Roberto Clemente’s iconic No. 21 has been a fixture in Pittsburgh for more than 60 years. Its presence has only grown since the Hall of Fame outfielder’s death at age 38 on New Year’s Eve 1972 in a plane crash off the coast of his native Puerto Rico.
His jersey remains one of the franchise’s most popular. It adorns the right-field wall named after him at PNC Park. It’s ubiquitous in the stands during Pirates home games and on postgame strolls along the Allegheny River. First-year manager Derek Shelton has even seen his neighbors rocking it while cutting the grass.
On Wednesday night, the number found itself in a place where it hasn’t been for nearly a half-century: on the back of a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates. All of them.
The Pirates celebrated Clemente’s legacy by wearing his number during the organization’s first “Roberto Clemente Day” on Wednesday against the Chicago White Sox. The number was mowed into the right-field grass a few hundred yards from where Clemente stood at Three Rivers Stadium.
“He’s our Jackie Robinson,” said current right fielder Gregory Polanco, who is from the Dominican Republic. “He’s our idol. He’s the Great One, man. He’s the player we all know growing up, like, ‘Hey, Clemente. He was the man. It was outside the baseball field. That’s what makes it even more, the greatest person, what he did and the way he was helping people always.”
Major League Baseball granted the Pirates permission for everyone to don No. 21 last week, then extended it to all Puerto Rican-born players.
Houston shortstop Carlos Correa, Cubs second baseman Javier Baez, Dodgers teammates Enrique Hernandez and Edwin Rios, Detroit pitcher Joe Jimenez and Milwaukee hurler Alex Claudio were among the many Puerto Rican major leaguers who took part in the celebration.
Clemente’s family and the team he represented are hoping the league will one day honor Clemente by retiring his number across all of MLB as it did for Robinson’s No. 42 in 1997.
“He deserves that,” Polanco said.
The Pirates made sure to extend the tribute beyond the walls of PNC Park, where the Roberto Clemente Bridge stands. The team partnered with the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to host a drive-through food distribution early in the day. They hosted a meal and mask distribution at the Latino Community Center and bought gift subscriptions to the New Pittsburgh Courier — a newspaper focusing on the city’s Black community — for local libraries.
“One of the things that we have talked about a lot is Roberto Clemente, the player, is one of the greatest players of all time,” Shelton said. “Roberto Clemente, the humanitarian, was probably the greatest humanitarian in the history of our sport.”
The day was also celebrated in Clemente’s hometown of Carolina, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere across the island. Pirates third-base coach Joey Cora, born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, received pictures from back home of Puerto Ricans wearing their own No. 21 jerseys.
“This is something when we first started, it was a really cool initiative, but the fact that it has grown into what it has grown into, the fact that all the Puerto Ricans will be able to don his uniform today, it’s pretty cool,” Shelton said. “It got a lot bigger, a lot faster, than I thought, but again, it’s something that I’m extremely proud to be part of.”
And as if that weren’t enough, he’s still in love with his estranged ex-wife Marie, played by the criminally undervalued Joy Bryant. He also is desperate to reconnect with his pregnant 17-year-old daughter Jasmine, played by rising talent Tyla Harris.
“Aaron is trying to discover who he is and what kind of man he is going to be because he has this conflict when he recruits his clients in prison,” says Steinberg, creator of For Life. But the visionary behind CBS’ long-running, award-winning Without A Trace is quick to point out that For Life is not your standard legal drama in the mode of say Law & Order.
“It’s a question of how he uses [the inmates he represents],” explains Steinberg. “Does he use them to benefit himself? Or does he do all that he can to fight for their case? For Life is as much a family story as it is a prison intrigue story and a courtroom drama. That’s something you won’t find in a traditional procedural television show.”
Pinnock jumped at the chance to play the role of Aaron, especially after learning more about Wright’s mind-blowing odyssey. “When I read the script and researched who he was it just seemed like an important project that I had to be a part of,” says the 46-year-old best known to American audiences as Leon on the UK crime drama Top Boy, which has been reborn as a Netflix cult favorite.
But it wasn’t until his first meeting with Wright that he began to understand the sheer magnitude of his seemingly insurmountable ordeal. “We had a table reading sometime back in March, and Isaac came along to it,” Pinnock recalls. “And I literally grabbed him for 45 minutes to just understand who he was. I’m not actually playing him, but I’m playing a version of him. So I thought it was important for me to have an essence of who he was and not just be completely and emotionally devoid of who and what Isaac was about.”
For Wright, it was surreal witnessing some of his darkest moments play out on screen. “Watching Nicholas perform was a multifaceted experience for me,” he said during a January 8th For Life panel at the Television Critics Association Tour. “When I went through what I was going through in prison, one of the things that was very distracting was the issue that it’s a very dangerous environment. Moving through that process, I had to develop such an intense focus that I had to change my character and be someone else.”
50 believes such layered performances give credibility to For Life’s nuanced storytelling. “Nicholas found a way to have these subtleties in his performance to make it really believable,” he praises of the actor’s first foray as a television leading man. And 50 is equally lauding when the discussion turns to Joy Bryant. “We worked together in Get Rich or Die Trying so I know her talent level, and since then I’ve seen her do some amazing things,” he gushes of the veteran actress who had just come off a six-season stint as a regular on NBC’s comedy-drama series Parenthood. “[We] got lucky that she was available during that time period.”
“50 is my movie baby daddy,” Bryant jokes about her former big-screen love interest. “I’ve been at it for a minute and it’s always wonderful to hear someone dig what you do…to think that you are right for a role because so many times you are told you are not right. As someone who has had loved ones incarcerated, I really connected with Marie.”
According to producers, casting the role of the complex Marie was most challenging. It was a reality that Bryant soon discovered as she was tasked with pulling off a character that audiences could sympathize with even after leaving a locked-up Aaron and shacking up with his best friend.
