When Clemente And Mays Roamed The Same Outfield
By Joe Guzzardi
During the seven-plus decades that I’ve been a baseball fan, I’ve watched games at all levels— Little and Pony League World Series, high school, the NCAA World Series and countless major and minor league games. When friends ask about my most memorable baseball moments, I answer going to Puerto Rico Winter League (PRWL) games. I’m not alone in my judgment. Dick Young, a New York-based columnist who wrote about the Yankees, Giants, Mets and the Brooklyn Dodgers for more than 50 years said that the most exciting games he ever covered were between the San Juan Senators against its neighbor, the Santurce Crabbers.
Thomas E. Van Hyning’s new book, “The Caribbean Series: Latin America’s Annual Baseball Tournament, 1949-2024,” transported me back to those wonderful days in the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, when as a Puerto Rico resident, I watched some of MLB and the Negro National League’s (NNL) best “peloteros,” as the fans referred to them. Among the league batting champions were Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, and Orlando Cepeda; NNL stars Willard Brown and Buster Clarkson won the runs batted in titles. Crabbers’ mound stalwarts were the Giants Ruben Gomez, a 28-year regular in the PRWL and Chicago Cubs ace and Sam “Toothpick” Jones, the first black pitcher to toss an MLB no-hitter. Santurce fielded the most successful PRWL teams of the 1950s. Author Van Hyning compared Santurce to the New York Yankees, “a franchise with a rich history and a winning tradition.” The Crabbers were all of that and more in the first season I watched them, 1954-1955. Most thrilling of all, in the Crabbers’ outfield, Clemente played left field with Mays in center, a fans’ delight as the duo roamed the deepest recesses of magnificent Sixto Escobar Stadium to snag long line drives. Well-traveled fans called Sixto Escobar the Fenway Park by the ocean. Clemente and Mays played together in numerous All-Star games, but the only time they played side-by-side continuously was as Santurce teammates.
Clemente respected Mays, with whom he had friendly competition, but Roberto didn’t worship the 1954 NL MVP. Instead, Clemente admired Monte Irvin, his childhood baseball hero who played for the Giants and, earlier, the NNL’s Newark Eagles. Mays played only one season with the Crabbers, 1954/1955, but what a season it was: batting average, .395, with 12 HRs and 33 RBIs in truncated season. “Ole, mira,” came the chants for Mays, the Spanish translation of, “Say, hey.” Clemente captured the 1956/1957 batting crown with the decade’s highest average, .396. During his 15-years-long PRWL career, Clemente played for the Crabbers, the Caguas Criollos, and the agaSenators, and against topflight MLB pitching, had career total of hitting .323, with thirty-five homers, and 269 RBIs. Clemente also had two managing stints with the Senators and guided the team to the playoffs twice.
Clemente was destined for stardom from the day that Brooklyn Dodgers scout Al Campanis, who had managed Cuba’s Cienfuegos Elephantes that winter, attended a tryout at Sixto Escobar. Campanis graded Clemente, then 18, as either A or A+ in the essential five-tools category—hitting, hitting for power, fielding, throwing, and speed. In his report to Dodgers’ management, Campanis wrote, “Has all the tools and likes to play. A real good-looking prospect.” On Nov. 22, 1954, the Pirates selected the 20-year-old Puerto Rican prospect from the Brooklyn Dodgers in MLB’s Rule 5 Draft. The Dodgers didn’t need Clemente that first season — outfielders Duke Snider and Carl Furillo hit .309 and .314 respectively, combined to hit sixty-eight home runs and helped Brooklyn win the 1955 World Series. But letting Clemente get away was an obvious Dodgers’ mistake when he won the ’66 NL MVP Award, four NL batting crowns and led the Pirates to World Series championships in ’60 and ’71. Over the course of his 18 MLB seasons, Clemente slashed .345/.382/.466 against the Dodgers with seventeen triples and twenty-one home runs in 291 career games. He didn’t hit higher than .330 against any other MLB team and is the only Hall of Famer to have been selected in the Rule 5 Draft.
The Crabbers, led by Mays’ .440 average and Clemente’s series-leading eight runs scored, topped off an excellent season by winning the 1955 Caribbean World Series. I moved back to the mainland before I would have seen a long string of Cooperstown Hall of Famers like Bob Gibson, Frank Robinson, Jim Palmer, Robin Yount, and Reggie Jackson. As I read Van Hyning’s book, thoughts of those great evenings I spent in Sixto Escobar Stadium, enjoying the warm Caribbean trade winds and top-flight baseball came back to me as though they happened yesterday.
Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com
When Clemente And Mays Roamed The Same Outfield