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Willie Stargell’s 1979 World Series performance felt mystic to SEAN D. HAMILL, but was it?
Willie Stargell’s 1979 World Series performance felt mystical. What did his teammates think?
It was Saturday, Oct. 13, 1979, the second inning of Game 4 of the World Series between the Pirates and Orioles. Willie Stargell was at bat. My then 13-year-old self and my 15-year-old brother, Chris, were sitting — for the first time in our lives — in box seats. They were along the third base line, about 15 rows from the field. With our dad, Denny, we were sitting the closest we’d ever been to our baseball heroes in our first ever World Series game.
After a long at-bat, Stargell, 39, went through his trademark windmill warmup that we had imitated countless times in our backyard, and WHACK! cracked a home run off pitcher Dennis Martinez 410 feet over the center field fence.
As we screamed ourselves delirious, my dad turned to me and said: “Just like Roberto.”
I knew just what he meant. When I was 5 and my brother 7, in 1971, we had watched our first baseball god, Roberto Clemente, 36, on television, lead our Pirates back from a 3-1 game deficit against these same Orioles, fielding, hitting and willing his teammates to an improbable victory.
Despite Stargell’s homer in Game 4, the Pirates would lose that game and fall behind 3 games to 1, just like in 1971 — only to come back and win it in Game 7.
Eight years, later, in my 13 year-old Piratewor shipping fan dom, it felt like Clemente was still there at Three Rivers Stadium, only this time whispering from above in Stargell’s ear: “You’ve got this.”
Was there something mystical about the Pirates’ aging icons and unquestioned leaders each leading the Buccos back from a 3-1 deficit against the same Orioles eight years apart?
I’ve always wondered that. Did Willie Stargell feel Roberto Clemente’s presence that October in 1979, though his friend had been gone for nearly seven years? Did Stargell’s teammates?
Reading the Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press in the days after the Pirates won in 1979, I didn’t recall any stories drawing any direct connection. A check back in our archives confirmed that. There was very little about the StargellClemente connection in the days after the 1979 victory.
Forty years later, I wanted to find out if there was any connection, as best I could anyway, time being what it is, relentless and unforgiving, stealing our childhood heroes from us year by year.
So I reached out to the men who played with Clemente and Stargell, and knew them well, to ask a question I thought I knew the answer to when I was 13.
Turns out, while Steve Blass, Grant Jackson, Al Oliver, Dave Parker, Manny Sanguillen and Rennie Stennett all revered Clemente and Stargell, they saw their roles as the leaders of two championship teams as nothing more — or less — than stunning, separate accomplishments by two very different men — even if Clemente was still in all their thoughts in 1979.
Mr. Blass, the winning pitcher of Game 7 of the 1971 World Series, said he understood why a 13-yearold would immediately think the two events were connected.
“When you’re 13, you connect all of that. That’s what fans do; it becomes almost mystical to you,” he said. “It’s like the [2013] Wild Card Game. I want to believe that if [Cincinnati Reds pitcher] Johnny Cueto drops the ball [while he’s pitching to the Pirates], the next pitch is going to be a home run. And it was.”
But it’s understandable, he said, that there was little public discussion of it in 1979 by the players or the media.
“I think you’re too busy to connect them, you’re just too excited about the win,” he said.
A big part of that was the excitement the city and players — retired or teammates alike — had for Stargell to get a World Series win.
“Of course I thought about every moment of the 1971 World Series” when the Pirates won in 1979, Mr. Blass said. “But I was just so happy for Stargell, a proud man who got a second chance” after a less-than-stellar 1971 World Series for him.
Different leaders
While both Clemente and Stargell were larger-than-life figures on and off the diamond, and eventually both led their teams to World Series titles, their methods were as different as their personalities.
Clemente, generally quieter than Stargell, could kibitz with players — particularly with Mr. Sanguillen — and advise them one-on-one.
Mr. Parker, who was not on the 1971 team but got to learn and play with Clemente in spring training that year and in 1972, said during that first spring training, it was Clemente who pulled him aside to teach him “how to reach back and get more out of my arm.”
But, as Mr. Oliver, the Pirates’ center fielder on the 1971 team, said, “Where he really led us was on the field. He played hard and hustled and you just followed his lead.”
Mr. Blass said it was not just learn by example, but by the pressure of that example.
“We all learned from Clemente. Roberto was so good, and we may not be as good as him, but we could try our best,” he said. “You didn’t want to be embarrassed under the eyes of Roberto Clemente.”
While Stargell was easy to meet, Mr. Blass said Clemente “didn’t suffer fools and didn’t say as much” as Stargell.
Mr. Jackson, the only player from the 1971 Orioles to play on the 1979 Pirates, said while neither of them were “rah-rah, pom-pom kind of guys,” Clemente was the more direct of the two.
