It was Oct. 17, 1971.
Manny Sanguillen, Roberto Clemente and the rest of the Pittsburgh Pirates were set to play the Baltimore Orioles in Game 7 of the World Series at now-defunct Memorial Stadium, and Sanguillen and Clemente were taking a taxi to the ballpark.
In an effort to make small talk, the cab driver, who didn’t recognize the players out of uniform, was complaining about the comments Clemente had made in the newspaper about Memorial Stadium’s outfield.
“The taxi driver was a Frank Robinson fan,” Sanguillen said Friday while sitting in the clubhouse at Pirate City. “He said, ‘I don’t like that Roberto Clemente talking about the ballpark. My man Frank Robinson should tell him to shut up and go play.’”
Clemente looked at his friend.
“Sangy,” Clemente said in Spanish, “he’s talking about me.”
When they got to the ballpark, Clemente took a $100 bill — the fare was $8, Sanguillen said — signed his name on it and gave it to the driver, who began dishing out apologies.
Then Clemente gave the driver four tickets to the game, telling him to bring his family.
Hours later, after Clemente’s home run lifted the Pirates to a 2-1 Series victory, they saw the same cab driver, who was ecstatic.
He took the $100 Clemente gave him and bet on the Pirates. He won $2,500 and was able to take the rest of the winter off.
“That was a lot of money back then,” Sanguillen said.
Yeah, there is something special about the seventh game of the World Series.
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There is nothing like Game 7 of a World Series. While there have been some classic finishes to the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup playoffs — and epic Super Bowls — those regular seasons are not as long as baseball’s.
When the Pirates won the Series in ’71, for example, they had to play 173 games — 162 during the regular season, four against the San Francisco Giants in the National League Championship Series and seven more against the Orioles in the World Series.
Eight years later in 1979, when the Pirates won the World Series, again at the expense of the Orioles, Pittsburgh played 172 games — the Pirates swept the Cincinnati Reds 3-0 in the NLCS.
Game 7 is the end of a very long odyssey.
“You have been under the gun for the previous month,” said former Pirates reliever Kent Tekulve, who closed out the Orioles in ’79. “It went down to the wire in the regular season, you went right into the playoffs, you went right into the World Series, every game is pressure.”
Few teams know Game 7 better than the Pirates, whose five World Series titles all came down to a Game 7, from Babe Adams stifling the Detroit Tigers in 1909 to Bill Mazeroski homering over Yogi Berra’s head and sinking the New York Yankees in 1960 to Tekulve and the “We Are Family” folks from ’79 — the last road team to win a World Series Game 7 and the fourth to erase a 3-games-to-1 deficit.
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