Roberto Clemente Day and honoring the Pittsburgh Pirates legend
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Howard Bryant, ESPN Senior Writer
IT WAS A JOURNEY that was never intended to be a quest. Life simply turned it into one — life, plus a single motivating sentence from the most influential of voices, assisted by a dose of divinity.
One day nearly 20 years ago, Vera Clemente, widow of the legendary Roberto Clemente, entered the studio of photographer Duane Rieder before the 2006 All-Star Game, to be played at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. The studio had once been an old firehouse — Pittsburgh’s Engine No. 25 — situated in the Lawrenceville section of the city. Built in 1896, the structure had been condemned when Rieder purchased it from the city in 1994 for the grand sum of a dollar.
Rieder had been preparing a pre-All-Star party for the Clemente family and adorned his studio with striking photos of Clemente as well as an archive of Clemente memorabilia and ephemera he had been collecting for the previous decade. He had met Vera after he had created a calendar of Clemente photos to commemorate the last All-Star Game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium in 1994. The following year, Rieder had assisted Vera in restoring damaged photos of the Clementes’ visit to the White House with President Nixon following the 1971 World Series, the moment that cemented Roberto Clemente nationally as what he had been known as locally for the previous 16 seasons: a transcendent great.
The photos were of particular importance to Vera, who lost her husband in one of the greatest tragedies in the history of American sports. On New Year’s Eve 1972, Clemente’s hastily loaded plane carrying relief supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico. Financial difficulty and indignity followed: Locals began stealing valuable Clemente items from the family home in Puerto Rico, including Vera and Roberto’s wedding album.
When she entered Rieder’s studio, she saw the striking photos of Clemente on the studio walls, including “Angel Wings,” the famous shot of Clemente stretching to make a catch while the clouds behind him seem to form a pair of wings behind his shoulders.
“Duane,” Rieder recalls Vera telling him, “You should make a museum of this place.”
Rieder then presented Vera Clemente with a priceless gift he had acquired from years of “calling in favors” and kismet — a photo album of pictures from the wedding she had never seen before.
Less than 60 days later, the Clemente Museum opened, and a life’s work would transform a building once condemned.
“I’m going to give Roberto and the Big Guy upstairs a lot of credit,” Rieder says, “for the things that evolved in this building.”
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a 12,000-square-foot homage to the man Pittsburgh has called “The Great One” for more than a half-century. According to Rieder, 10,000 visitors come to the museum annually. The nonprofit museum is not affiliated with the Pirates or Major League Baseball, and the money to keep it running comes from baseball die-hards, deep-pocketed Clemente die-hards — Rieder credits Eddie Vedder, the frontman for the rock band Pearl Jam, with keeping the doors open during the pandemic. Credit also, of course, belongs to the soul, spirit and sweat of the museum’s owner.
The Clemente Museum is accessible by appointment only and functions largely on the honor system — few of the 650 or so Clemente items are protected from the public by casing and so the museum trusts its patrons to not touch items or try to steal them. The converted firehouse can feel dark and foreboding with its heavy woods, a portal back into the 19th century of handlebar mustaches and horse-drawn fire carriages. Touches of the old firehouse remain — two holes in the first-floor ceiling, one still with its fire pole. The other was removed to make room for the front door.
When it is lit, the museum transforms into a shrine that feels uniquely Pittsburgh — an original baseball town since 1882. The museum is approached by fans, celebrities and big-league players as a pilgrimage and sanctuary. Manny Machado, the Padres third baseman, spends the night at the museum at least once a season. Virtually every visiting team makes a late-night stop after games, to pay tribute to The Great One, and also to relax in the basement of the speakeasy-style winery, wood-fired oven and cigar bar (named after Pirates catcher Francisco Cervelli) that is the basement. Many of them take turns swinging the massive 38-ounce bat the 5-foot-11, 175-pound Clemente swung. During a recent four-game series with Washington, 34 members of the Nationals came to the museum. One of them was Darren Baker, 25, who made his big-league debut this month. He was amused to come across a 1968 photo of a 19-year-old Dusty Baker in the Marines hanging on the wall — according to legend, Dusty broke Clemente’s Marines record for pullups. Dusty, of course, is Darren’s father and a legend in his own right. Yet for every anecdote, irony and eerie coincidence that lends the impression that the space was ordained, there is three decades of sweat behind it that give the stories meaning, that make them real.
Without Rieder, a 63-year-old with the spirit of a college freshman, physically pulling the electrical wires and knocking out part of the ceiling, revealing the original Carnegie Steel beam with the No. 21 on it — signifying the 21-inch thickness of the beam — the coincidences would have remained buried, or worse, nonexistent, bulldozed by time, progress, new structures erasing old history.
“The stories come to this building because we saved it,” Rieder says.
When the firehouse closed in 1972 — largely because of age and because the new trucks were so big they could no longer fit through the wooden doors of a building built in the 19th century — Engine 25 served as a hub for EMS vehicles. By the early 1990s, the buildings were in disrepair and the city had agreed to tear down more than a dozen of the old firehouses. Engine 25 was condemned when Rieder first looked into buying it. It was, he says, a “haven for pigeon poop and rats.”
“This part of town, Lawrenceville, was a mess,” he says. “People told me I was crazy buying here. The neighborhood was in such bad shape, you were taking your life into your own hands parking on the street … and the place needed so much work. It had no running water. Estimates were running me $500,000 in renovations.”
