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| Roberto Clemente is shown in his early days with the Pittsburgh Pirates. On July 25, 1956, in his second season, Clemente gave the Bucs a 9-8 victory over the Chicago Cubs with an inside-the-park, grand slam walk-off homer -- something never done before or since. |
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| The 1955 Bowman baseball card of Chicago Cubs pitcher Jim Brosnan, back when TV was kind of a new thing. Brosnan, who'd just come into the game, surrendered a bases-loaded, inside-the-park homer on his first pitch to Roberto Clemente, giving Pittsburgh a 9-8 victory over the Cubs on July 25, 1956. |
In 1956, Roberto Clemente was a few years away from truly launching what was to become a legendary career. He did bat .311, a substantial improvement over .255 in his rookie year of 1955. But he slipped to .253, .289 and .296 the next three years. It wasn't until he hit .314 and finished eighth in National League MVP voting in the Pittsburgh Pirates' world championship season of 1960 that he began to establish himself as a player to watch for years to come.
But back in 1956, on Wednesday, July 25, Clemente flashed the potential and excitement he could bring to the game with one of the most wondrous hitting, and base running, feats imaginable.
It's exciting when someone hits walk-off homer to win a game, right?
And it's exciting when someone hits grand-slam homer, right?
And it's exciting when someone hits an inside-the-park homer, right?
Well, imagine if someone combined all three with an inside-the-park, walk-off grand slam. That's what Roberto delivered to give the Pirates a 9-8 victory over the Chicago Cubs, sending 12,431 gathered at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field on the way home in what must have been a frenzy. Clemente's homer trifecta had never been done before, nor since.
Clemente's dash, described as a "Merriwell Finish" in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline, capped a 2-for-5 day with five RBIs and two runs scored in a seesaw battle that saw the Pirates go up 4-0 through six innings, and the Cubs move in front with a seven-run eighth inning.
With the Cubs holding an 8-5 lead, Hank Foiles, batting for relief pitcher Nelson King, started the last half of the ninth by drawing a walk off Turk Lown. A single by Bill Virdon and walk to Dick Cole loaded the bases. Jim Brosnan relieved Lown.
On Brosnan's first pitch, high and tight, Clemente launched a shot over Jim King's head in left field. "After the ball struck the fencing, it rolled along the cinder warning track toward center field," wrote Steven C. Weiner in an article for the Society for American Baseball Research's Games Project. "The three runners easily scored, and Clemente ignored the outstretched arms and stop sign of Pirates manager and third-base coach Bobby Bragan as the relay throw came in from center fielder Solly Drake to Ernie Banks to catcher Hobie Landrith."
As reported by the Post-Gazette: “He made it just in front of the relay from Ernie Banks. He slid, missed the plate, then reached back to rest his hand on the rubber with the ninth Pirate run in a 9-8 victory as the crowd of 12,431 went goofy with excitement.”
It was Clemente's sixth homer in a year he had seven.
(Clemente could do everything but wasn't a prolific home-run hitter. He didn't reach double digits until 1960, his season high was 29 in 1966 and he hit 240 in his career.)
Bragan didn't fine Clemente for running through his stop sign, which was somewhat of an upset, since he had a penchant for fining players, including Clemente -- $25 for missing a squeeze sign earlier in the season.
“Clemente tied up the game, for sure and I threw up the stop sign. … After all, we had some long-ball hitters coming up, no one out and getting Bobby home with the winning run looked easy," Bragan said in The Sporting News, referring to Clemente with an Americanized first name (he was also called Bob) that Roberto didn't care for.
Said Clemente to The Associated Press: “I say to Bobby: ‘Get out of my way, and I score,’ Just like that. I think we have nothing to lose, as we got the score tied without my run, and I score, the game—she is over and we don’t have to play no more tonight.”
In retrospect, Clemente's transgression looks not-so-harmless yet as heroic as Enos Slaughter running through a third-base stop sign to score the winning run in the 1946 World Series. In fact both actions look brilliant. In an article titled "The Greatest Forgotten Home Run of All Time" for The Massachusetts Review in 2015, Martin Espada wrote, "What Roberto Clemente accomplished in Pittsburgh on July 25, 1956, stupefied the tobacco-spitting baseball lifers all around him precisely because it transcended baseball, entering the realm of pure theater and then myth. Even his defiance of authority that day — running through hapless Bobby Bragan’s sign — enhances the quality of the legend.”
Getting back to more mortal matters, the Cubs began to make things interesting that day with their big eighth. Bob Friend, who'd fairly sailed through the first seven innings, yielded four singles in five at-bats to pinch hitter Don Hoak leading off, Drake, Dee Fondy and Banks. Jerry Kindall, pinch running for Hoak, scored on Fondy's base rap.
