Swiping Clemente from the Dodgers
The most famous Rule V pick in baseball history is made 69 years ago today as the Pittsburgh Pirates pluck a 20-year-old outfielder named Roberto Clemente from the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class AAA affiliate in Montreal.
Just a little over nine months earlier, the Dodgers sign Clemente for a $10,000 bonus, outbidding the New York Giants and Yankees for him, and then shipping him to Montreal.
Under the contract terms with Clemente being a so-called “bonus baby,” the Dodgers in 1954 either need to keep him on the major league roster for the entire season or send him to the minors with the risk of losing him to another team in the postseason Rule V draft.
The Dodgers (insert face palm here) choose the latter, figuring they already have enough outfielders in Brooklyn.
The plan, according to Dodgers general manager Buzzie Bavasi, is to deliberately keep Clemente from looking good to anyone scouting Montreal.
“Our manager, Max Macon, kept moving him in and out of the lineup,” Bavasi tells Sports Illustrated in 1967, the year after Clemente is named the National League’s Most Valuable Player.
“Poor Roberto,” an exasperated Bavasi says. “He’d strike out and Max would let him play the whole game. If he hit a home run, Max would get him out of there quick. He was benched one game because he hit three triples the day before. He was taken out for a pinch hitter with the bases loaded in the first inning of another game.
“You can imagine how this must have puzzled the kid. The net effect was to hold his batting average down to .257, and we figured he was safe from the draft.”
Bavasi and the Dodgers badly miscalculate (insert another face palm here) as that pedestrian .257 batting average hardly deters scouts from seeing and evaluating Clemente’s immense talent during his 87 games in a part-time role for the Montreal Royals in 1954.
The Pittsburgh Pirates are foremost among the teams that Clemente interests, and – since they have the first pick of the Rule V draft – quickly grab him 69 years ago today.
Making the first recommendation to the Pirates is Clyde Sukeforth, one of their top scouts who a decade earlier is instrumental in the Dodgers signing Jackie Robinson.
Another of the Pirates’ top scouts, Howie Haak, follows Sukeforth to Montreal and he, too, gushes over Clemente’s talents.
Of course, he gushes as quietly as possible as not to let other teams know of the Pirates’ thinking.
After the Rule V draft of 1954, Clemente never spends another day in the minor leagues.
Instead, the Great One plays the next 18 seasons in Pittsburgh, putting together a Hall of Fame career with 3,000 hits, four National League batting titles, 15 All-Star Game selections and 12 Gold Gloves.
“He was the one player that players on other teams didn’t want to miss,” longtime Pirates pitcher and broadcaster Steve Blass once says of Clemente, his teammate from 1964-72. “They’d run out of the clubhouse to watch him take batting practice. He could make a 10-year veteran act like a 10-year-old kid.”
The Great One takes batting practice in 1968 at St. Louis (Neil Leifer photograph)