Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss Page B

greatness. How could he be great if he didn’t play? Don’t leave, Campanis urged him. Trust us. You’ll get your chance. The next night, in a mess of a game that the Royals lost 22–4, Clemente was inserted into the lineup in the second inning, replacing Whitman, and got two hits in three at-bats. He played some more during that series against the Maple Leafs, but then, with Bavasi and Campanis gone, it was back to the bench.
    The effort to hide Clemente from the world, or more specifically from the last place Pittsburgh Pirates, who would have the first selectionin the supplemental draft at season’s end, was ineffective. Branch Rickey, who ran the Dodgers organization for most of the 1940s, had moved on to Pittsburgh at the start of the fifties, where he had struggled to lift a pathetic Pirates club out of the National League cellar. Although there had been no notable success at the big-league level to show for it, Rickey was starting to accumulate talent, with the help of two superb scouts who had come with him from Brooklyn, Clyde Sukeforth and Howie Haak. They were opposites in personality: Suke-forth a modest, efficient, polite New Englander, Haak (pronounced Hake) a prodigiously profane baseball addict who chewed tobacco from the moment he got up and could keep a wad going in his mouth while eating scrambled eggs. But they were two of the best talent evaluators in the game. With Rickey’s intimate knowledge of the Dodgers and their system, and with his scouts at his call to go wherever he needed them, there was no way a prospect like Roberto Clemente, dangling out there, ready to be drafted at the end of the year, was going to escape their notice. At various times during the summer, Rickey dispatched Sukeforth and then Haak out to report on Montreal’s bonus baby.
    As Sukeforth later told the story, he checked on the Royals during a series against Richmond. Just observing Clemente in outfield practice, when he unloosed one stunning throw after another, and at the plate during batting practice, when he kept drilling shots back through the box, was enough. It hardly mattered that Macon kept Clemente on the bench.
    Before he left town, Sukeforth approached the Montreal manager and said, “Take care of our boy!”
    “You’re kidding. You don’t want that kid,” Macon answered.
    “Now, Max. I’ve known you for a good many years,” the scout said, softly chiding Macon. “We’re a cinch to finish last and get first draft choice. Don’t let our boy get in trouble.”
    Not long thereafter,Rickey sent Haak up to Montreal to double-check. Haak, with his belly paunch, slicked-back gray hair, and pants that constantly drooped down a flat rear, drove to Montreal nonstop in his beat-up old car with a spittoon next to the driver’s seat. He would drive anywhere to see anyone, and was known for being able to size upa player in a minute or two, thumbs-up or thumbs-down. As Haak later recounted the scene in writer Kevin Kerrane’s delicious book of interviews with baseball scouts, Dollar Sign on the Muscle, Rickey instructed him to watch the Royals without specifically stating what player to scout. “I knew who it was, though. Another Pirate scout [Sukeforth] had already been up to Montreal and he’d raved to me about this kid the Dodgers had hid out there. . . . When I walked into the Montreal clubhouse, I said hello to Max Macon, the manager, and he said, ‘You son of a bitch, what’re you doing here?’ I said, ‘I came to talk to you.’ He said, ‘You’re fulla shit. You’re here to look at Clemente. Well, you aren’t going to see him play!’”
    Macon kept Clemente in the dugout again, but Haak outmaneuvered him. He met Clemente after the game and found the young outfielder in a perplexed mood, steamed again about being consigned to the bench. With that psychological opening, Haak told Clemente that he should bleeping stay where he bleeping was and keep bleeping quiet, because the bleeping Pirates