21

although claimed by cancer two decades ago he remembers that his pap was a big baseball fan and at sixteen had been signed by the dodgers due to the fact that he threw hard enough to break a batter’s arm on more than one occasion at least according to his grammy and that he even had the laces of the ball calloused into his fingers 40 years after he gave up the sunlight of baseball for the darkness of coal mines.

he recalls that his pap once told him that he had driven from wheeling wv to forbes field in pittsburgh and that prior to the game the great clemente took a bag of balls and threw strike after strike after strike to the catcher at home plate for he was blessed with the greatest arm in the history of the game.

he remembers that at the end of the 1971 season that the great clemente told his teammates that if they got to the world series he would make sure they win it and then went out and produced base hits in all seven games of the series 12 in all on the way to becoming the first latin player to ever with the series mvp award (fuck all of you who jeered him for his ethnicity).

he recalls new year’s day 1973 when he woke up after a night of dick clark and niehgbors and noisemakers and his dad had to take him into the green tweed and oak of the rarely used living room and explain to him that the great clemente had died in a plane crash delivering relief aid to earthquake survivors in nicaragua.

he did not cry then as that is not how shock greets a nine-year-old although he has many times since.

today the number 21 is scrawled inside every baseball hat that he owns so he can remember and the spot where the picture of the great clemente used to hang in his office is now bare as the photo of clemente - taking the field for the final time after his 3000th and last hit with back to the camera and cap to the crowd - has been stolen and now resides above the bed of an eight-year-old baseball player who loves the game and often cries over a man who he never saw play.