In 1994, Rieder settled on another studio, in Polish Hill. The papers were signed. The deal had closed. Engine No. 25 faced another destiny against the wishes of angry Lawrenceville residents: It was scheduled to become a nightclub. There was no way out, until Jimmy Ferlo, the powerful city councilman of the 7th District, stepped in. “I said, ‘Jimmy, there’s no way out. We’ve closed,” Rieder recalls. “Jimmy said, ‘Do you want it, yes or no?'” In a scene that sounds like a movie, Ferlo ripped up Rieder’s closing papers on the Polish Hill spot, and the move to the firehouse was miraculously done.
The firehouse was haunted by a dark coincidence: Engine No. 25 permanently closed its doors on Dec. 31, 1972, at 9 p.m. ET; a thousand miles away and about 20 minutes later, Clemente’s plane had just taken off and began its fateful descent. Undeterred, Rieder renovated the building, piece by piece. A welder by trade who refers to himself as “severely dyslexic,” Rieder put his life into the building. Sanding the floors. Scavenging for wood and coal. Renovating the original tin panels that adorn the second-floor ceiling. Finding old pieces — like the filing cabinet from a nearby printing press. Rescuing old photos, like Angel Wings, from the trash.
Rieder met Vera Clemente the following year, and he began to archive Clemente materials. A vision of a museum was taking shape — but did not become one until Vera Clemente’s suggestion more than a decade later.
“If I wasn’t a photographer and a workaholic, this couldn’t have happened,” Rieder says. “Who could do this? Even if you had all the money in the world, could you do this? Because it wasn’t about money. And I’m not bragging when I say this kind of stuff. It was just piece by piece, putting your work into your interests.”
When the museum officially opened in 2006, Rieder had been working on the building for a dozen years. In between, he honed another craft, learning to make wine. First photography. Then wine. Then baseball. “Every Italian in Pittsburgh made their own wine,” he says. “I started making dago red. It was just a hobby at first.” Now, big-league players from Pete Alonso to Ryan Zimmerman to Josh Bell have barrels of wine in the cellar speakeasy as part of Rieder’s wine club.
Sarah Kelsey, a part-timer at the museum with a soothing voice and gentle demeanor, did not come to the Clemente for the baseball. She is originally from Arlington, Virginia, but needing a life change seven years ago, she arrived in Western Pennsylvania. She now speaks of the region — and the Clemente — as a place of soft refuge. She met Duane Rieder for the wine, and remained for the architecture, the community, what she referred to as the magical nature of the building — the cherry floors in the basement, sloped slightly to the right because the firehouse, built in 1896, once doubled as a horse stable in the days before fire trucks and the floors needed to be sloped for drainage.
On the second floor, the light pierces the wide room as though through stained glass, accentuating the wide-plank floors, and the original woodwork. The second floor contains catnip for Clemente fanatics: the 1961 silver bat commemorating his first batting title, dented because his kids used it to hit. The museum is for Kelsey a place of peace. “It is a beautiful building,” she says. “The building feels safe. Every time I come here, I see something new, and I hear something new. It is a very uplifting place. People are moved by it. I’m happy and humbled, and lucky to be here. When people come here, they want to talk about their lives. They want to donate things — albums, cuff links. They feel the need to share.”
Three times the museum has been saved, by luck or divinity. In 2006, Rieder’s most famous photo — of the Steelers praying before a game — went viral after a television station did a story on Rieder before the Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl. The selling of the iconic print saved Rieder from a tax accounting error that put him in arrears. “I paid off the IRS,” he says. “Sixty thousand. In cash.”
In 2009, the museum nearly burned to the ground. “It was my fault,” Rieder says. “I was doing the plumbing. I was heating up the copper pipes with a torch, and it caught on to the insulation and started burning. The power went out, and I was in total blackness. I saw a ball of fire. I could see it behind the drywall, so I punched holes in the drywall with my fist, found the piece of insulation and stamped it out. Then, I fixed the pipe and went home.”
In 2020, the pandemic nearly closed the shrine. But Eddie Vedder saved it. “He filmed a video for us, like a virtual fundraiser,” Rieder says. “He sent a guitar signed by the whole band. We auctioned everything off and raised $100,000.
“We were closed for almost two full years and the bills were piling up. He supports a hundred charities, and we were lucky to be one of them. So, thank the Lord for Eddie Vedder.”
THE LORE OF ROBERTO CLEMENTE
IN THIS TOWN, Clemente endures as perhaps no other player in any other big-league city. He is not claimed in the way of a Ruth or Williams or Mays — respected for the memories, awed by their abilities. Nearly 70 years after his major-league debut and 52 years after his death, Clemente stands closer to Henry Aaron, not just admired, but revered. The main bridge crossing the Allegheny River leading into PNC Park is the Roberto Clemente Bridge. At the foot of the bridge is the Clemente statue. At the stadium itself, there are distractions for kids, and a bar in center field for adults, and perhaps the best views in baseball, all animated by the excitement generated by rookie fireballer Paul Skenes, but it’s the Clemente images throughout that make watching a game here feel grounded. In the team shop at the stadium, Clemente jerseys are still prominently displayed. He remains the city’s conscience.
Art Rodriguez, a retired dentist who works at the museum with an almost ancestral connection to it, conducts many of the private tours. Rodriguez still owns the scorecard from his first baseball game: July 28, 1968, at Forbes Field. The Cardinals were in town. The Pirates won 7-1. Clemente, the son of a cane crop worker, went 3-for-4 with a triple and two runs scored. Rodriguez and his father, Archie, stopped scoring the Cardinals after the second inning. The Pirates kept their attention until the sixth, when Clemente struck out to end the inning. Bob Gibson didn’t pitch that day, but Rodriguez would never forget the aura of Gibson while trying for an autograph: green turtleneck, gold chain. No signature. Rodriguez was seven years old.
