As the golden anniversary of Roberto Clemente's 3,000th and final hit looms this Friday, baseball fittingly finds itself a bit feverish with milestone mania.
Aaron Judge, the towering Yankees menace currently flirting with the Triple Crown, threatens the legitimate record for home runs in a season, 61, which still belonged to Yankees legend Roger Maris as of this deadline.
Albert Pujols, again of the Cardinals, thankfully, arrived at the 700-homer plateau Friday night, a baseball topography visited only by two or three people, depending on your tolerance for performance-enhancing substances — Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth. There was very little doubt he'd make it before the end of the season and his career, as the Cardinals' final six games are against the Pirates, his favorite tormentees.
But this is about Clemente's day, a Saturday afternoon, Sept. 30, 1972, and it keeps us in compliance with the unwritten journalistic imperative that we note with some effort significant anniversaries so long as their total years in the rear view are divisible by 5. Hey, I didn't make the rules. Look for a 50th anniversary piece on the Immaculate Reception here in a couple of months.
Nothing about that day has changed in the last half-century, although the still sickening fact that the great Pirates right fielder died in a plane crash three months later has assigned his final official hit additional scrutiny. Most everything about hit No. 3,000, a tracer bullet double through the left-center gap off soon-to-be Rookie of the Year Jon Matlack, has been thoroughly wrung out, including that an over-eager scoreboard tech mistakenly posted a flashing H on a Friday night grounder Clemente thought was a hit but almost everyone else agreed was an error on Mets second baseman Ken Boswell.
The one aspect of Clemente's 3,000th that seems incongruent and which history has mostly dismissed is that Pittsburgh just didn't seem terribly interested in it. The Pirates had a great team in 1972 (can you imagine?), but the crowd that day was an almost embarrassingly light 13,117.
"We had the division locked up," explained eyewitness Steve Blass, who'd smother the Reds in the first game of the 1972 NLCS. "I think most people were saving their money to buy World Series tickets."
Plausible, but how come the front sports page in the Sunday Pittsburgh Press played Pitt's 27-22 loss to Northwestern above the Pirates story, headlined "Roberto Gets 3,000th, Will Rest Till Playoffs?"
Was there some significance to that Pitt-Northwestern fray? Other than the fact that Pitt fell to 0-4 that day? Someone getting a 3,000th hit was rare at the time. Clemente was only the 11th player to do it. In fact, between 1925 and 1972, only four times did someone get a 3,000th hit. Pitt lost four times that September.
In any case, the Pirates crowd set me to wondering if there has ever been a smaller home crowd for a 3,000th hit than Roberto's 13,117, launching an extensive box score hunt that was frustrating at times, particularly when it veered frightening close to actual work.
Where's the box score from the day Cap Anson got his 3,000th hit, July 18, 1897? Good luck with that. Also couldn't find Nap Lajoie's in 1914 or Ty Cobb's in 1921 or Eddie Collins' in 1925. But the answer is yes, there was at least one home crowd smaller than Clemente's, and in the kind of specialized irony only baseball can deliver, it was for none other than Paul Waner, who spent his first 15 years with the Pirates and joined Clemente and 17 others in the club's inaugural Hall of Fame class this month.
On June 19, 1942, with Waner playing for the Boston Braves, 3,304 New Englanders turned out for Big Poison's 3,000th hit.
Long before the time the 3,000-hit club grew to 33 members in April (Miguel Cabrera), players who hit the milestone at home generally enjoyed robust audiences. Robin Yount's 3,000th drew 47,589 in September 1992, Derek Jeter's 48,103 in July 2011, and even the much-travelled Rickey Henderson drew 60,103 to San Diego's old Qualcomm Stadium in October 2001, the largest such assemblage in 3,000-hit history.
The enduring baseball legacy of September, 30, 1972, is wrapped in just how fondly it's remembered by its relatively few eyewitnesses.
Blass remembers Clemente standing at second, acknowledging the crowd, and wishes that pose had been used for Clemente's statue. He further remembers Willie Mays, then an incongruent Met, coming across from the visiting dugout to congratulate The Great One.
Bob Smizik, who wrote the game story for that ridiculous Sunday sports page, remembers that Doc Ellis had a no-hitter that Saturday for 5 1/3 , and still laughs that people were saying that no one else would get to a 3,000th hit.
Some of the warmest remembrances came this week from Steve Ziants, then an 11-year-old fan who'd one day attain a distinguished newspaper career making halfway readable the dubious prose of writers like me. He's my Sunday editor.
"We were somewhere behind the first-base dugout, maybe 20 rows off the field; I didn't get to many games then, maybe two or three in a season," Steve remembers. "So I felt — and still do — extremely blessed as a baseball fan that I got to be there that day ... and even moreso in retrospect after living through the New Year's Day morning that followed three months later. And I also recall how the night before, while listening on the radio, how disappointed I was when I thought he'd gotten his 3,000th, then excited when I heard his 'hit' was taken away by the official scorer and that I'd have the chance to see him get it the next day — a Saturday. Even then, I was rooting for the story. Beyond that, I'm not sure where my personal memory ends and the official memory of the day begins. I've read so much about it and seen so many replays of it. I was fortunate enough to snap a picture of him when he got his hit; a picture I had blown up and have carried with me these last 50 years. When you consider that I had one 12-exposure roll of film for my Kodak, to have gotten the hit was pretty fortunate."
Maybe that's why we do these semi-mandatory look-backs. It's the process, apparently, through which we remind ourselves what sports are for.
