Clemente or Koufax?

[Exhibitman]

So much rancor and misinformation too.

Would Koufax be revered as much for not pitching game 7 rather than game 1? The question misses the point. Koufax's stance on pitching wasn't situational, it was ethical. Which game he had to sit wouldn't have mattered once the ethical commitment to honor the holiday was made. Hank Greenberg dealt with the same thing a generation earlier.

As for naming stuff, well, Jewish tradition is not to name children after living people. That's why we don't 'do' Sr., Jr., III, etc. Naming stuff after living people is also a bit uncomfortable in traditional life.

As far as Clemente goes, the Dodgers did not purposely get rid of him. Their front office screwed up: Clemente was signed to a bonus contract that required him to be on the roster but the team sent him down to Montreal anyway to hide him, which exposed him to the draft and enabled the Pirates to snag him. The Pirates scouted him and decided to make him the first round pick in 1955.

The story about Jackie Robinson making roster decisions on Clemente is probably apocryphal. First of all, the starting line-up in the outfield for the Dodgers in 1954 was Robinson (LF), Snider (CF) and Furillo (RF). They didn't need Clemente. Where was Clemente going to play? Gilliam (another black guy) had displaced Robinson from 2nd to left. Was the team going to stick a rookie with no experience into center for Snider? Hardly. Furillo? Besides having a rifle arm, Furillo had just led the league in batting in 1953. He wasn't going anywhere either.

But let's delve deeper into the Dodgers racial composition and roster moves. Suggesting that the Dodgers got rid of Clemente to keep a white guy implies that the other outfield roster spots were reserved for white guys, which is not true. In 1954 the Dodgers called up Sandy Amoros as a backup outfielder: black, Cuban Sandy Amoros. Who'd been up briefly in 1952 and was a known commodity at Montreal. To suggest that the team that broke the race barrier and that actively sought out black talent would then decide to suppress that talent for racial reasons, then call up another black guy a few months later, is a fanciful suggestion. Race may have been a consideration as it usually was in any American decision in the era but it wasn't the overriding decision in Dodgers roster moves, as is obvious from the actual roster moves. The more likely explanation is the one that Clyde Sukeforth offered to historians: the team signed Clemente because he had such great potential, then tried to bury him in Montreal to get around the bonus rule and lost him.

Now, back to Koufax. The Dodgers had a better line-up on paper than the Yankees, except for one thing: pitching. It was pitching that had beaten the Dodgers every Series. The Yankees had the arms. Koufax had a left arm touched by God; that was apparent from the outset. Hell, he struck out 14 Reds in a game as a 19 year old in 1955. The Dodgers were 'arming' for the Yankees. Outfield was not the same level of urgency.