July 1, 1972: Clemente’s second homer is a walk-off to keep Pirates atop East Division

Ferguson Jenkins was not intimidated by many major-league hitters.

Jenkins, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, respected every man who came to bat, but as one of the best pitchers in baseball in the early 1970s, he was confident in his ability to get outs. Still, there were a couple of players the Chicago Cubs ace did not like seeing come to the plate, and one of them resided in the Pittsburgh lineup.

Roberto Clemente in the on-deck circle “would scare the hell out of me,” Jenkins said of the Pirates right fielder. “I never liked seeing him there. Didn’t I just pitch to him? The lineup always seemed to come around to him too quickly.”1

That surely made for a tough spot on July 1, 1972, when Clemente was the second man due up in the bottom of the ninth inning as the Pirates looked to rally and erase Chicago’s one-run lead in a midseason game between a pair of playoff hopefuls. With one home run already to his credit that afternoon,2 Clemente strode to the plate with a man on first to put a buzz into the 16,102 weekenders who came to Three Rivers Stadium.

“He came to the plate and he [always] had an idea of how he was going to hit the ball. He hit the ball up the middle a lot, right-center, and if you pitched him hard in, he would pull the ball,” Jenkins recalled decades after his career. “He wasn’t an individual you learned to pitch to one way.”3

And on that warm Saturday, when Jenkins tried to zig, Clemente – unsurprisingly – zagged.

After Milt May singled to center to open the bottom of the ninth, Clemente slugged a Jenkins fastball into the center-field seats to send the Pirates to a 4-3 victory and polish off his triumphant return from a four-game absence caused by a knee injury and viral infection.

“[T]here was something about his Saturday homerics that make you appreciate the greatness of this 37-year-old superstar all the more,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports editor Al Abrams wrote in his weekly column after Clemente’s walk-off homer kept the Pirates .003 points ahead of the New York Mets in the East Division standings.4

Little did Abrams know that the time to appreciate Clemente was running out. After helping the Pirates get two more wins over the Cubs, he played in five of the seven games on the ensuing road trip before a recurrence of the virus knocked him out until July 23. After a single start, Clemente missed the next 10 games and made only four pinch-hit appearances in the 16 games from August 4-20 while he also dealt with troublesome Achilles tendons.

Throughout the season, the Pirates were noticeably better when Clemente started (59-29, .670) than when he didn’t (37-30, .552). So even with an 11-game lead going into September, there was no doubt the club was pleased that Clemente was healthy for the 32-game stretch run, and he delivered with a .333 average in 26 games as Pittsburgh went 18-11 in September to claim a third straight division crown.

But before that, there came one of the finest performances of Clemente’s final season.

In the series opener against the Cubs, a 4-3 loss on June 30, Clemente hit his 164th career triple to move into a tie with Pie Traynor for third place on the franchise’s all-time list.5 Despite that fourth loss in five games, the Pirates rebounded to win on Clemente’s walk-off home run, and then took the division lead for good on July 2 with a 7-4 win. The next day, Sports Illustrated released its latest edition with a cover story about the Pirates, who secured another walk-off win – this time a 3-2 victory on Willie Stargell‘s home run.6

The three straight wins to open July were reminiscent of July 1971, when the Pirates went 18-10 and gained 6½ games in the standings to firmly grasp control of the East Division on the way to a World Series championship. In July 1972 Pittsburgh went 20-10 and built a seven-game lead in the division.

But the Cubs didn’t make it easy for the Pirates to secure their third straight July-opening victory.7

Chicago struck first on a two-out RBI double by Billy Williams in the third, but Pirates starter Bob Moose wouldn’t allow another hit until the eighth. In the meantime, Jenkins was also cruising. He retired the first 15 batters, but the Pirates threatened in the sixth. Bob Robertson led off with a single, but Gene Alley grounded into a double play. Jenkins nearly fell off-track, allowing two more singles to Moose and Dave Cash, but with Clemente in the on-deck circle, Jenkins got Jose Pagan to ground into a fielder’s choice, keeping Clemente from potentially hitting with runners on base.

“Baseball’s hard to figure sometimes,” said Robertson, who was hitting a paltry .143 coming into the game and got his hit on a curveball when he was anticipating an outside slider. “I was completely fooled on the pitch, yet I hit it and things started to happen.”8

Though Jenkins escaped that scoring opportunity, he couldn’t stop Clemente from tying the game when he led off the seventh. Clemente tore into a Jenkins curveball and sent it over the 385-foot marker in left field for a homer that tied the game at 1-1. Stargell followed with a single. Pinch-runner Gene Clines stole second, moved to third on Al Oliver‘s fly out and scored on Manny Sanguillen‘s sacrifice for a 2-1 lead.

“He had the best stuff I’ve seen him have in a long time,” Clemente said of the right-handed Jenkins, who held Clemente to a .111 average over five games in 1971. “It was one of those things. We just started hitting him.”9

Undeterred, Jenkins started an offensive rally in the top of the inning, leading off with a single and scoring on Williams’s two-out home run off reliever Ramon Hernandez that gave Chicago a 3-2 lead.

Jenkins retired the Pirates in order in the eighth but knew the pesky Clemente would be on deck to open the bottom of the ninth. After May’s pinch-hit single, Jenkins and Clemente met for the 98th time in their classic rivalry. Clemente was left to enjoy the 13th and final multi-home-run game of his career,10 while Jenkins was left to ponder the “what-ifs” of his third loss to Pittsburgh in 1972,11 though he could rest easier knowing he was beaten by one of the best in the game.

“I cannot despise any man who comes to bat wearing a major-league uniform. No man would be at bat unless he could hit,” Jenkins wrote in 1973. “But you have to respect some hitters more than others. The two best hitters in my first seven years in the National League were the late Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron.”12

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted B​aseba​ll-Re​feren​ce.​com and R​etros​heet.​org.

h​ttps:​//www​.base​ball-​refer​ence.​com/b​oxes/​PIT/P​IT197​20701​0.​shtml

h​ttps:​//www​.retr​oshee​t.org​/boxe​setc/​1972/​B0701​0PIT1​972.​htm

NOTES

1 David Maraniss, Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 225.

2 It was Clemente’s first home run against Jenkins since August 21, 1967, a span of 70 plate appearances.

3 Wes McElroy, “Catching Up with baseball Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins,” July 13, 2018, R​ichmo​nd.​com, accessed November 12, 2021. (h​ttps:​//ric​hmond​.com/​sport​s/wes​-mcel​roy/c​atchi​ng-up​-with​-base​ball-​hall-​of-fa​mer-f​ergus​on-je​nkins​/arti​cle_1​a0bc6​33-4e​9e-59​ec-b0​32-0e​22e87​57f20​.​html).

4 Al Abrams, “Sidelights on Sports,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 3, 1972: 12.

5 Clemente would surpass Traynor on September 6 and had earlier passed him in career RBIs on June 19.

6 Clemente almost played the role of the hero in that game, too, having popped out to second before Stargell’s home run.

7 On July 1, 1971, the Pirates beat the New York Mets, 3-0, and on July 1, 1970, Pittsburgh was a 4-3 winner over the Mets.

8 Dan Donovan, “Clemente Lowers the Boom, 4-3,” Pittsburgh Press, July 2, 1972: D-1.

9 Donovan.

10 Clemente’s last previous multi-home-run game came on July 4, 1970, the second of back-to-back two-homer games.

11 Jenkins also lost to the Pirates on June 23 and April 20.

12 Ferguson Jenkins, as told to George Vass, Like Nobody Else: The Ferguson Jenkins Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1973), 210.