribbean to be admitted, the Pirates retired his number 21, and the annual award for the player who best combines skill with service to others now carries his name.