Clemente offered his most direct leadership leading up to the 1971 World Series, said his best friend on the team, Mr. Sanguillen, and it was in classic, simple terms.
“In 1971, he told us, ‘You guys take me to the World Series, and I’ll take care of it from there,’” he recalled.
Stargell, meanwhile, was constantly probing, looking for what the collective team needed.
“He’d have team parties if we lost two or three games in a row,” Mr. Oliver recalled. “Him and Dock Ellis would say, ‘We need to loosen this team up,’ and they’d call for a party at Willie’s house.”
Those parties would feature an alcoholic concoction of Stargell’s own creation — “Purple Passion” — that featured a big vat filled roughly half with grape juice, and the other half with gin or grain alcohol and ice, Mr. Oliver and others on the team recalled.
Getting to know his teammates also allowed Stargell to be the one to openly make fun of them, and get everyone else laughing at their expense.
For example, Mr. Oliver said Stargell could tell when Mr. Oliver was going to go on “a sermon” about something he was upset about.
“And he’d tell my teammates he knew what I was going to do and tell them, ‘Watch this.’ And I’d get started and they’d all start laughing at me, and I’d have to tell him, ‘You got me. You got me.’”
Mr. Oliver said the differences between Clemente and Stargell related to how the players saw them.
“With Roberto, we looked at him as a father figure,” he said. “With Will, we looked at him as a big brother figure.”
Passing the torch
Tom Bird, who was a Pirates public relations employee from 1979 until 1983 and later helped Stargell write his autobiography, said the way Stargell described it to him was that early in his career Clemente explained to Stargell how he should act.
“Roberto schooled Willie and Willie schooled us,” said Mr. Bird.
He first learned this, he said, in 1979: “I was pulled aside by Willie and told how to act, the same way he said he was told by Clemente. It was about how to treat people, how to carry yourself.”
With that, “Roberto took a very cheerful, playful player like Willie and made him a leader of the game,” Mr. Bird maintains.
Clemente apparently had a good student.
Mr. Sanguillen said that “When Roberto was going to speak to us, Willie knew to sit down and listen. And once [Willie] said to me, ‘Manny, one day I might have to lead like him.’”
Though much has been made over the years about how Stargell had to reluctantly take over as the team leader in 1973, after Clemente died so suddenly on New Year’s Eve 1972, his teammates said that as Stargell’s experience on the team grew, Clemente and Stargell led jointly.
“They were the two figureheads in the clubhouse,” Mr. Blass said.
By the 1971 World Series, Mr. Sanguillen said, “It was beautiful to see them together, two brothers, leading the team together.”
“And by 1979, [Stargell] showed how much he learned from Roberto,” he said.
The real lesson Stargell carried from Clemente from 1971 to 1979, Mr. Sanguillen said, was that Clemente “taught us to live in the now and be ready when your chance came.”
Mr. Stennett said having been able to watch Clemente go through a World Series in 1971 where the Pirates were under such intense pressure, down 3 games to 1, clearly helped Stargell: “I think the experience of seeing how [Clemente] did when things didn’t work out helped. He played with him for a few years, so he saw how he carried himself, how he led.”
Both teams had an internal motto, Mr. Stennett said: “We bend, but we don’t break.”
“No matter what, we’d always come back [to the clubhouse] the same way: Never get too low. Keep an even keel. As a result, we were a loose ball club,” he said.
All of that experience, all that watching of his late teammate perform so well under such intense pressure eight years earlier — Clemente hit a home run in Game 7 in 1971 that put the Pirates ahead — came to a head for Stargell on Oct. 17, 1979, in the 6th inning of Game 7 of the 1979 World Series.
The Pirates were down by a score of 1-0, and other than Stargell — who already had two hits — they could not get anything going against Orioles starter Scott McGregor, a left-handed pitcher.
Because of the friendship Stargell had developed with Mr. Oliver in the years they played together, even though Mr. Oliver had been gone for two years, playing with the Texas Rangers in the American League, Mr. Oliver felt close to the 1979 Pirates.
“I was excited to see them win, even though I was traded. I mean, I knew those guys so well,” Mr. Oliver said.
“So I had reached out before the World Series and gave Will a scouting report on Baltimore’s pitchers. He just wanted to know what kind of breaking balls they had. He always wanted to know what kind of curveball the left-handers had in particular,” he remembered.
Mr. Parker said Stargell was upset when he hit a mere double off Mr. McGregor two innings earlier that he didn’t get all of.
With Mr. Oliver’s scouting report in mind, before Stargell got up to the plate with one runner on, Mr. Parker said that Stargell told him: “If [McGregor] threw [the same pitch] again, he was going to hit it out.”
“And he did.”
As my dad said: Just like
Roberto.
While both Clemente and Stargell were larger-than-life figures on and off the diamond, their methods were as different as their personalities.