Rodriguez grew up in Donora, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, birthplace of the famous Stan Musial, and Ken Griffey Jr. It was Musial that connected the Rodriguez generations to baseball, and it was work that drew the family to Pittsburgh. His grandfather on his father’s side, Manuel, came over from Oviedo, Spain, in 1917 and worked in the Western Pennsylvania zinc mills. On his mother’s side, his grandfather, Dominic, came to America from Ceto, Italy, in 1913 and worked in the coal mines. Their story was the immigrant-American story: the grandparents, one set from Spain, one from Italy, spoke some English and had no interest in sports. The next generations became American through sports, the father with Musial, the son, Clemente.
During his tours, Rodriguez does not revel in Clemente’s prodigious statistical achievements — a .317 career average, 3,000 hits, four batting titles, 12 straight Gold Glove awards — as much as he focuses tourgoers on the man and the price he paid during his times. Clemente faced the discrimination of the Black players of his era and the anti-Latin sentiment common in baseball. Reporters would quote Spanish-speaking players phonetically, as if to mimic their poor English. Clemente resented attempts to Americanize him. The museum features several editions of Clemente cards where his name is listed as “Bob Clemente” instead of “Roberto.” For years, Clemente internalized those resentments before challenging his teammates as athletes and as men.
“I really emphasize the racism he faced, and yet he was so stoic,” Rodriguez says. “He had a way of getting to people. He knew he probably should speak out. He could convey that if you were a bigot, you couldn’t be a good man, and that resonates so much to the messages of today.”
In his tours, Rodriguez senses when visitors recognize the parallels between the xenophobia Clemente faced as a player and the nation’s current divisions. Before winning over the baseball world with his play and humanitarianism, Clemente endured the rising sentiment within the sport that baseball had hired too many minorities and, despite the greatness of him and players like Mays and Aaron, the game was diminished because of integration.
“If you’re Black or an immigrant, the message is ‘You have ruined our country,’ and that is the appeal,” Rodriguez says, alluding to the rising political rhetoric over the past several years and its parallels to the Clemente years. “I guess coming from a family of Spanish and Italian immigrants, I relate to whom those comments are directed. He didn’t say it. His supporters didn’t say it. But that is the feeling. I’m blown away by it. If someone had told me that racism would be as present to the degree as it was during Clemente’s time, I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s really important for the young people to understand.”
Clemente is an indelible part of American mythology. So is baseball. So is Pittsburgh. The reverence is rooted in the rare person who died as he lived and thus is not diminished by time. The Pirates won two World Series during the Clemente years, but the Pirates and his legend are uncomplicated because the Steelers during the 1960s were not the great team they would become. Then there is Pittsburgh, the Steel City of unpretentiousness and integrity people like to believe they embody — but most often do not.
Duane’s wife, Kate, definitely does. She is a shy, funny woman with mischievous eyes who says far less than she is thinking. Where people will refer to her husband as “the mayor of Pittsburgh” for his indefatigable gregariousness and constant availability, Kate Rieder is the opposite — and often provides the governor to her husband’s limitless generosity. It is common for the Rieders to get a late-night phone call from MLB players or coaches — the Nationals manager Davey Martinez, for instance — who want to pop by the museum for cigars, a glass and soak up the aura of The Great One. “I don’t do the public thing,” she says. “It’s fine as long as I don’t have to do it.” She grew up in the South Hills area, repeating, in a small sense, part of her childhood. Her father, an old New Englander and die-hard Red Sox fan from Nashua, New Hampshire, who became synonymous with Pittsburgh, was known all over town, the legendary KDKA-TV meteorologist Bob Kudzma. Kudzma was on the air for 34 years. But unlike Duane, who is naturally extroverted, Kate Rieder remembers her father, who passed away in 2021 as a private man with a public occupation. Off-camera, she says he kept to himself and his family.
She marvels at Duane’s energy. “He always finds time to create every thing. He never stops. He helps people. He’s super thoughtful. He’s like the Energizer Bunny.”
Nick Barnicle, a film producer who shot a documentary, including of Duane’s Clemente collection and spent extensive time with them at the museum, said, “Kate is the Landau to Duane’s Springsteen. The Robin to Duane’s Howard. The Varitek to Duane’s Pedro. Without Kate, it’s just not the same.”
THE PROPELLER
BRIAN, THE UBER DRIVER taking me to the museum on a recent late-summer day, drives in silence for several blocks before glancing again at his phone to confirm my destination. “The Clemente Museum,” he says evenly. His tone is curiously monotone — something bothers him. Through several red lights, Brian finally reveals the mystery of his ambivalence. “The propeller is in there,” he tells me. “It’s right there. That has never sat well with me.”
To the left of the front entrance of the museum, at roughly 11 o’clock, sits a vertically rectangular plexiglass case protecting a lone, damaged gray-black propeller blade. It is one of the blades from the DC-7 that plunged Clemente fatally into the Atlantic. After the crash, the newspapers showed the photos from Puerto Rico, of the search and rescue. The most prominent one featured Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillén, the only teammate to go into the water as part of the effort, heartbroken, trudging waist-high through the surf.
In 2013, St. Louis came to Pittsburgh, and Carlos Beltrán, the star Cardinals outfielder and another in the line of great Puerto Rican players, visited the museum. Soon after, Beltran told Rieder of a find: The father of Beltran’s friend was the captain of the Coast Guard ship that pulled the plane wreckage from the sea.
“I later get a call from Carlos’s friend, an architect named Angel, who was helping Carlos design his academy,” Rieder says, staring into the case. “He says, ‘Sit down. I want to send you a picture.’ A photo of a propeller comes. It’s laying in his buddy’s garage. He says, ‘Would you ever want this?’ And I went, ‘Holy cow. Is that the propeller from the plane?'”
