City aid will help Roberto Clemente Park live up to its name

Finally, Roberto Clemente Park, which should have been a Miami showplace, is about to get long-awaited upgrades that will help it live up to the quality of its Hall of Fame name.

The city park within the Little Puerto Rico area is named for one of the nation’s greatest baseball players whose career was cut short when he died in a plane crash while he was on an earthquake relief mission delivering supplies to Nicaragua.

Yet for more than a decade the park and its baseball field have been most notable for conditions that did a disservice to both the name the park bears and the needs of neighborhood youngsters who grow up on the playing fields of municipal parks, as we see across this nation.

“So many people say ‘my coach changed my life.’ I was raised through the park system and I owe everything to the parks,” Manny Gonzalez, then executive director of the Wynwood Business Improvement District, told Miami Today in 2022 as he was in the midst of his long personal campaign to bring Roberto Clemente Park up to major league standards.

Now the battle seems to be won.

Last week, Miami Today reported that the City of Miami had accepted a $1.2 million state grant and matched it with $800,000 from local impact fees to revamp the park’s baseball field and infrastructure. Work is to take two years, far too long for teens who would use the park, but at least it’s a light at the end of the tunnel for a vital upgrade.

The improvements will bring new field drainage, sod, fencing, bullpen and dugout improvements, and a 1,560-foot exfiltration system around the perimeter of the park, which was renamed from Wynwood Park 50 years ago to honor Mr. Clemente’s memory.

The park today reflects his name, but not his stature.

“The park is disgusting,” Mr. Gonzalez told the Wynwood Business Improvement District’s board in December 2021. “But it is dedicated to a hero.”

Mr. Clemente is honored elsewhere far better than here. Major League Baseball gives a Roberto Clemente award yearly to the player who “best represents the game of baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropic excellence, and positive contributions on and off the field.” Each of the 30 teams has a nominee for the sought-after honor.

During the Caribbean Series in 2024 at the Miami Marlins’ loanDepot Park a traveling exhibit depicted Mr. Clemente’s life, during which he outspokenly battled racism. Some photos showed a search-and-rescue mission to the waters where the DC-7 plane carrying Mr. Clemente crashed.

Yet the baseball park that bears the Clemente name not far from Marlins Park was allowed to languish.

The field is unplayable, Mr. Gonzalez said four years ago, with rocks and no drainage. “There aren’t lights, so at night people are out there smoking, and we’ve seen bags of drugs,” he said. 

Mr. Gonzalez fought his own battle for the park, working with the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce and Major League Baseball, which sent him to the Marlins. “The Marlins knew about the park’s state for eight years. Then I called the Roberto Clemente Foundation in Pittsburgh.”

Finally, the Puerto Rican Chamber told him that the Marlins had agreed to adopt the park and would be in charge of all repairs, the contractor, and equipment such as gloves and bats. But covid intervened and efforts stalled.

Now, the state and city are stepping in with solid funding.

The Miami park to memorialize the Puerto Rican sports hero isn’t unique. We’ve found 11 Clemente parks across the nation, including a state park in the Bronx in New York and three in his native Puerto Rico. There are two Roberto Clemente parks in New Jersey, two in Massachusetts.

In Pittsburgh, where he starred as a player for 18 years, there’s a Roberto Clemente Memorial Park near the current baseball stadium, a ballpark that can be reached on foot over the 79-foot-high Roberto Clemente Bridge.

Yet scant attention has been paid to the park here, far too little for what it’s meant to represent.

When a Miami Today photographer visited in 2022, her photos showed signs on the park’s fencing seeking to promote jobs to work for the 2020 census two years earlier. That shows graphically how little attention was paid to the park.

Nobody should expect the city’s funding to provide a glistening stadium. 

But area residents do deserve a good ballfield where youngsters can play ball with the aim of every kid: to be someone special, in the spirit, if not the stature, of Roberto Clemente. 

Thank you, Miami, for finally making that possible.