That’s what the author claims, anyway, and I’m sitting in an airport with very dicey internet connections, unable to verify that claim, and it’s not really to the point if it’s really as unique as he claims. The part that gets me is that today is July 25, 2017, and purely by chance this one-of-a-kind phenomenon took place exactly sixty-one years ago today, propelling me to write a draft and try to post it, in honor of the anniversary, before they call my flight in about another 15 minutes.
According to the author, a Professor of English at UMass-Amherst named Martin Espada, this unique HR was hit on July 25, 1956 by none other than Roberto Clemente: http://lithub.com/the-greatest-forgotten-home-run-of-all-time/. Read the article, and you’ll see two things: it was a very exciting play (as I just wrote, a week or so ago, my favorite plays are triples, and even more exciting, though I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one, is an inside-the-park HR—a walk-off grand-slam of that stripe would be the ultimate in excitement), but Professor Espada writes, even more heatedly than he does about the event, about the racism with which the event was written up, at the time, and then a few years afterwards, and then in the Roberto Clemente biography by David Maraniss.
I’m not sure how to take the racist angle. My first instinct is to acknowledge it: sure, it was (barely) in the first decade of integrated baseball, so of course white sportswriters, and white ballplayers, and white biographers are going to imbue events with a cruder sense of race-relations than we will find polite in 2017. To say that pretty much anything involving a minority ballplayer from 1956 will be described in racially insensitive terms from our perspective is to be met with the all-purpose 21st century response of "Duh!" And if you read the heated comments to this article, you’ll see that much of the heat concerns racism rather than baseball, including defenses from Maraniss himself, as well as from Maraniss’s (and others’) defenders and detractors, on a level not often seen outside of the Reader’s Posts section of BJOL. Read it and enjoy.
But I’d like to focus on the baseball stuff alone. As I just mentioned about exciting baserunning, and its disappearance from the game as smart baseball and sabermetrics, there seems to be less reckless strategy employed in baserunning generally, which I’m quite sure represents a firmer grasp of risk/reward and a less daring brand of baseball, both at once. In the situation described here—bases loaded, no outs, down by three runs, bottom of the ninth—would you be inclined to hold Clemente to a triple, if you were his manager or his third-base coach? (In this case, they were one and the same.) If Clemente stops at third base, you have the game tied up, no outs, and a good baserunner on third base. I don’t know what the Pirates’ odds of winning the game would be at that point, but they’ve got to be pretty good—75%? 90% Better than 90%?--, and even if they fail to get Clemente in from third, they’ve still got a tied game, at home, which in itself puts the odds at better than 50/50.
So, racial and cultural stuff aside, are you inclined to label Clemente a genius, as Professor Espada seems inclined to do, a brilliant assessor of risks and rewards, or do you take Manager Bobby Bragan’s more conservative position, and throw up a stop sign, saying, "Roberto, this game isn’t about you, and exciting the fans, and going for the glory! Stay put, and let one of your teammates drive you in."
They’re calling my flight, so I’ll have to continue this column in the Comments sections, if anyone cares to chime in. I’m with Roberto, and daring baserunning, by the way, but I think I’m speaking as a hot-blooded fan, not a cold-blooded analyst. I think the play I’d like to see, and the play I wish I’d seen, is not the soundest winning strategy.