Rieder acquired the blade at the end of 2013, and the next year began displaying it full time in the museum. But not before dealing with the question of displaying the blade — whether its appearance in the museum was necessary or gratuitous — in an emotional meeting with Vera Clemente and her three sons, Maurice, Ricky and Roberto Jr.
“There had been an auction house in Puerto Rico selling off parts of the plane,” Rieder says. “And the family said to please take those items out of the auction. So later, the family is coming to Pittsburgh to talk about Clemente Day. They say they’re coming over. I said, ‘OK, head’s up: I have a piece I want to talk about and you guys can vote. If you say it stays, it stays. If you say it doesn’t, it goes. So they show up and I had it in the middle of the room. I had it covered with a black piece of cloth. So I pulled off the tarp, and Vera, Maurice and Ricky all said, ‘OK. I think it should be here.’ A museum should tell the truth, should tell the story. Roberto Jr. got very emotional and ran out the door.”
Rieder had his own reason why he felt it necessary to display the propeller: to dispel the myth that the plane was never recovered. “Roberto’s body was never found,” he says. “That part is true, but we do hundreds of tours and someone in the tour always makes mention that the plane was never found. All Puerto Ricans know they found the plane. They stood on the shoe for three days watching the Coast Guard pieces up on deck, and that’s where it came from.”
Vera died in 2019, and Rieder eventually reached an agreement with Roberto Jr.: When he was in town, the Museum would cover the blade, and wheel it out of sight. One day, Roberto Jr. arrived on short notice. With no time to remove the blade to a back room, Rieder scrambled to cover the propeller with a poster.
“The posters weren’t tall enough,” Rieder recalls. “He walked in and said, “I’m cool with it now. So, it took him a few years, but he agreed that it’s part of the story. They found the plane.”
RETIRE NO. 21
ON THE COUNTER at the museum, in Pirate black-and-gold, are circular stickers that read “RETIRE 21,” a plea for Major League Baseball to do for Clemente what it did for Jackie Robinson and what the National Hockey League has done for Wayne Gretzky: universally retire Clemente’s iconic No. 21.
The retirement push is a grassroots effort that has deep emotional resonance to its supporters — no player is a greater inspiration to the Latino players who now dominate the sport than Clemente, the first Latino inducted into the Hall of Fame. Major League Baseball, however, has not pledged its support, as universal retirement of a number is extremely rare. When baseball finally retired Robinson’s No. 42 during the 50th anniversary of his debut in 1997, it was not without controversy. The idea did not come from the commissioner’s office, but from National League president Len Coleman.
The league office maintains that Clemente is already appropriately honored by baseball through the Roberto Clemente Award, given annually to the player who best demonstrates community and humanitarian commitments. Still, retiring Clemente’s number is a topic that has drawn the attention of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Executive director Tony Clark tells me he supports retiring Clemente’s number, but he would prefer the players take it upon themselves: Instead of waiting to be told by the commissioner’s office that the number is retired, Clark wishes the players would collectively agree to no longer wear No. 21. That, Clark says, would be an even more powerful gesture.
THE PLACE TO BE
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a go-to spot for the out of towners looking to score cool points, and for celebrities and dignitaries to pay their respects — and to visit the winery downstairs. Eddie Vedder has a table. One chair has the name “Smokey” painted on the back, because that’s the chair where Smokey Robinson sat and drank. (“I make a semi-sweet Riesling for him,” Rieder says.)
Politically this year, Pennsylvania is a battleground state, inundated with attack ads from both political parties. Virtually every analysis of the 2024 election expects Pennsylvania to be decisive, and so it is that during a recent late-summer week, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is in town on a campaign stop, and the Clemente Museum is on the short list of local businesses the VP intends to visit.
Harris doesn’t appear on the day I visit, but an old Pittsburgher does: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. Flanked by two Secret Service agents, the 73-year-old Vilsack and his wife, Christie, tour the museum before settling in the basement for some wine and stories. Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007, is a Pittsburgh native, from the Squirrel Hill section.
Vilsack sips his wine as the Secret Service stands quietly at a short distance. Periodically, the secretary will take another piece of the lore of the building from Rieder, some impossible connection that must be apocryphal, like the repeated story that Lou Gehrig slept in the firehouse during the 1927 Yankees-Pirates World Series. “OK, now you’re pulling my leg.” The mythology is too great to be true.
“First of all, who could ever find that out, but me, because I’m here, in a building that we saved,” Rieder says. “And now people are coming taking Clemente tours, and a woman was on a tour and she said her father was the chief that shut this place down. If I don’t get her here to get that story and ask her to bring him here, we wouldn’t know these things. We did a good thing, and it wasn’t on purpose. I was just looking for a place for my studio.”
There is Clemente. There is America. There is Pittsburgh. Across the table from Vilsack is a wine barrel with the burly outline of Bruno Sammartino, the legendary professional wrestler who settled as a teenager in Pittsburgh, in the North Oakland section. Rieder shows him a 1967 Polaroid photo of Clemente and Sammartino. At the bottom of the photo, inscribed in pen, read the words, “Bruno & Roberto.” Next to their names are their respective weights: 275-175. Vilsack nods in acknowledgement, relents to the power of the shrine, of Pittsburgh, and buys four bottles of wine to go.
“This really is a testament to a man who’s been gone 50 years,” Vilsack says. “I’ve seen things here I never expected to see.”
