Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 22, 1994 TAG: 9408220017
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB TEITLEBAUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Former Salem manager John Lipon, an outstanding infielder with Detroit and now a minor-league instructor for the Tigers, says Edmead was Pittsburgh's top prospect when he was taken into the organization 20 years ago.
Harding Pete Peterson, the Pirates' farm club director in 1974, says Edmead had presence as a prospect.
The expectations of what Edmead, a rookie outfielder in the Pirates' organization in 1974, would accomplish as a professional baseball player were almost unbelievable.
That alone would make the tragic events on Aug. 22 of that year enough to haunt grown men and cause them to remember this happy Latin player for the rest of their lives.
That night, Edmead, playing right field for Salem against Rocky Mount in a Carolina League game, came in on a pop fly.
Salem second baseman Pablo Cruz, who ironically was one of the people responsible for finding and signing Edmead, drifted back on the fly.
What happened next defied all odds. Edmead dove, his skull cracked into Cruz's knee, and both men went down with injuries. Only Edmead would never get up. He died less than an hour later at the hospital and became what was believed to be the first mortality in a baseball game since New York Yankees submariner Carl Mays hit and killed Cleveland's Ray Chapman with a pitch in 1920.
Tonight, on the 20th anniversary of Edmead's death, fans attending the Salem-Kinston game at Municipal Field will be handed an article from the Roanoke World-News that ran the day after the collision.
There will be an on-field memorial ceremony before the game. The plaque, located by the press box honoring Edmead, will be moved when Salem moves to a new park next year.
Edmead isn't forgotten. Salem Bucs' general manager Sam Lazzaro has made sure of that. When he took over his duties in 1986, he attended to a long-neglected formality of retiring Edmead's jersey number 7 so that no member of a Salem baseball team will ever wear it again.
"No one connected with the game will forget Edmead or what happened. Since I've been back in coaching, every time I see someone collide like that, I think of that night," said Mitchell Page, who played left field that night for Salem and is now a coach in the Oakland Athletics' organization.
"We had a play like that last year. That's the first flashback I get when I see a player go down, holding his head. I heard the sound that night and I've never heard a sound like that again in my life. Then I got there and I saw his brains coming through his nose."
Though Edmead was alive after a trainer from Rocky Mount worked on him feverishly, anyone there realized the young player from the Dominican Republic was in big trouble.
Finally the ambulance (there was no rescue squad as such in those days) arrived. Cruz, who had a severely injured knee, and Salem general manager Dan Kinder, who was only a year out of Princeton University, rode in the ambulance.
Though he blots out much of that night's events, Kinder says, "I remember Pablo and I shouting all the way to the hospital, `Hang on Alfredo.' We said it with as much intensity as we could and at the same time we were saying our prayers."
Cruz, now Pittsburgh's chief Latin American scout, said until he talked to a player from Rocky Mount a year later, he never was clear as to what happened that night. At first he never thought there was a possibility that the collision was violent enough to kill Edmead.
Cruz had more than a player-player relationship with Edmead. Those two, along with centerfielder Miguel Dilone, were very close that summer.
"Every time the ball went over my head between them, I had to call quickly and say who would make the play. That's because they were so quick," Cruz said. "That night, I had no help. I saw the ball in my glove. Then I felt Alfredo hit a little bit up from my knee."
For a long time, it was believed that Edmead's skull made contact with a brace Cruz wore for a gimpy left knee. Cruz says Edmead's head didn't hit his brace. So how could what seems like incidental contact shatter someone's skull so completely?
"As they described it to me, Alfredo's skull had the thickness of two pieces of paper put together. When he dived into Pablo, [Edmead's] skull smashed into his brain. There was no way to know about the thickness," Kinder said.
After Edmead's death, Kinder called the ball park and broke the news to this reporter and informed me that I would have to tell Salem manager John Lipon after the game. The main thing, he said, was not to let the players or fans know anything while the game continued.
When Lipon was informed, he showed no emotion and after a few moments of deep breaths went to tell the club of their fallen comrade.
"I vaguely remember telling them. I was pretty well shook up," said Lipon, who at that time was still trying to deal with the untimely death of his own wife a few years earlier.
"It shook all of us up. Young people are very impressionable and a lot of them broke down. It was the toughest thing I've ever done [in baseball]. It took the sunshine off the entire season. You just don't get over things like that that quickly."
The look on Page's face and that of other players was incredulous. Page was a big man who later went on to be the American League's rookie of the year and had home run power. That night he was just a little boy as were the other players in that steamy dressing room.
"John Lipon came up to me and said, Mitchell, you have to take charge. He put the leadership role on me to carry the team and make sure everyone else was ready. I had a way of keeping the players loose," Page recalled.
That night, Cruz was back at his apartment, suffering both mental and physical anguish from what had happened. He would attempt to play again that season but he was unable to do so because of his knee.
The next day, Peterson arrived from Pittsburgh to make final arrangements for having Edmead's body shipped back to the Dominican and set up a memorial service that night for the players. A scheduled game at Kinston was postponed.
