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Gaceta de la LNP

@lnpgaceta.org

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150 years of baseball, all in one place: a Puerto Rico free since the Grito de Lares. Powered by Out of the Park Baseball.

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · Nov 19

Q: What is the LNP?

A: it's an #OOTP #baseball league, set in a Puerto Rico freed in the 1868 Grito de Lares—which in our world failed more or less instantly.

The Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña began play in 1871, and soon became its world's best baseball league.

It's our job to tell its stories.

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · 5d

TONIGHT:
It's the 1907 Partido de Campeones! Come watch the best hundred players in the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña fight it out.

Does 🔴 Betances take it this year? Or will it be 🔵 Hostos?

fun begins at 7:05 PM EDT:
twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

LNPGaceta - Twitch

We are the writers, streamers, and other workers who present to you 150 years of baseball in a liberated Puerto Rico.

twitch.tv

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · 12d

After the 6th inning:

🧭 Navegadores 2
🦜 Cotorras 0

Despite a lot of Naguabo sound and fury, other than 🇵🇷 Benji Valdez’s two-run single, the Naves are hanging on to a thin lead. Can they hold on?

We’ve got a poetry reading in less than an inning! Hop in!
www.twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

LNPGaceta - Twitch

International Waters: Game 86, vs. Cotorras de Río Grande (51-39)

www.twitch.tv

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · 12d

9/26 (tonight!):
We couldn't get the all-lefty lineup we wanted, but the 🧭 Navegadores nonetheless welcome the reigning champion 🦜 Cotorras to town.

Commercials! Poetry! Fun with LNP history! And more, courtesy of Louisa and @nsmckinnon.bsky.social!

fun begins at 7:05 PM EDT
twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

LNPGaceta - Twitch

We are the writers, streamers, and other workers who present to you 150 years of baseball in a liberated Puerto Rico.

twitch.tv

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 3

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 3

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 3

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 3

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 3

This—from David Maraniss’ bio of Clemente—is why he’s the GOAT to me.

Much of this book is devoted to talking about Clemente’s unique willingness to apologize, and I think about how now people let pro athletes off the hook in a way they don’t any other profession, while pretending they’re like us.

The quote is way too long for alt text so I’ll summarize: Milton Gross, an NY Post writer, tells of a time when he wrote a positive story based on a long interview with Roberto Clemente and Clemente was angry with him, calling it “horseshit.” Gross was of course offended by this. Weeks later, Clemente apologized to Gross because, he had discovered, he had been given a false impression of the story by a friend of his, and he had told his friend they were no longer friends since the guy had lied to him. Gross closes with a reflection on the rarity of a ballplayer admitting he was wrong and adds: “Clemente didn’t need me but he felt it incumbent upon himself to tell me that he had done me an injustice.”

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 5

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.

“At Clemente's sweetest moment of glory, in the dugout after his Pittsburgh Pirates won the 1971 World Series, he brought pride to all of Latin America by choosing to speak in Spanish to honor his parents back home. Thirty-four years later, when another Latino, Ozzie Guillen, the Venezuelan manager of the champion Chicago White Sox, stood atop the baseball world, he too paid homage, revealing that in the study of his house he kept a shrine to the one baseball figure he honored above all others, Roberto Clemente. For many years after Clemente's death, Tony Taylor, the Cuban infielder, made a point of walking young Latino teammates out to the right field wall whenever they visited Pittsburgh to give them a history lesson about the great Clemente. He is your heritage, Taylor would tell them, but more than that he is what you can become.”

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jul 5

I think a lot about how Clemente had the most Puerto Rican death a ballplayer can have: so busy trying to do something no one else was doing that he didn’t stop to think that he was getting on a colossal death trap—because he cared more about Nicaraguan victims of an earthquake than his own life.