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David Hale
CLEMSON, S.C. — Dabo Swinney has a knack for finding a silver lining. It has been his defining trait over the past five seasons, as Clemson has hovered near the top of the ACC, but frustratingly far from the run of dominance it enjoyed in the 2010s. In a loss, Swinney found lessons. Even after a blowout, he saw hope. Even in the midst of fan revolt, he found all the evidence he needed of an inevitable turnaround within his own locker room.
Perhaps that’s what’s most jarring about Clemson’s most recent bout with mediocrity. It’s not just that the Tigers, the prohibitive favorite in the ACC to open the season, are 1-3 heading into Saturday’s showdown with equally disappointing and 2-2 North Carolina (noon ET, ESPN), but that Swinney’s usual optimism has been tinged with his own frustration.
“It’s just an absolute coaching failure,” Swinney said. “I don’t know another way to say it. And I’m not pointing the finger, I’m pointing the thumb. It starts with me, because I hired everybody, and I empower everybody and equip everybody.”
Record aside, Clemson has been here before — after slow starts in 2021, 2022, 2023 and last year’s blowout at the hands of Georgia to open the season. And yet, at each of those turns, Swinney remained his program’s biggest salesman.
Now, after the Tigers’ worst start since 2004, not even Swinney is immune to the reality. The questions are bigger, the stakes are higher and the solutions are more ephemeral.
In the aftermath of an emphatic loss to Syracuse in Death Valley two weeks ago, ESPN social posted the historic upset in bold type. The response from former Clemson defensive end Xavier Thomas echoed the frustration so many inside the Tigers’ once impenetrable inner sanctum are feeling.
“At this point,” Thomas replied, “it’s not even an upset anymore.”
Two months remain of a seemingly lost season. There is a path for Clemson to rebound, as it has before, and finish with a respectable, albeit disappointing, record. But there is another road, too — one hardly imagined by anyone inside the program just weeks ago. A road that leads to the end of a dynasty.
“He’s definitely bought himself some time to be able to have some hiccups along the way,” former Clemson receiver Hunter Renfrow said. “He’s an unbelievable coach and leader, and he’ll get it figured out.”
FORMER CLEMSON RUNNING back and now podcaster Darien Rencher banked a cache of interviews with star players during fall camp that he planned to release as the season progressed. Most have been evergreen. At the time he talked with Clemson quarterback Cade Klubnik, that one did, too. Looking back, it feels more like a time capsule, one that can’t be unearthed without a full autopsy of what has unfolded since.
“A month and a half ago, we’re talking about him being a front-runner for the Heisman, a top-five draft pick,” Rencher said. “I mean — my gosh.”
Any unspooling of what has gone wrong at Clemson must start with the quarterback.
Klubnik’s career followed a pretty straight trend — a rocky rookie season primarily as the backup to a sophomore campaign filled with growing pains to a coming-out party last season that ended with 336 passing yards and three touchdowns in a playoff loss to Texas. The obvious next step was into the echelon of elite QBs — not just nationally, but within the pantheon of Clemson’s best, alongside Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence.
Instead, Klubnik has looked lost.
“It can’t be physical unless he’s got the yips, which maybe he does,” former Clemson offensive lineman and current ACC Network analyst Eric Mac Lain said. “It’s bad sometimes. You’ve got guys screaming wide-open, and he’s looking at them, and the ball’s just not coming out. That’s the unexplainable thing.”
Through four games, Klubnik has nearly as many passing touchdowns (six) as he does interceptions (four).
There are, however, more than a few folks around the program who believe they can explain the struggles — for Klubnik and other stars who underwhelmed in September.
“We don’t got no dogs at Clemson,” former All-America defensive end Shaq Lawson posted in early September. “NIL has changed everything.”
It’s telling that even Swinney also has been vocal in his critique of Klubnik.
“It’s routine stuff. Basic, not complicated, like just simple reads, simple progression,” Swinney said of Klubnik’s play in Week 1, a performance that has been mirrored in subsequent games. “Holding the ball and running out of the pocket. Just didn’t play well, and so I didn’t have to talk to him. He already knew. He knows the game.”
This is a different era of college football, and while Swinney often sought a measure of patience with his players before, Klubnik is, by most reports, the second-highest-paid person inside the football building after Swinney, so the expectations have changed.
“If [Klubnik] ain’t a dude, we ain’t winning,” Swinney said after the loss to LSU in Week 1. “Dudes got to be dudes. This is big boy football.”
That massive NIL paydays and equally immense hype might underpin Klubnik’s struggles is not without anecdotal evidence. Look around the country and there are plenty of others — Florida‘s DJ Lagway, Texas‘ Arch Manning, UCLA‘s Nico Iamaleava, South Carolina‘s LaNorris Sellers and LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier — who’ve endured rough starts to seasons that were supposed to be star turns.
And yet, for Klubnik, this feels like a hollow excuse. He is, according to numerous coaches and teammates, unflinchingly competitive and talented. If anything, the knock on Klubnik the past few years has been his eagerness to play the role of hero, to do too much.
Perhaps the bigger impact of NIL on Klubnik’s performance comes in how far he has been from earning the paycheck. The millions could be an excuse to relax or a burden to live up to, and Klubnik’s tape through four games shows a QB scrambling to look the part rather than simply playing the game as he always has.
“It’s a tough sport and a team sport. There’s no perfect quarterback,” Klubnik said. “For me, I’m not paying attention to how other quarterbacks are playing, but I’m competitive whether we’re good or not, and I’m going to fight to the very end. I feel like the tape shows that, but you ask anybody in this facility about who I am and who this team is, we’re going to fight and we’re not going anywhere.”
