I’m a third-generation Latina baseball fan
By Angie Clemmons-Roberts
I handed my resume to the skeptical sports editor on the opposite side of the table from me.
“Your dad’s name is Roger Clemmons?” he asked me. I swear he raised an exasperated eyebrow.
Yes. The ballplayer spells it wrong, I replied.
“I don’t know how we can’t hire you,” he said.
That’s basically the story of how I got my first job in sports, although my command of spelling and grammar and the fact that my father had raised me as a sports fan were thrown in as secondary qualifications.
I was raised a baseball fan and, more precisely, a Dodgers fan. At some age, you realize “being raised” is really just an act of brainwashing. My dad can be quite systematic about such things, using pop quizzes to make sure attention is being paid.
Who is Mike Piazza’s godfather?
Name the ’74 Dodgers’ infield.
What position did Pee Wee Reese play?
I can still picture my dad preparing for yardwork by trying to tune in the Dodgers game on his beat-up shortwave radio. He could find any game in the country — and most parts of Canada — on that thing. Summers where I grew up in Montana meant hearing Vin Scully’s calm intonations all around the house and throughout the backyard, as though he were broadcasting from our deck in the intense prairie heat.
Dad even scheduled vacation time from his job at the post office to coincide with the World Series, just in case his beloved Dodgers made it to the Fall Classic.
We once made a pilgrimage to Dodger Stadium, when I was about 8. The key memory I have from that trip is now under some dispute. I remember going to get Steve Garvey’s autograph, and Garvey actually patting my head and saying, “You’re a good kid.”
The upsetting thing about this memory? My father remembers it happening to my then-6-year-old sister, Milissa.
My Mexican Mom
So, I got my love of baseball from my dad. I got being Mexican from my mom.
Antonia “Toni” Clemmons née Caudillo was born in Montana to parents who migrated from Mexico in 1917 in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. My grandmother Martina and my grandfather Ysidro found work wherever the sugar beet fields took them and, amid the constant travel, started a family. My Aunt Adelina, the oldest of my mom’s siblings, was born in Minnesota; my Aunt Carmen in Texas; and my mom and my Uncle Dick (Ricardo) were born in Montana.
Only my mother was spared working the fields, though she remembers as a little girl taking sandwiches to her dad and her sisters when they were harvesting close to home. The family eventually made enough money to buy a house in the nearest big city — Billings — and my mom was able to start first grade there. She was the only one of her siblings to attend high school; her sisters finished fifth grade, and her brother, closest to her in age, went to junior high in Billings.
My dad is decidedly NOT Mexican. He grew up the son of a railroad worker, moving almost once a year from different towns spread out between Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and, finally, Montana.
In 1965, they married, after a courtship that included dates to see an Elvis movie, stock car races and rodeos. Though mixed marriages at the time were rare in Montana and segregation was once a fact of life in the state, they don’t remember getting too much static — although my father recalls one detail from the planning of their wedding reception at the Eagles Lodge.
“They found out there would be Mexicans there and they tried to cancel,” says my dad. Luckily, both of my parents had friends who were members, and the lodge was persuaded to hold the reception.
“People didn’t think we would last,” concedes my mother, now married to my dad going on 53 years.
Rooting for Latinos
Growing up half-white, half-Mexican means you are living between two worlds. We were closest to my mom’s family, visiting my Grandma Martina Caudillo every day, and I think I pictured myself as brown-skinned, although when you see a picture of me and my sister as very small girls with our Mexican cousins, it is clear we were, to twist something Vice President George Bush once said, “the little white ones.”
But what could be more American than making tortillas with your grandma and then settling in to watch Hee-Haw and Lawrence Welk?
And through it all, my mom was right there, rooting for whichever Latino was in the vicinity.
Golf? While Dad was waxing poetic over Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus, she was checking in and asking how Lee Treviño or Nancy López was doing.
Music? My siblings and I grew up listening to Elvis, the Beatles, the Beach Boys — and Freddy Fender.
Because I am half-Mexican, I have an edge as a journalist and especially as a copy editor. I carry the spellings of Mexican names around in my head, accustomed to seeing them on Christmas cards and church programs. I know which Latino names might take an accent and have made many a futile argument at various newspapers around the country to include accents and tildes.
