Lastly:
The 🍞 #Cuervos de Patillas, by consensus the second best team in Liga Betances, face the 🧭 #Navegadores for the Crimson Pennant.

If you've ever wanted to hear Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in proper, metrical Spanish, then scroll to 1:15:56 and have some fun.
youtu.be/tm-bk5xTUqo

Next:
Finally in the playoffs! The 🧭 #Navegadores de Naguabo—more dominant than they've ever been, thanks to career years from their entire rotation—face off against the 🐐 #Chupacabras de Canóvanas in the first round.

Will La Brújula sail on or run aground immediately?

youtu.be/th0AXscYvw4

Next:
Back to @kristencrossing.bsky.social's 😈 #Malditos de Naguabo, whose crop of top talent got them a 72-24 record and more than ensured a playoff berth this year.

In the first round, they face the ❓ #Críptidos de Canóvanas . . . and LVP baseball, as usual, remains chaotic.

youtu.be/Tn2Zm9fA-2w

Next:
We've been waiting to show off @iluvbaseball.bsky.social's ☕ #Ristretti de Maricao, and what better team to put them against than the 💣 #Napoleónicos de Yauco, whose exciting prospect, 🇬🇺 SS/RHP Xyzzy Plugh, is taking some long strides in his sophomore season?

youtu.be/UoYcSqlkLZg

Next:
In the Puerto Rican baseball system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: Liga Betances, who wears red, and Liga Hostos, who is supposed to wear sky-blue but somehow keeps forgetting.

This is their story. Watch the Partido de Campeones:
youtu.be/PcaYGxeYZZg

Next up:
The 🦜 #Cotorras de Río Grande won the 1906 national championship on the backs of an absurd pitching rotation. Arms like Castillo, Vásquez, and Cordero made the rest of the LNP jealous.

How do they stack up against the 🧭 1907 #Navegadores de Naguabo?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbjL...

We’re allowed our little Olympic team and our flag-covered cars and our fried plantains, so long as we remember our place and express our gratitude when the Americans come to town to indulge their national adolescence.

If there is one thing that lights the revolutionary fire within me to burn hot and sky blue, it is that this fucking cesspool of a country has forced me and my people to scrape and bow and apologize and be *proud* of our “kindness,” which is really the servile character that’s been forced on us.

He had to swallow his pride in two languages, to carry the baseball reputation of an entire country on his back for a good portion of his career, and yet he held himself to a higher standard than every suburban white boy raised to be a top 100 prospect who pretends like no one ever believed in them.

Clemente got routinely slagged off as a hypochondriac, malingerer, layabout, time bomb, and everything else by a sports press that didn’t know how to deal with an Afro-PR player who was incredible on the field and had the audacity to be proud of it, and yet he learned to distinguish friend from foe.

Alt text for the rest of that second page, from David Maraniss’ Clemente bio, which I finished yesterday after months of being unwilling to get to the sad part.

Clemente gave everything he had to baseball, but unlike so many of his successors, he also gave everything to others. Including himself.

Didn’t know this article existed until today, but this is the exact quality that makes Roberto Clemente my GOAT. He not only sought to be the best damn baseball player of his era, and achieved that (argue with your nearest wall), but to be a positive influence on the world. sabr.org/journal/arti...

Hell, I’ll probably have taught that guy, too.

All of which is to say—some things have undoubtedly gotten better, some things have perhaps gotten worse, but if #21 means anything to me, it’s that you can never stop thinking about how you, with your specific gifts, can make the world better.

And now we live in a world where Random White Guy #2705 will probably have more opportunities to state his (often-abhorrent) values on camera by the time he gets drafted in the sixth round than Roberto Clemente did for most of his career as, again, the greatest RF of his era. (Argue with a wall.)

But most of all what I think about is that Clemente could’ve been satisfied with being the greatest right fielder of his era, and perhaps of all time, and a transformative player for his Pirates, and instead saw that as a starting point to keep speaking out about the things he had to think about.

Bowie Kuhn, who wasn’t exactly known for his warm and fuzzy feelings towards Black players, said of him that “he had a touch of royalty,” which I think is what you say when you see a man you consider lesser respectfully asking for and embodying the dignity to which he is entitled for being a person.