SWINNEY HAS OFTEN bristled at outright criticism of his own performance, like his tirade in response to one apoplectic Clemson fan — Tyler from Spartanburg — who called into Swinney’s radio show after a 4-4 start to the 2023 season demanding change. Swinney’s rant was largely credited as inspiring a five-game winning streak to end the year, an emphatic rebuke to those ready to write his epitaph.
“He’s done it his way,” Renfrow said of Swinney. “And he’s built a really good roster. Three months ago, everyone was crowning us as the best team to play this year.”
The narrative has quickly changed, and Swinney isn’t arguing.
“Everybody can start throwing mud now,” Swinney said even before this latest round of mudslinging began in earnest. “Bring it on, say we suck again. Tell everybody we suck. Coaches suck, Cade stinks. Start writing that again.”
During Clemson’s past four seasons — years of 10, 10, nine and 10 wins — the underlying narrative was that the Tigers remained good, but they were slowly falling behind the competition due to Swinney’s stubborn insistence on remaining old-school. He was tagged as reluctant to embrace the NIL era due to comments he made in 2014, seven years before NIL began (though Clemson was heavily invested in its players via its collective at the time), and for multiple seasons, he refused to deal in the portal, retaining the vast majority of his recruited talent but adding nothing in the portal until this offseason.
And yet, Swinney has evolved — even if a bit more gradually than most coaches.
“One of the lazy takes on Swinney is he hasn’t changed,” Rencher said. “He did what he needed to do to give them a chance. He went and got the best offensive coordinator [Garrett Riley] in the country to come to Clemson. He got one of the most renowned defensive coordinators [Tom Allen] in the country who was just in the playoffs to come to Clemson. He went in the portal and got a stud D-end [in Will Heldt]. He paid his guys, retained his roster. These guys got paid.”
Even amid the hefty criticism coming from former players, little has been directed at Swinney. They played for him, they know him, and they’re convinced he’s not the source of Clemson’s struggles.
The new coordinators — Riley was hired in 2023, and Allen was hired this offseason — and current players, however, are a different story.
“They want to win more than we do,” former edge rusher KJ Henry posted amid Clemson’s stunning loss against Syracuse.
The outpouring of frustration from former players — many, such as Henry, who endured a share of setbacks during Clemson’s more rocky stretch in the 2020s — has been notable.
Heldt said he has not paid much attention to outside criticism, but he understands it.
“They’ve earned the right,” Heldt said. “They put in the time and have earned the right to say how they feel, but I don’t put too much thought into that.”
If the commentary hasn’t seeped into the locker room, the message still seems clear.
Swinney’s scathing review of the coaching staff — himself included — this week was evidence that the whole culture is off. Swinney was lambasted for years for an insular approach to building a staff, hiring mostly former Clemson players and promoting from within, but those hires at least maintained a culture that had driven championships. But now, the disjointed play and lack of any obvious identity on both sides of the ball has made Riley and Allen feel more like mercenaries than saviors, and the result is a sum that is less than its individual parts.
Riley’s playcalling has been questioned relentlessly. In the second half against LSU, with Clemson either ahead or within a score, the Tigers virtually abandoned the run game entirely.
Allen was brought in to toughen up a defense that was scorched last season by Louisville, SMU, Texas and, in the most embarrassing performance of the season, by Sellers and rival South Carolina. And yet, with NFL talent such as Heldt, Peter Woods and T.J. Parker on the defensive line, Syracuse owned the line of scrimmage in its Week 4 win in Death Valley.
Meanwhile promising recruits such as T.J. Moore and Gideon Davidson have yet to look ready for the big time, and the transfer additions beyond Heldt — Tristan Smith and Jeremiah Alexander — have offered virtually nothing.
Start making a list of all the things that have gone wrong, and the frustration is apparent.
“Dropped balls, Cade misses a guy, the offensive line gets beat, Cade has PTSD and rolls out when he shouldn’t — it’s just all these things,” Rencher said. “You can blame a lot of things but it’s just too much wrong to where it can’t be right. It’s too many things everywhere so it can’t come together. You can overcome some things, but they’re just all not on the same page.”
BEFORE HIS GAME against Clemson, which Georgia Tech ultimately won on a last-second field goal, Yellow Jackets coach Brent Key set the stage for what he knew would be a battle, despite the Tigers’ rocky start.
“No one’s better at playing the underdog than Dabo,” Key said.
Swinney has resurrected his teams again and again, swatted away the critics, stayed true to his core philosophies and emerged victorious — if not a national champion.
So, is this year really different? Has Clemson lost its edge? Has Swinney lost his magic?
“I see an extremely talented team,” Syracuse defensive coordinator Elijah Robinson said. “Those guys are dangerous. I don’t care what their record is. That’s not just a team, that’s a program. Dabo Swinney does a great job, and they went out and lost the first game last year and went on to win the conference. A lot of these kids, when I was at Texas A&M, we tried to recruit them. People can think what they want when they look at the record. I’m not looking at the record at all.”
Added another assistant coach who faced Clemson this season: “It wouldn’t surprise me if they run the table the rest of the way.”
Winning out would still get Clemson to 10 wins, a mark that has been the standard under Swinney. Winning out would likely shift all the criticism of September into another offseason of promise, such as the one Clemson just enjoyed. Winning out is still possible, according to the players there who’ve said a deep breath during an off week has been a chance to reset and start anew.
“The college football landscape has changed so much over the last 10 years,” Renfrow said. “But developing, teaching, coaching, bringing people together — that hasn’t, and Swinney’s as good as I’ve been around at those things.”
That’s largely the lesson Florida State head coach Mike Norvell took from his team’s miserable 2-10 performance a year ago. In the face of a landslide of change and criticism, the key is doubling down on the beliefs that made a coach successful to begin with, not a host of changes intended to appease the masses.
