Jim Sankey: Extra Innings: Clemente deserves, receives more than a retired number
Sep. 21—Major league baseball neared the end of the 51st season of baseball without Roberto Clemente last week with Friday's 22nd annual celebration of the MLB-wide Roberto Clemente Day, established to honor the life and legacy of the first Latino to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and a 15-time All-Star who died in a plane crash on New Year's Eve 1972 while attempting to deliver supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
Officially created in 2002 to take place on Sept. 15, at the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month, teams across baseball honor Clemente for his groundbreaking humanitarian efforts with a Roberto Clemente Day of Service in the teams' home cities and beyond.
It is a day in which the game of baseball takes a back seat to more important concerns.
And a Roberto Clemente Award is bestowed annually to "the player who best represents the game of baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy, and positive contributions, both on and off the field," according to the MLB website.
Each team nominates one player ... "whose various community and philanthropic activities have focused on important issues ranging from awareness and fundraising to support those with cancer and other illnesses or special needs, education for young people, natural disaster relief, outreach to underserved children and communities in the United States and abroad, and more," the site says.
MLB Network's Harold Reynolds was in Pittsburgh last weekend to cover the Pittsburgh celebration.
"We always talk about your community adopting you and [being] part of that fabric of the community. It's real here," Reynolds said at a gala Thursday night. "You can see that, and that's something that Roberto stood for. I just look back with him doing what he did. Nobody was really doing it before him, at least not to this level of [recognition]. Players come along now where it's almost like a rite of passage to [serve others].
"As I've watched through the years, every team has 26 guys that could be nominated because they're all doing things," Reynolds said. "And I think when they start getting into pro ball, there's more of an awareness of understanding the impact that they have and wanting to be ambassadors in that way. So, we're in a cool place now in history. And Roberto started on that 50 years ago. Unintentionally, that's the best part."
David Bednar has been the Pirates nominee for the award for 2022 and 2023.
"You understand the scope of Clemente and you understand what he meant to this community, but as you go to more events and you hear people talk, you realize it's not just Pittsburgh. It's not just Puerto Rico. It's the entire world that he's impacted," Bednar told MLB.com reporter Justice delos Santos, "To have that legacy and to continue to be a driving force in people's inspiration to [serve others], it just truly speaks not just to what he did as a player. We're not here talking about his 3000 hits or anything like that. We're talking about all of the incredible things he did off the field."
Throughout the day, nearly 150 Pirates-affiliated personnel and their families took part in the day of service. Every player and coach on the active roster and many front office personnel participated in projects in and around Pittsburgh that serve the four of the major missions of Pirates Charities: youth baseball and softball, cancer support, military appreciation, and mental health. In addition, another project that supports Pittsburgh's Latino Community Center was included.
And as happens every so often, mostly around the annual Clemente day, a call came again for MLB to retire Clemente's uniform number 21 in the same way it did in 1997 with number 42, worn by Jackie Robinson. Baseball's HOF website notes that then-Commissioner Bud Selig said that Robinson's work "would be honored for all time" for "his unmatched contributions to the game."
The Pirates have retired number 21, and that's enough. Clemente himself would be more appreciative of the way he is celebrated now with a day of service.
As he famously once said: "Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don't, then you are wasting your time on Earth."
JIM SANKEY is the Pittsburgh Pirates columnist for Allied News. His work appears in the weekly edition during the baseball season.
