WHITESTONE, NY – Somebody inside the offices of Major League Baseball woke up sometime last week and remembered that it is the 50th year of the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente’s passing. #MLB decided to acknowledge the great humanitarian on September 15th throughout the ballparks.
Let’s be real here, once again MLB has dropped the ball. Clemente’s image should have been on the shoulder of every Major League player from the Opening Day pitch. That image should have remained there for the entire 2022 season. They could have even retired his number 21 on August 18th, the day of his birthday. If not for that tragic day in 1972, Clemente would have been 88 years old.
It took until the month of September, which happens to be Hispanic Heritage Month, for the morons who sit behind a desk at 6th Ave in New York City to use Clemente’s name as a pawn for their Hispanic shenanigans. The moral of the story is: Those pendejos blew it!
This sport is going down the drain and they know it. Without educating the new generation about the roots of the game, names like Ruth, Gehrig, Aaron, Mays, and Clemente will be remembered as, “some guys my great grandfather and grandfather used to root for.” MLB just doesn’t care.
After helping his Pirates defeat the Yankees in an epic 1960 World Series, Clemente remained underrated until his display in the 1971 classic versus the Baltimore Orioles. He displayed his five tools on the field and his Spanish language when he spoke to his parents on live television, before he was interviewed for his heroics.
The magnitude of Roberto should have been magnified on this 50th year of his death. It took until the middle of September for this great man to get a mention, and MLB justifies it by using Hispanic Heritage Month as if that’s all he was, a Hispanic man.
MLB needs to hire a whole new staff that gets it, and stop using the excuse of, “I’m clueless because my mother threw away my baseball cards.”
That’s it for me, come back tomorrow for a man that needs a month of Mondays to honor him, Junoir Blaber.