“The dynamic of college football and being a part of a team and the pressures that are within an organization now are greater than they’ve ever been,” Norvell said. “You put money into the equation, and you have all the agents and people surrounding these kids, when things don’t go as expected, you’ve got to really stay true to who you are and make sure you’re connected with these guys at their needs. The example we had last year, we didn’t do a great job at that because as the tidal wave of challenges showed up, it’s critical to refocus and revamp the guys for what they can do. It’s not fun to go through, but I think you’ll continue to see more and more.”
The game has changed, and Clemson, for all of Swinney’s steadfast resolve, has been swept along with the currents.
There’s a legacy at Clemson, one it helped build, and for all its faith in Swinney’s process, it’s not hard to see the cracks in the façade.
Never mind the record, Rencher said. Maintaining the Clemson standard is what’s at stake now.
“That, more than any loss, would be the most disappointing thing, if they didn’t respond,” Rencher said. “Swinney’s optimistic. They’re built to last. He said they’re going to use all these things people are throwing at us to build more championships, and I believe him. Clemson is built on belief and responding the right way. It would be unlike Clemson to not respond. That would be so much more disappointing than going 1-3 if we just laid down. If this is the class that just lays down, I can’t imagine that.”
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Alden Gonzalez
WHEN THE LOW point arrived last year, on Sept. 15 in Atlanta, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts broke character and challenged some of his players in a meeting many of them later identified as a fulcrum in their championship run.
This year, he attempted to strike a more positive tone.
It was Sept. 6. The Dodgers had just been walked off in Baltimore, immediately after being swept in Pittsburgh, and though they were still 15 games above .500, a sense of uneasiness lingered. Their division lead was slim, consistency remained elusive and spirits were noticeably down. Roberts saw an opportunity to take stock.
“He was talking to us about the importance of what was in front of us,” Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas said in Spanish. “At that time, there were like seven, eight weeks left because we only had three weeks left in the regular season, and he wanted all of us, collectively, to think about what we were still capable of doing, and the opportunity we still had to win another championship.”
Later that night, Yoshinobu Yamamoto got within an out of no-hitting the Baltimore Orioles, then he surrendered a home run to Jackson Holliday and watched the bullpen implode after his exit, allowing three additional runs in what became the Dodgers’ most demoralizing loss of the season. The next morning, though, music blared inside Camden Yards’ visiting clubhouse. Players were upbeat, vibes were positive.
The Dodgers won behind an effective Clayton Kershaw later that afternoon, then reeled off 16 wins over their next 21 games — including back-to-back emphatic victories over the Cincinnati Reds in the first round of the playoffs.
It took a day, but Roberts’ message had seemingly landed.
“We needed some positivity,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernandez said, “to remove all of the negativity that we were feeling in that moment.”
As they approach a highly anticipated National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the Dodgers once again look like one of the deepest, most fearsome teams in the sport.
But the journey there was arduous.
A Dodgers team many outsiders pegged as a candidate to break the regular-season-wins record of 116 ultimately won only 93, its fewest total in seven years. Defending a championship, a task no team has successfully pulled off in a quarter-century, has proven to be a lot more difficult than many Dodger players anticipated. But they’ve maintained a belief that their best selves would arrive when it mattered most. And whether it’s a product of health, focus, or because the right message hit them at the right time, they believe it’s here now.
“We’re coming together at the right time,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said amid a champagne-soaked celebration Wednesday night, “and that’s all that really matters.”
BUSTER POSEY’S San Francisco Giants became the most dominant team in the first half of the 2010s, during which they captured three championships. They won every other year — on even years, famously — but could not pull off the repeat the Dodgers are chasing. To this day, Posey, now the Giants’ president of baseball operations, can’t pinpoint why.
“I wish I could,” Posey said, “because if I knew what that one thing was, I would’ve tried to correct it the second, third time through.”
Major League Baseball has not had a repeat champion since the New York Yankees won their third consecutive title in 2000, a 24-year drought that stands as the longest ever among the four major North American professional sports, according to ESPN Research. In that span, the NBA had a team win back-to-back championships on four different occasions. The NHL? Three. The NFL, whose playoff rounds all consist of one game? Two.
MLB’s drought has occurred in its wild-card era, which began in 1995 and has expanded since.
“The baseball playoffs are really difficult,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “You obviously have to be really good. You also have to have some really good fortune. The number of rounds and the fact that the very best team in the league wins around 60% of their games, the very worst team wins around 40% — now you take the upper-echelon in the playoffs, and the way baseball games can play out, good fortune is a real part of determining the outcomes.”
The Dodgers, now 11 wins shy of a second consecutive title, will hope for some of that good fortune this month. They’ve already encountered some of the pitfalls that come with winning a championship, including the one Posey experienced most vividly: the toll of playing deep into October.
“That month of postseason baseball — it’s more like two or three months of regular-season baseball, just because of the intensity of it,” Posey said.
The Dodgers played through Oct. 30 last year — and then they began this season March 18, nine days before almost everybody else, 5,500 miles away in Tokyo.
“At the time, you don’t see it,” Hernández said, “but when the next season starts, that’s when you start feeling your body not responding the way it should be. And it’s because you don’t get as much time to get ready, to prepare for next season. This one has been so hard, I got to be honest, because — we win last year, and we don’t even have the little extra time that everybody gets because we have to go to Japan. So, you have to push yourself to get ready a month early so you can be ready for those games. Those are games that count for the season. So, working hard when your body is not even close to 100%, I think that’s the reason. I think that’s why you see, after a team wins, next year you see a lot of players getting hurt.”
