Roberto Clemente: A Gamechanger on and off the Baseball Diamond
By: Greg Ruppert Roberto Clemente was a talented man on the baseball diamond but a better man off of it. Clemente’s baseball career flourished in the predominantly white league that is Major League Baseball. Clemente played 17 years as a Pittsburgh Pirate and was around during the worst parts of state-sanctioned segregation in U.S. history. For example, America was in the middle of Jim Crow segregation, which divided people into “colored” and white. In the 1940s to 1960s, Major League Baseball (MLB) had a inconsistent stance on Latinos players. As Adrian Burgos has shown, MLB leaders tied to Jim Crow were befuddled over the racial ambiguity of Latino players. He writes, “Those disturbed by the blurred line of exclusion called for renewed policing of the in-between space along the color…