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de los Tumbabrazos —the town of those who cut off arms.
    The old man knew nothing about baseball. The sport had reached the island from Cuba even before U.S. Marines came ashore in July 1898, but Melchor never had time for it as a young man and had not learned the basics. Once, watching from the stands, he felt sorry for his son for having to run all the way around the bases after hitting a ball while most of the other batters were allowed to return to the bench and sit down after sprinting to first base. But Roberto was not the first or only Clemente to love the game. Matino, who was seven years older, played first base in the top amateur league, a slick fielder and feared line-drive hitter. Roberto admired his older brother, and always insisted that Matino was the best ballplayer in the family but came along too soon, just at the cusp of the segregated era in professional baseball in the States. His career was cut short in any case when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1950 and served three years, including eleven months in Korea with C Company of the 10th Engineers Combat Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division. Matino was Momen’s first baseball instructor, and he maintained that role, offering advice and counsel long after his little brother became a major league star.
    Baseball was the dominant sport on the island, followed by boxing, horse racing, track and field, volleyball, and basketball. Soccer, by far the most popular sport elsewhere in Latin America, had not caught on in Puerto Rico, another sign of how it was influenced by the United States. The mainland seemed remote to young Clemente, and baseball there even more unreachable, but he followed winter league baseball in Puerto Rico religiously. In the San Juan area, loyalties were divided between the San Juan Senadores (Senators) and Santurce Cangrejeros (Crabbers), a split that in many ways mirrored the one between theYankees and Dodgers in New York.The Cangrejeros were grittier, beloved by cabdrivers, hotel workers, factory hands, and much like the Dodgers, they had a strong black following. Josh Gibson, star of the Negro Leagues, played for Santurce in the early years, followed by Roy Campanella, Ray Dandridge, Willard Brown, and Junior Gilliam, whose range at second prompted Cangrejeros fans to call him the Black Sea. But Clemente grew up rooting for the San Juan Senadores. His loyalties were shaped by his idolizing of Monte Irvin, San Juan’s graceful outfielder. Irvin’s color kept him out of the majors for most of his career, until 1949, when the Giants brought him up, but he was a star for the Newark Eagles in the Negro Leagues for a decade before that, and tore up the Puerto Rican winter league for several seasons in the mid-forties, when Clemente was eleven to fifteen, formative years for any baseball fan.
    The Senadores and Cangrejeros played in the same stadium, Sixto Escobar (named for a bantamweight boxing champ), just off the ocean on Puerta de Tierra, the long finger of land leading to Old San Juan. The way the winter league worked, there were only three games a week, one on Saturday and a doubleheader on Sunday.Irvin said later that he enjoyed playing there because of the beauty of the island, the leisurely schedule, the excitement of the fans, the first-rate competition, and above all, the fact that “we were treated much better there than in the States.” If a black American hit an important home run, fans might pass a hat through the stands to collect an impromptu bonus for the player. When they went out to eat in Old San Juan or the restaurant strip in Condado, they were treated as celebrities and offered meals on the house.
    When he could, Momen caught the bus from Carolina on weekends to hang out at Sixto Escobar with swarms of other kids. Juan Pizarro, who lived much closer, near Loiza Avenue in Santurce, never had money to get inside, but shimmied up a palm tree to watch the games. Clemente sometimes had a quarter from his