The Dodgers had the second-most amount of money from player salaries on the injured list this season, behind only the Yankees, the team they defeated in the World Series, according to Spotrac. The Dodgers sent an NL-leading 29 players to the IL, a list that included Freddie Freeman, who underwent offseason surgery on the injured ankle he played through last October, and several other members of their starting lineup — Will Smith, Max Muncy, Tommy Edman and Hernández.
The bullpen that carried the Dodgers through last fall might have paid the heaviest price. Several of those who played a prominent role last October — Blake Treinen, Michael Kopech, Evan Phillips — either struggled, were hurt or did not pitch. It might not have been the sole reason for the bullpen’s struggles — a combined 4.94 ERA from free agent signees Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates played just as big a role — but it certainly didn’t help.
“I don’t know if there’s any carryover thing,” Treinen said Sept. 16 after suffering his third consecutive loss. “I don’t believe in that. We just have a job, and it’s been weird.”
IN FEBRUARY, ROJAS made headlines by saying that the 2025 Dodgers could challenge the wins record and added they might win 120 games at full health. An 8-0 start — after an offseason in which the front office added Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Michael Conforto, Hyeseong Kim, Scott and Yates to what was arguably the sport’s best roster already — only ratcheted up the expectations.
The Dodgers managed a 53-32 record through the end of June — but then, they went 10-14 in July, dropped seven of their first 12 games in August and saw a seven-game lead in the National League West turn into a one-game deficit.
From July 1 to Aug. 14, the Dodgers’ offense ranked 20th in OPS and 24th in runs per game. The rotation began to round into form, but the bullpen sported the majors’ highest walk rate and put up a 1.43 WHIP in that stretch, fifth highest.
The Dodgers swept the San Diego Padres at home in mid-August, regaining some control of the division, but then Los Angeles split a series against the last-place Colorado Rockies and lost one in San Diego. The Dodgers swept the Reds, then lost two of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks, dropped three in a row to the Pirates and suffered those back-to-back walk-off losses to the Orioles.
Consistency eluded the Dodgers at a time when it felt as if every opponent was aiming for them.
Before rejoining the Dodgers ahead of the 2023 season, Rojas spent eight years with the Miami Marlins, who were continually out of the playoff race in September and found extra motivation when facing the best teams down the stretch. Those matchups functioned as their World Series.
“I think that’s the problem for those teams after winning a World Series — you’re going to have a target on your back,” Rojas said. “And it’s going to take a lot of effort for your main guys to step up every single day. And then, at the end of the regular season, you’re going to be kind of exhausted from the battle of every single day. And I think that’s why when teams get to the playoffs, they probably fall short.”
Travis d’Arnaud, now a catcher for the Los Angeles Angels, felt the same way while playing for the defending-champion Atlanta Braves in 2022. There was “a little bit more emotion” in games that otherwise didn’t mean much, he said. Teams seemed to bunt more frequently, play their infield in early and consistently line up their best relievers. Often, they’d face a starting pitcher who typically threw in the low-90s but suddenly started firing mid- to upper-90s fastballs.
“It’s just a different intensity,” said A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher for the Chicago White Sox teams that won it all in 2005 and failed to repeat in 2006. “It’s hard to quantify unless you’re playing in the games, but there’s a different intensity if you’re playing.”
BEFORE A SEASON-ENDING sweep of the Seattle Mariners, the 2025 Dodgers were dangerously close to finishing with the fewest full-season wins total of any team Friedman has overseen in these past 11 years. Friedman acknowledged that recently but added a caveat: “I’d also say that going into October, I think it’ll be the most talented team.”
It’s a belief that has fueled the Dodgers.
With Snell and Glasnow healthy, Yamamoto dialing up what was already an NL Cy Young-caliber season and Shohei Ohtani fully stretched out, the Dodgers went into the playoffs believing their rotation could carry them the way their bullpen did a year earlier. Their confidence was validated immediately. Snell allowed two baserunners through the first six innings of Game 1 of the wild-card round Tuesday night, and Yamamoto went 6⅔ innings without allowing an earned run 24 hours later.
“For us, it’s going to be our starting pitching,” Muncy said. “They’re going to set the tone.”
But an offense that has been without Smith, currently nursing a hairline fracture in his right hand, has also been clicking for a while. The Dodgers trailed only the Phillies in slugging percentage over the last three weeks of the regular season. In the Dodgers’ first two playoff games, 10 players combined to produce 28 hits. Six of them came from Mookie Betts, who began the season with an illness that caused him to lose close to 20 pounds and held a .670 OPS — 24 points below the league average — as recently as Aug. 6. Since then, he’s slashing .326/.384/.529.
His trajectory has resembled that of his team.
“We had a lot of struggles, really all year,” Betts said. “But I think we all view that as just a test to see how we would respond. And so now we’re starting to use those tests that we went through earlier to respond now and be ready now. And anything that comes our way, it can’t be worse than what we’ve already gone through.”
The Dodgers still don’t know if their bullpen will be good enough to take them through October — though Sasaki’s ninth inning Wednesday night, when he flummoxed the Reds with triple-digit fastballs and devastating splitters, certainly provided some hope — but they believe in their collective ability to navigate it.
They believe this roster is better and deeper than the championship-winning one from last fall. And, as Rojas said, they believe they “know how to flip the switch when it matters most.”
“It’s been a long year,” Muncy said. “At this point, seven months ago, we were on the other side of the world. We’ve been through a lot this year, and to end up in the spot we’re in right now — we’re in a great spot. We’re in the postseason. That’s all that matters. That’s what we’ve been saying all year. Anything can happen once you’re in October.”
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