“The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on clichés of the innocent past, the nostalgia for how things were. Fields of green. Fathers and sons. But Clemente's myth ares the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become. His memory is kept alie as a symbol of action and passion, not of reflection and longing.
He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero. That word can be used indiscriminately in the world of sports, but the case definitine uses omeone who gives his life in the service Kohers, ada hat is exactly what Clemente did. He was also the real-softle caly Latino players in a game that is increasingly dominated . . .

by Spanish-speaking athletes. Ramirez, Martinez, Rodriguez, Pujols, Rivera, Ortiz, Beltran, Tejada, Guerrero- these are the names of baseball today, among the 204 Latinos who opened the 2005 season on major league rosters, about one-quarter of all players. Puerto Rico itsel has mostly moved on to basketball and other faster-paced sports, leaving the baseball obsession more to the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, but the story of how Clemente was the best among them is passed along from generation to generation, country to country.”

There’s more, but it doesn’t fit in the alt text and it’s worth reading in its entirety, so I’m putting it in the next skeet.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Sep 15

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...

Roberto Clemente: Baseball Rebel – Society for American Baseball Research

sabr.org

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Sep 15

‪An entire life, on the diamond and off it, spent reminding us of one of the most immutable truths of the universe:

When you want the job done right, you call the boricua. 🇵🇷🇵🇷🇵🇷‬

Happy Roberto Clemente Day.

A painting of Roberto Clemente, wearing the classic Pirates white vest with the fancy 21 on the back and the black sleeves, having just undoubtedly lined the crap out of some terrible breaking ball a pitcher tried to slip past him.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

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.)

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

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.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

A man who didn’t forget the rest of the world when he made it. If he had, he might still be with us today, instead of having his number retired across Nicaraguan baseball.

A devoted father, husband, and a Marine, and all that won him was, as my father said, people complaining that he never smiled.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

This is a man who fought off coaches and executives who wanted to call him “Bob.” (There’s trading cards with that name on it at the Hall of Fame.) A man from whom the simple act of asking a blessing from his parents on camera, in Spanish, on winning World Series MVP, was something akin to radical.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

It’s nothing new, really. The Pirates of Clemente’s day actively sought out talented Black and Afro-Latino players, and those players would make them one of the most feared teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but you try telling white Pittsburghers that. Especially in the ‘50s, when Clemente broke through.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

Because if you might have a little Taíno or a little Yoruba in your DNA, you can’t be racist now, right?

This falls apart if you think about it for a second, but that’s the thing: it’s supposed to be a talisman against ever having to think.

Well, Clemente didn’t get a chance to not think about it.

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

For most of my life there’s been a pretty nasty undercurrent in how white Puerto Ricans think of ourselves.

Our way of not discussing, or even thinking, about racism is to take the history of violence perpetrated on Indigenous and African people and say “well, we’re a little bit of everything.”

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Noah S. McKinnon 🇵🇷🇨🇺 @nsmckinnon.bsky.social · Jun 20

Me being me, you know I’ll post about Clemente.

“I am Puerto Rican. I am Black and I am between the walls. So anything that I do first, it would be reflected on me because I’m Black, and second, it would be reflected on me because I am Puerto Rican.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFEH5nxSoKc

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · Sep 6

After the 6th inning:

😈 Malditos 5
📳 Zumbadorcitos 0

A home run from 🇨🇦 Trevor Ransom and a couple Zumbas errors got things going in the Círculo Noveno.

We’ve got a poetry reading in less than an inning! Hop in!
www.twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · Sep 5

After the 2nd inning:

😈 Malditos 0
📳 Zumbadorcitos 0

You’re missing historical notes from the 19th century! Hop in!
twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

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Gaceta de la LNP @lnpgaceta.org · Sep 5

9/5:
After a one-week emergency hiatus, we take a little detour to the developmental leagues, where the top-heavy 😈 Malditos de Naguabo open their season facing the 📳 Zumbadorcitos de Vieques.

Which team of young players will take the night?

fun begins at 7:05 PM EDT:
www.twitch.tv/lnpgaceta

A slide for our stream tomorrow: it's a sapphire-tiled background with a golden compass rose and three chevrons pointing right. The text says "International Waters: an alt-history OOTP 26 baseball stream."

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