Alaska Employment Law

Catching up on baseball: it was my good fortune several weeks ago to stay in Pittsburgh right across the river from PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Here, a note: If anything bad ever happens to Fenway, I recommend that the citizens of Boston go to Pittsburgh and liberate PNC Park from an inept but improving team whose fans are more interested in the Steelers and Penguins than in the Bucs, a sub-.500 club for 15 straight years. Like Fenway, PNC is a ballpark, not a stadium, and it’s gorgeous. To get to PNC Park from downtown, one walks across the Roberto Clemente Bridge (a/k/a 6th Street) past the dramatic statue of Clemente just outside the left field gates. There, at game time, you can buy walk-up box seats behind home plate for $27.

I had a keener appreciation of Clemente after reading Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, by David Maraniss. One of the very first Latin baseball stars (Vic Power, also from Puerto Rico, arrived in the major leagues in 1954, a year ahead of Clemente, and baseball historians tend to omit Theodore Samuel Williams, whose mother’s parents were Mexican), Clemente was obtained from the Brooklyn Dodgers by Pirate general manager Branch Rickey, himself a book-worthy individual who invented the farm system while with the Cardinals and integrated baseball while with the Dodgers.

Maraniss unfolds his story slowly. I was initially frustrated reading the early part of the book not to hear more about Clemente himself, instead of his family, his surroundings in Puerto Rico, and the state of baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. Only gradually does Clemente, a hypochondriac and a man sensitive to any slight, particularly one he thought might be related to his color or his accent, emerge as the strong, opinionated, inspirational leader he turned out to be, on and off the baseball diamond. It takes him a while to grow into that person, and so he emerges, slowly, before our eyes, in Maraniss’s book, becoming one of the greatest right fielders ever to play baseball.

And as much as I have written here, I have to leave out an awful lot that made Clemente a special individual. Clemente achieved status as a legend following his death in the crash of a DC-7 as it took off from Puerto Rico, carrying relief supplies to Nicaragua following the earthquake there in 1972. Just as now is the case in Myanmar, the government would not freely admit aid workers to Nicaragua, and there was much diversion of supplies and black market selling. Clemente, who had spent considerable time in Managua, was urged to come there by those who felt his presence as a Latin leader would persuade the Nicaraguan government to relent. The plane, overloaded and probably unsafe to fly even at normal loads, crashed into the ocean on takeoff. Clemente’s body was never found. In the end, you remember not the player, but the man.  A first-class biography.