Photo of the Day: A Prized Pirate’s Locker, PNC Park, Pittsburgh

With this past weekend’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction of Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltran, and Andruw Jones, it seemed like an appropriate point to reflect on a place with reminders of its own Cooperstown members: Legacy Hall in PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As I mentioned in this post from the other day, a thunderstorm cut short my plans to watch the Bucs for the first time while I was on vacation earlier this month. 

But before finding my seat and waiting impatiently for the “Play Ball” call that never came, I spent a few minutes in Legacy Hall, a multi-use space filled with some great team memorabilia, with much of it not previously displayed at the ballpark.

Several Hall of Fame players are commemorated here, including Willie Stargell, Ralph Kiner, Honus Wagner, and Bill Mazerowski. But I’ll focus on one in this post: an original locker from the club’s prior home in Three Rivers Stadium, occupied by Roberto Clemente. Elsewhere in the city, a museum honors the life and legacy of this great ballplayer and humanitarian.

But fans will still want to look and linger at what is on display honoring him at Legacy Hall: his uniform, jacket, cap, cleats, photos, and a bat—emblematic of a consistent and superb hitter who won four batting titles and collected 3,000 hits.

These days, Latinos and Hispanics make up anywhere from a quarter to a third of players in major league baseball. But Clemente was the first superstar of the group. What this proud and sensitive man had to endure from the media then was shameful and would not be tolerated today.

It took a while for Clemente’s skills to be noticed in a bumper crop among a bumper crop of contemporary outfielders that included Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Frank Robinson, but eventually his performance at the plate and on the field in the 1971 World Series exposed to a nationwide audience the greatness that so many in baseball had recognized since his debut in 1955.

His statistics and leadership had already made Clemente a basement legend. 

But his death on board a plane carrying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua during the Christmas season of 1972 lifted him to the status of role model and icon, much like the New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig—the only other player that Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame board explicitly waived its five-year rule for consideration to major league baseball’s Valhalla.