On April 18, 1955 — Roberto Clemente’s first major league home run – a 440- to 450-foot inside-the-parker off Giants southpaw Don Liddle – arrives three games into his big league career and it’s just his luck that it occurs in the one stadium that, due to its freakish configuration, could possibly have contained this blast, namely the Polo Grounds, that semi-rectangular oddity wherein 279- and 257-foot foul lines coexist with 455- and 449-foot power alleys. This first New York visit also has a deeper significance for Clemente since, in his third major league game, he’s playing on the same field with both his new mentor and role model, Willie Mays (alongside whom he was playing just two months earlier in Santurce), and his boyhood hero, Monte Irvin, whose winter ball career Clemente monitored religiously in the late 1940s and who, in the interim, has himself become both a teammate and something of a mentor to Mays.