"I asked the league president [Wallace McKenna] to give us a couple of days off," Lipon said. "Even if he had said for us to play that night, there was no way that we were going to Kinston. We would have forfeited the game."
"All the players were in a bad state of mind," Peterson said. "John had called me the night it had happened and I told the airline I had to have the earliest flight it had [for Roanoke].
"I don't remember talking to the team as a group. I talked to Pablo and he was down. It was the toughest thing I ever did as a farm director. I wouldn't have to think about that. I knew how much the parents loved their son. Howie [Haak] did a tremendous job of talking to the parents, who of course were very distraught."
Haak flew to the Dominican Republic for the funeral and Dilone accompanied the body home.
"In the Dominican, they bury the body the day after someone has died," Haak said. "They carried Alfredo on their shoulders to the cemetery and buried him. It was a mile-and-half from the church. I would say there were 300-400 people at the funeral."
Sadly, crime took no holiday for death.
"I remember his father had $1,600 to pay for the funeral and someone picked his pocket at the church," Haak added.
\ A budding superstar
It had been a very good season for both Salem and Edmead.
The Bucs, after a 9-9 start that ended with a 25-4 thrashing at the hands of Lynchburg, finished 38-14 to win the first half by seven games over the Twins, as the team from the Hill City was then known.
At this point, Dilone and Edmead had combined for 91 steals and were both hitting above .300. It continued that way in the second half, though Salem's once big lead over the rest of the league was down to four games over Lynchburg going into the contest when Edmead was killed.
"We knew Lynchburg was coming fast and that's why Alfredo dove for the ball," Kinder said. "He was determined as were the other players that there would be no playoffs. They wanted to go home."
"That night before the game, we were in the outfield. Miguel was supposed to go to the big leagues [as a September Pittsburgh callup]," Cruz said. "We were trying to play hard because we didn't want to go to the playoffs."
Cruz remembers Edmead getting three or four hits and stolen bases. He did get on base that much and stole two bases. In fact, Cruz, Dilone and Edmead combined for five hits.
Though Dilone would make it to the majors that year and eventually have a nice career with several clubs, Edmead was the budding superstar.
"He had all the qualifications. He ran above average, threw above average and had above average power," Haak said. "You don't know whether a player [with those tools] will hit. If he does, he'll make it.
"He had good bat speed and no weakness such as a hitch or overstride. So he should hit if he has good eyes, but who knows that? Sometimes you can have 20-20 [vision] and you won't have good hitting eyes for baseball."
Cruz said he and Haak discovered Edmead at the Pan American games.
"Alfredo was a home boy. His father worked in the sugar cane offices. I wound up in Salem [that year] trying to make a comeback," added Cruz, who still hoped to make the majors as a player.
At his death, Edmead was hitting .314, had hit seven homers and stolen 61 bases in 78 attempts. Those are impressive figures for a first-year pro in the Carolina League.
Dilone, who had been around for a couple of years and had the benefit of playing rookie-league baseball, hit .333 and stole 85 bases in 108 attempts. Cruz hit .326.
"He had surprising power for a little man," said Lipon of Edmead. "He didn't hit that many homers, but he hit one in a big ball park that must have gone 400 feet. And he was only 18 years old, not a lot older than my boy."
It was speed that made Edmead and Dilone so good. One night some boys outside the Lynchburg ball park threw rocks at the Salem bus. Lipon turned his Latin speedsters loose and they ran down the culprits.
"We didn't turn them over to the police. We just reprimanded them. Those two could catch most young people. But Miguel and Alfredo were like children. As you can remember, Pablo was great with children. He signed a lot of autographs," Lipon said.
"Alfredo was kind of shy," Peterson recalls. "Though he was slight of build, you could see he'd get stronger and hit a lot of homers. We were real high on him."
According to Kinder, though, there was more to Edmead than just being a player.
"He's one of the most remarkable people I've encountered as a human being," said Kinder, who had spent a year after college in Colombia and spoke Spanish.
"He had an amazing mind and spirit. He spoke almost lyrically. When he first arrived, he was interviewed for a story. He hadn't been away from home and he was asked a very tricky question, like was he lonely."
Kinder, acting as translator, remembers that Edmead's response went on for five minutes.
"My Spanish was pretty good, but not good enough to translate [all that he said]. He expressed a series of complicated thoughts in beautiful, poetic terms. He viewed himself as an ambassador for his people to the American people.
"I told him my Spanish wasn't good enough to translate, but he said it was and I did the best I could."
Kinder, who was about the same age as the players at Salem, said he viewed his job as trying to get them ready for the majors. So he took some time to be with them at night after games.
"I didn't have time to be with them every day. But with Alfredo, it was different. When he came into the office, I'd take the phone off the hook because I knew he'd always have something interesting to say," Kinder said.
After the tragedy, Salem held off Lynchburg to win the pennant. Several players such as Page, Dilone, John Candelaria, Rick Langford and Steve Nicosia went on to fairly lengthy major-league careers.
Normal life resumed in Salem a day after the death. Only the 937 fans, the players, press and employees of the club at the game that night will remember for the rest of their lives the events that are too haunting and scary to forget.
by CNB