Fifty years ago today, Pittsburgh Pirates legend Roberto Clemente laced a double off New York Mets rookie pitcher Jon Matlack to join one of baseball’s most exclusive fraternities: the 3,000-hit club.
“I still think it was a pretty good pitch,” Matlack, now 72, recently told the Tribune-Review, describing the curveball he threw to Clemente that day in the bottom of the fourth inning at Three Rivers Stadium.
Clemente wasn’t fooled. He lunged to reach the outside pitch and drilled it into the left-center field gap, one-hopping the outfield wall.
“It was the same pitch he struck me out on in the first inning,” Clemente said after the game.
It would be the last regular-season at-bat of Clemente’s career.
Three months later, on New Year’s Eve, he died in a plane crash while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
“My dad did stuff that still today no other player has done. But his humanitarian side is what really perpetuated him in such a way that people who are not even sports or baseball fans still admire him for who he was as a human being,” said Luis Clemente, 56, one of the late Roberto and Vera Clemente’s three sons.
While Clemente’s death was cause for mourning, his 3,000th hit was a landmark moment in the history of the game.
About 20,000 people have played Major League Baseball since 1876. Only 33 of them have at least 3,000 career hits. Clemente was the 11th player — and the first Puerto Rican and Latin American — to reach the milestone.
“He felt denied for much of his career,” said Duane Rieder, executive director of the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. He noted Clemente, as a younger player, often felt underappreciated and overshadowed by players from larger media markets on the East and West coasts.
“I think he knew when he stood on second base that day (after getting his 3,000th hit) that there was no way anyone could deny him from getting into the Hall of Fame and being instantly recognized as one of the game’s greatest players of all time,” Rieder said.
The gatekeeper
Twenty-two players have reached the 3,000-hit milestone since Clemente.
“For me, he is the gatekeeper for every player who has come after him,” said Danny Torres, 56, a fine-arts teacher and writer from New York City who hosts the Clemente-centric podcast Talkin’ 21. “It’s like when they get there to 3,000 hits, he puts his hand on their shoulder and says, ‘Welcome to the club.’ “
Clemente wasn’t always welcomed with open arms.
During his first spring training with the Pirates in 1955, Clemente and the team’s other Black players had to board in homes in a historically Black neighborhood on the east side of Fort Myers, Fla., while white players stayed in a downtown hotel, author David Maraniss wrote in the 2006 biography, “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero.” Black players often remained on the team bus while white teammates ate in whites-only restaurants.
In Pittsburgh, Clemente faced different challenges early in his career.
In addition to having problems with some members of the local press, Maraniss wrote, “He was Black, yet as a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican was somewhat removed from the indigenous Black community of Pittsburgh, and even further removed from most of his white teammates , separated by language, race and age.”
It wouldn’t take long for Clemente’s on-field play, off-the-field work in the community and charismatic personality to break down barriers.
By 1960, Clemente, then 26, had blossomed into a leader on the Pirates’ first World Series championship team in 35 years while becoming a National League All-Star and local fan favorite.
Fast forward to 1967, and he was a full-blown superstar. He had been named NL MVP the season before and was en route to his fourth NL batting title and seventh of 12 Gold Glove awards as the league’s best defensive right fielder.
That’s when Matlack first laid eyes on Clemente.
More than a great player
At the time, Matlack was a 17-year-old freshman at Pitt, but he wasn’t your typical college student.
Months earlier, the Mets had selected the 6-foot-3, left-handed pitcher from West Chester with the fourth overall pick in the June draft. He finished his American Legion season, pitched two games professionally for the Double-A Williamsport Mets and then enrolled at Pitt. He said he chose to attend Pitt because it followed a trimester schedule at the time.
“I thought I could get some schooling in and still have time to play fall ball” in the Florida Instructional League for young prospects, Matlack said.
While at Pitt, Matlack said he was invited by former Mets general manager Bob Scheffing to attend a Mets game against the Pirates at Forbes Field.
“I can’t tell you who won or who did what. I was just in awe of the big, wide-open place and the bright lights. I was sort of star struck,” Matlack said.
That wound up being Matlack’s only trimester at Pitt.
“Very quickly, some in the Mets organization said, ‘Are you going to be a ballplayer or a bookworm?’ he said.
He rocketed through the Mets’ farm system before being called up to the big leagues for part of the 1971 season. After that, he signed to play in the Puerto Rican winter league for the San Juan Senadores.
Clemente had played for the Senators since the late 1950s, but coming off the Pirates’ 1971 World Series championship, he opted not to play winter ball in 1971-72. One night during the winter season, though, he invited all of the Senadores’ American players to his home for dinner in the Rio Piedras section of San Juan.
“It was a very cool, neat gesture on his part,” Matlack said. “It was the first time I was ever really close to him, but it was very evident from that evening the kind of person he was beyond being a great baseball player.”
Matlack also was struck by the strength of the 5-foot-11, 175-pound Clemente.
“I remember he was in a room talking hitting with some of the guys, and he picked up a bat that I found out later was a maximum-dimension bat,” Matlack said, referring to the 42-inch bat that more closely resembled a utility pole.
Although Clemente used a smaller bat in games, Matlack said, “He was moving it around like it was balsa wood, like it didn’t weigh an ounce. After he was done and everyone left the room, I went over and tried to pick up the bat but could barely get it off the floor.”
One of the greatest
The 1972 season was Matlack’s first full campaign in the big leagues and Clemente’s last. After intentionally walking Clemente in a relief appearance early in the season, Matlack got Clemente out the next five times he faced him.
Then Clemente sauntered to the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning Sept. 30, 1972, sitting on 2,999 career hits.
After Clemente took the first pitch for a strike, Matlack said, “I tried to bring a curveball in and just hit the outside corner. He took a big stride and then here comes his big bat, and I’m thinking, ‘He’s not supposed to go after this pitch.’ He drilled it into the gap, and I was like, ‘How did this happen?’ “
Clemente cruised into second base. Play was stopped, and the sparse crowd of about 13,000 fans gave Clemente a rousing ovation. Clemente was handed the ball he had just hit. He coolly tossed it underhanded to first base coach Don Leppert, who placed it in one of his back pockets.
“I had no idea what was happening until the scoreboard flashed ‘3,000,’” Matlack said. “I was an oblivious rookie just trying to do my job.”
Matlack, who was named NL Rookie of the Year in 1972 and went on to win 125 games with the Mets and Texas Rangers, also had no idea how inextricably linked his career would become with Clemente’s.
“At the time, I thought I might be remembered in some small way for giving up that hit. But as time wore on, given everything that happened, it became obvious that it wasn’t going to be in a small way,” Matlack said.
“It was devastating when I heard what happened on New Year’s Eve. I felt a real sense of loss because (the crash) happened as he was trying to help people who were in dire need. It was a huge loss for baseball and, I think, the world.”
Al Oliver, a former Pirates teammate who considered Clemente a friend and mentor, said he thinks it was meant to be that way.
“I think the man upstairs wanted him to leave that way in order for him to finally be known and recognized not only as one of the greatest players to ever play the game,” Oliver said, “but as one of the greatest human beings that ever walked on this Earth.”
Tom Fontaine is a Tribune-Review digital news editor. You can contact Tom by email at [email protected] or via Twitter .