Burgos: Roberto Clemente Day should focus on importance of Latinos to baseball

From SABR member Adrian Burgos Jr. at The Sporting News on September 16, 2015:

MLB announced this year’s 30 nominees for the 2015 Roberto Clemente Award on Monday. The announcement came in advance of 14th annual Roberto Clemente Day, to be held at big league parks across the circuit on Wednesday.

Formerly known as the Commissioner’s Award, the Roberto Clemente Award not only represents part of MLB’s effort to acknowledge the legacy of one of the game’s all-time greats but also to motivate its current batch of stars to aspire to be the role model that Clemente was for Latinos and all of baseball.

Celebration of Clemente’s legacy as a humanitarian, as much as his greatness on the baseball diamond, marks one of the few moments MLB pauses to celebrate the contribution of  Latinos in baseball. In as much as Clemente Day pays homage to the Puerto Rican great who died tragically on a humanitarian mission to bring relief supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims, Roberto Clemente Day is not a Latino celebration.

Despite it coinciding with the start of Hispanic Heritage Month, Roberto Clemente Day is just as much an opportunity for MLB to acknowledge each year’s group of nominees, a few of whom may happen to be Latino, and to launch the online voting to determine the season’s recipient of the Roberto Clemente Award, which is announced during the World Series.

Read the full article here: http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/story/2015-09-16/roberto-clemente-day-latinos-award



Originally published: September 16, 2015. Last Updated: September 16, 2015.