Elroy Face relieved Friend, and rather than put out the fire he spread it by surrendering two-run doubles to Walt Moryn, Eddie Miksis and Hobie Landrith, around a walk to Jim King, making the score 7-4 Cubs. Face got out of the inning by striking out Kindall and Drake.
(Face hadn't quite yet become the premier reliever he would be in the late '50s, although he did lead the league in games pitched that year with 69 as he went 12-13 with four saves. Two years later he led the NL in saves with 20. In 1959 he went 18-1 out of the bullpen, fifth in the league in wins, and set a record for single-season winning percentage that stands today.)
The Pirates bit into the margin with Jack Shepard's double and Eddie O'Brien's RBI single in their half of the eighth. The Cubs answered with a single run in the top of the ninth on back-to-back-to-back singles by Banks, Moryn and King with two out. Cubs 8, Pirates 5. Exit Face, enter King, who struck out Miksis on three pitches.
And enter Roberto to end it all.
What ended as somewhat of a slugfest began as a pitcher's duel between Friend and Cubs starter Warren Hacker. Dale Long, who earlier in the year had set a major league record with homers in eight straight games, broke up Hacker's shutout with a two-run homer, Clemente aboard on a single, in the fourth. It was Long's 20th homer of the year, setting a record for Pittsburgh left-handed hitters, and he'd hit seven more for his career high.
Clemente's sacrifice fly scored another run in the fifth after a single by Friend and double by Virdon. Consecutive doubles by Frank Thomas and Shepard in the sixth increased the Pirate lead to 4-0 and ended Hacker's day as he gave way to Vito Valentinetti, who retired six straight batters before Lown took over to start the eighth.
Hacker finished with a line of four runs allowed, all earned, in his five innings with no strikeouts and one walk.
Going into the eighth Friend had a four-hit shutout with eight strikeouts and no walks. The final box score showed 7 1/3 innings, four runs, all earned, nine Ks and still no walks.
(One of the more solid NL hurlers of the 1950s and '60s, Friend in his sixth year had a then-career high in wins in 1956 at 17-17 with a 3.46 ERA, earning his first of four All-Star Game selections. He went 196-266 with a 3.57 ERA in 16 years.)
With the strikeout he got to get the Pirates out of the ninth, Nellie King picked up the win to move to 4-1 on year. With the gopher granny he surrendered to Clemente, Brosnan fell to 3-5.
(Brosnan, in the days before Jim Bouton's chronicle of his 1969 season, pioneered the baseball diary with "The Long Season" and Pennant Race," written about his 1959 and '61 campaigns. Referred to by teammates as "The Professor," he also authored magazine articles during his playing career and was a writer by profession after retiring from baseball. And he wasn't too shabby a relief pitcher, five times finishing in the top 10 in saves.)
Besides Clemente, other hitting standouts for the Cubs included Virdon, 4-for-5 with a run scored, and Shepard, 3-for-4 with a run and an RBI.
If not for Clemente, fellow legend Banks might have been the star of the game. "Mr Cub," more known as a home-run hitter, had four singles in five at-bats with two RBIs and a run scored. He also had six assists and two putouts from the shortstop position he established himself at before moving to first base in the 1960s. Moryn was 2-for-5 with two RBIs and a run scored for the Cubs.
The day's events left the Pirates in fifth place in the NL, 13 1/2 games back of first-place Milwaukee. The Cubs were in seventh, 16 back.
Eventually the Pirates faded to finish seventh at 66-88, 27 behind first-place Brooklyn. The Cubs brought up the eighth-place bottom at 60-94, trailing the Dodgers by 33.
As for Clemente, "The Great One," after five years on the cusp he played in his first All-Star game in 1960, the first of eight straight years he would appear and 12 of 13. At .314 his batting average was his second .300 season, also beginning a stretch of eight straight and 12 of 13. Only in 1968, "The Year of the Hitter," did Clemente miss out on .300, at .291, and an All-Star Game appearance. He also won 12 straight Gold Gloves, tied for most among outfielders, consecutive and overall.
In his 18-year career, Clemente batted .317 with four titles and an even 3,000 hits. His life came to a tragic end when he was killed at age 38 in a plane crash off the Puerto Rican coast while helping deliver relief to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The Puerto Rican native was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973 in a special election that waived the mandatory five-year waiting period.
"He had about him the touch of royalty," baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn said of Clemente.
July 25, 1956, could be seen as his coronation.
Sources: Basic play-by-play came from Retroshoot at www.retrosheet.org/
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