Troubled Nicaragua honors baseball hero

Forty-six years after this death during a humanitarian mission to Nicaragua, and in the midst of current upheavals  Major League  Puerto Rican baseball star Roberto Clemente is still honored in the troubled  Central American country.

On Monday, December 31 hundreds of children who play in the Managua baseball leagues participated in a tribute to Clemente . each placing a flower in the vicinity of the Roberto Clemente National Children’s Stadium, in the old quarter of the Nicaraguan capital.

Clemente died on December 31, 1972, when the plane carrying aid for the survivors of an earthquake that had devastated Managua 9 days earlier crashed due to overloading in the Caribbean Sea shortly after taking off from Puerto Rico. The body of the star was never recovered.

The earthquake that devastated Managua had a magnitude of 6.2 on the Richter scale, and caused the death of at least 10,000 people, and left some 20,000 injured

Clemente, who played 18 seasons in the Major Leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates, won four batting titles, hit a .317 average participated in

12 all-star games, was the MVP  in 1966 and the first Latin American player with 3,000 hits in the MLS

He won 12 gold gloves, played in the World Series in 1960 and 1971, and in the latter  earned the best player title

His merits took him to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, in a hurry in 1973, a year after his death.