“I've already had a colonoscopy by Blass.”

“Oh, my God. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Really.”

“Well, I'm sort of glad to see Pittsburgh win because that Clemente is so great.”

“It all began with Clemente hustling to first. He knows only one way to play this game.”

“They got on his back, and he carried the team. He said, "I’m not going to let my team lose."”

“I want everybody in the world to know that this is the way I play all the time. All season, every season. I gave everything I had to this game.”

“It all boils down to Blass, to pitching being 90 percent of the game. Blass couldn't have been better. He didn't get stronger late in the game, but he sure didn't get much weaker.”

“I'm not selling Clemente short. He couldn't have done more than he did. But, great as Clemente was—and he was great without a question—Clemente didn't do it to us. It all boils down to Steve Blass.”

“After we lost the second game in Baltimore, Clemente came into the clubhouse and he starts screamin’ and said that we’re gonna go back to Pittsburgh and we’re gonna kick their butts three games in a row. And we went back to Pittsburgh and we did exactly that.”

“[T]he Bucs drafted Clemente for $4,000. The Dodgers lost a superstar, $6,000 and God knows how many pennants. Tomorrow night at Leone's, Roberto Clemente will be handed the keys to the Sports Mag car, for having won the World Series for Pittsburgh. At age 37, he can hit the ball back to the box and beat the car to first base.”

“And then, too, there was the shared experience, already permanently fixed in memory, of Roberto Clemente playing a kind of baseball that none of us had ever seen before—throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection, playing to win but also playing the game almost as if it were a form of punishment for everyone else on the field.”

“I say Roberto Clemente won that game for Pittsburgh. Simply by being Roberto Clemente and running out a ground ball the way he always has since the day he began playing ball 30 years ago. I had only one thought watching Clemente run down to first base. I wondered what Alex Johnson was thinking while watching the whole thing on TV.”

“In case you didn't notice, and you probably didn't because TV directors were very careful, there were thousands of empty seats at the World Series. On Saturday, with the Pirates leading 3–2, in games, there were 7,963 empty seats in Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. And on Sunday, with the Series deadlocked, 4,856 stayed home and many who did show came with transistor radios so they could follow their favorite pro football teams.”

“Leppert’s only regret is that Clemente didn’t have the chance to truly excel in the field. Other than his eye-popping throw to the plate in the sixth game, Clemente was required to field no more than ordinary chances. "Brooks Robinson had that great Series with the glove in 1970, but you’ve got to be lucky to field like he did. By that, I mean you’ve got to get the tough chances, and if Roberto had had some in this Series, he really would have shown them something.””

“I never really pitched against him until the World Series. The scouting report said you can go up and in with him, but don’t go there twice. You can pitch him low and away, but don’t stay out there. So what does that leave? Throw it down the middle and hope he hits it at someone. Clemente beat us. The reason they won was Steve Blass’s two games and Clemente. He ran the bases as well as you could run them, made great plays and great throws. And he hit the home run to right field against me, the triple to left-center – he had 12 hits.”

“During the Series, after arriving in Baltimore, Roberto practiced for hours, studying how the ball caromed off the right field fence at different angles and locations. His determination was of such a magnitude that one could be excused for believing he’d gone crazy. Crazy like a fox is more like it, as the World Series would ultimately demonstrate; time after time, Roberto, having left nothing to chance, would appear in precisely the right spot to field each carom. For me, Roberto Clemente has to be the greatest right fielder of all time.”

“He's been popping off about ballparks and he's played in a bleeping coal hole over there at Forbes Field all his career. Clemente's such a great outfielder, it shouldn't matter to him. He should be able to play on the moon. Sure, it's tough to see the ball in Baltimore. But I'm not going to cry about it, I'll just play my game. We're going back there to play, so maybe he can buy a ticket for the stands if he doesn't like the outfield. And if he isn't sure where he lought to play, tell him to watch me. He says he plays in close. I see him playing on the warning track.”

“From a personal standpoint, I have known Clemente since he came up to the Pirates 17 years ago and the thing he did that impressed me most in the Series against the Orioles wasn't that he hit .414 or got off those excellent throws, but that he got up and chased the ball when he kicked it into distant left centerfield after falling down trying for a backhanded shoestringer on Mark Belanger's triple in the first game. "Swoboda would've had it!" said a newspaperman I know. Seriously, though, what impressed me so much about Clemente's get-up-and-go-after-it sequence is that this was so typical of his performance. He'd do the same thing in the second game of a series with San Diego as he was doing now in the second game of a series with Baltimore.”

“The park didn't have any foul poles. You had the foul line on the field and then there was a fence with a yellow line on it and then about an 18-inch gap and a wall with a yellow line on it and that was it. In the second game there, the first night game ever in the World Series, Eddie Vargo of the National League was behind the plate. I was working the right-field line. In the middle of the game, Roberto Clemente hits this wicked line drive down the right field line. It went into the stands right in the area where there was no foul pole. When you have to make a call like that, it's a killer-diller. I called it foul. Everybody told me afterward if there had been a foul pole, it would have been a home run. And the next year, they put up a foul pole.”

“Roberto Clemente was on second and Wilver Stargell on first with none out. The Pirates were two games down in the Series and their knuckles were getting white in their cling to the precipice when Bob Robertson came up. Now, bear in mind, Bob Robertson had hit three home runs in one game in the playoffs. Behind him in the Pirate order was the banjo section. In this situation, naturally, the manager orders bunt. Managers never call for cards, never fade you. Managers order you to give yourself up in this situation. Managers like to blow retreat. Bob Robertson missed the bunt sign. Which was understandable; he'd never seen one. They wouldn't be in the World Series if they gave him the bunt sign during the season. So, he hit the ball out of the park. Pittsburgh had got a foot in the door in this World Series. Wilver Stargell greeted Robertson at home plate. "Nice bunt," he said laconically.”