Pittsburgh: At the moment, it wasn’t a big deal. Just one more game in the middle of the week in the middle of the pennant race.
The best nine players available ran for the Pittsburgh Pirates on the field at Three Rivers Stadium on September 1, 1971.
The fact that all nine were Renee Stannett, Jean Clynes, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargel, Manny Sanguillen, Dave Cash, Al Oliver, Jackie Hernandez and Doc Ellis were black or of Latin origin, didn’t really even happen to them until later. .
Oliver has always found it curious why it isn’t celebrated the way Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Yet in recent years, he’s come to take it as a compliment of sorts, for the color-blind approach Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh took his job.
We didn’t take the field to make history,” Oliver said Wednesday night, honoring the 50th anniversary of the 10-7 win over Philadelphia. But as it turned out, it was history. And that’s the thing I love about it. It seemed like it proved the unity we had in our team and proved that we had a manager who wasn’t really concerned about the race.
Oliver, a seven-time All-Star during his 18-year career, tells of a sea of black and brown faces with a gold pee on his hat, the way general manager Joe Brown built a team.
(He said) What we did, we signed players because they could play, not the church they went to, said Oliver, who played earlier that night. And every time I hear that quote, I laugh because it’s true. It doesn’t matter which church you go to as long as you can play some ball.
Something that was never an issue for the lumber company era in Pittsburgh. The win over Philadelphia that night occurred during a tropics 18–5 that allowed the Pirates to win the NL East. Pittsburgh rallied from a two-game deficit to heavily support Baltimore in the World Series, beating San Francisco in four games in the NL Championship Series.
Cash said that you can never underestimate what we thought as a team, because we can beat anyone. Baltimore beat everyone else, but they didn’t beat us.
Not with Hall of Famers like Clemente in right field and Stargale left and Oliver usually in the middle. It’s telling that the only thing Oliver noticed about the lineup wasn’t his racial makeup, but his place in it: seventh.
I thought I was a pretty good hitter, said Oliver, a .303 Lifetime hitter, with a laugh. But when I looked at the card, I’m hitting seventh, and I said, hey, this must be a great team.
He was. While Oliver remembers the day he got a shrug of sorts, in five decades it has taken on new meaning for the grandfather of four.
It’s important for[my children and grandchildren]to know that their people were part of baseball history,” he said. I think that’s the key. You know, it’s something that can be passed on, like that. Something that can’t be taken away. And I just love that they are aware of that fact.
Even if it is a moment that can be hard to replicate. The surviving members of the 1971 team believed that it was more likely that a team would field a fully Latin lineup before one featuring all Black and Latin players. Participation in baseball among blacks has fallen across the board, and black players currently make up less than 10% of the Major League roster.
Oliver said that Afro-American children have turned to basketball, they have turned to football. And the reason they’ve done this is because of what they actually see on TV, on commercials, on all the football players and basketball players. But you don’t really see much in baseball, in commercials for baseball players. And, you know, as an African-American person, you have a tendency to do things that look like you.
It’s a stark contrast to how he grew up in Ohio in the 1950s and ’60s, when he idolized Jackie Robinson and Frank Robinson.
I knew Clemente was playing, and (Willie) Mays and (Hank) Aaron, Oliver said. We used to get his bubblegum cards all the time. So we had something to look at that looked like ours. And until we get back to that, we may not see another mix of players like that together.”
For one night, anyway, Oliver and his teammates play a part in something that has become much bigger than themselves. For 2 hours and 44 minutes in front of 11,278 fans, the pirates became the epitome of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King’s preaching.
Oliver said he was trying to convince our society that good things can happen when we come together. And the result was that on the first date in September 1971, he proved that good things can happen when we come together.
This allowed the career of the iconic Clemente to come full circle. His son, Roberto Clemente Jr., said that his father felt he was representing all minorities when he entered the majors with Pittsburgh in 1955. In the next-to-last season of his career, evidence of his influence stood beside. him in the clubhouse and out on the field.
I know it was a special day to have all his brothers on that team, said Clemente Jr. And I knew it was a special moment because it (minority players) had come.
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