And while my own Spanish-speaking abilities have seen better days, I still know enough to correct an errant writer who has misinterpreted what someone was saying in a quote. Lazy stereotypes practically jump off the page at me.
Baseball dictationist
That first job I mentioned was at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, and it led to another sports job at the Raleigh News & Observer, which eventually led to a job at the Associated Press in New York City.
I started out on the lowest rung at AP Sports — baseball dictationist. It’s a job few have heard of, but it used to be instrumental in getting baseball game stories out to all of the newspapers almost as soon as the game was over. I would sit at my computer terminal and wait for the phone to ring. Every AP writer at every baseball stadium every night did the same thing: they would start writing their stories in the last few innings, describing all of the important events of the game, and with three outs left in the game, they would make their phone call.
“Three to go in Dodge,” the writer at Dodger Stadium might say.
And the story would drop into a queue at the AP’s Rockefeller Center office. As one of about five dictationists each night, I would pick up that story, announce as loudly as I possibly could, “THREE TO GO IN DODGE,” which alerted the news editor that the story was coming in. While waiting for the game to wind down, I would chitchat with the writer, which sometimes might even be a woman, like the venerable Nancy Armour in Chicago. Or start typing the writer’s potential lead paragraph, the “topper” as we called it.
As soon as the third and final out of the game was called, the writer would dictate the topper with the final score plugged in, and I would quickly read it back to them before sending it to the editor, who would read over the whole thing and then zap it out across the wire.
Copy editor’s challenges
I eventually settled into a life of copy editing. I am the one checking for the usual suspects in the text of a story — did a person “literally explode”? (Probably not.) Is something really ironic, or is it coincidental?
But being a sports copy editor brings different challenges, especially in the stat-heavy sport of baseball.
Is the stadium’s name correct? Not only are stadium names always changing, thanks to the revolving nature of sponsorships, if we are writing about something in the past, we need to get the name as it was known at the time. If it’s a story about the Atlanta Braves, did it take place at Atlanta Stadium, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Turner Field or SunTrust?
I have to know, or be able to find, up-to-the-minute information, as well. How many games back was the team when the story was written, and has that number changed by the time of publication?
Here at La Vida Baseball we rely primarily on BaseballReference.com for stats, and the Associated Press Stylebook is my go-to guide for style questions. I also check out the style guide compiled by Cecilia Tan at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) for more obscure questions, such as whether “batter’s eye” takes an apostrophe, or how to spell “eephus,” should it come up.
In my work here, my focus and my research skills are sharpened even further. Was Radamés Mayoral the broadcasting voice of the Leones de Ponce? How many Latinos are in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum? (13.) And do we count Ted Williams? (He was apparently as Mexican as I am, at least genetically speaking, if not culturally.) Is Pompeyo Davalillo’s nickname really “Yo-Yo” — and does Yo-Yo take a hyphen? (Yes and yes.)
When I started out, the only resources we had to fall back on were the team guides sent to most newspaper sports departments by Major League Baseball — they were like gold! — or The Baseball Encyclopedia, which once had bible status.
The internet has made fact-checking easier, in a way — I can certainly look up Juan Marichal’s 2.10 ERA in 1969 much faster, but YOU try fact-checking your way through a typical sports story, especially now in the era of statistics like WHIP and FIP and WAR. I can easily spend a full hour just double-checking statistics. Before, I would just trust the writer and spend my time improving the flow of a story or writing headlines. Not anymore. In the information age, the reader is far less forgiving. When in doubt, look it up. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry — at least yet — about “fake stats.”
But today I am given the opportunity to weigh in on issues affecting Latino ballplayers, and this is more important to me than anything. When I ask whether Latino minor-leaguers are getting enough support within their organization, there is a part of me doing it because they remind me of my cousins or my uncles — and because a lot of times, no one else is asking. The ranks of sportswriters, unfortunately, are still vastly white and male — and rarely bilingual. All of this stands in the way of getting the story.
When I hear people talk about legendary Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, I like to pipe up with a mention of Jaime Jarrín, who has been calling Dodger games in Spanish since 1959, and in this way, I embody both of my parents. I’m my father’s daughter. And my mother’s, too.
Angie Clemmons-Roberts is a full-time baseball fan and, on a part-time basis, La Vida Baseball’s chief copy editor.
Featured Image: Angie Clemmons-Roberts
Inset Images: Angie Clemmons-Roberts