PITTSBURGH — In the moment, it wasn’t a big deal. Just another game in the middle of the week in the middle of a pennant race.

The best nine players available ran onto the field at Three Rivers Stadium for the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sept. 1, 1971.

The fact all nine — Rennie Stennett, Gene Clines, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Manny Sanguillen, Dave Cash, Al Oliver, Jackie Hernandez and Dock Ellis — were Black or of Latin descent didn’t even really occur to them until afterward.

Oliver has always found it curious as to why it hasn’t been celebrated the way Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947 is. Yet in recent years, he’s come to take it as a compliment of sorts, a nod to the color-blind approach Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh took to his job.

“We didn’t take the field, you know, to make history,” Oliver said Wednesday night while honoring the 50th anniversary of a 10-7 win over Philadelphia. “But as it turned out, it was history. And the thing that I feel great about it was that it proved the unity that we had on our team and proved that we had a manager that really (wasn’t) concerned about race.”

Oliver, a seven-time All-Star during his 18-year career, figures the sea of black and brown faces with the gold ‘P’ on their caps was simply the byproduct of the way general manager Joe Brown went about constructing a team.

“(He said) ‘What we did, we signed players because they can play, not the church they went to,’” said Oliver, who played first that night. “And every time I hear that quote, I’ve got to laugh because it’s true. It doesn’t matter what church you go to as long as you can play some ball.”

Something that was never an issue for the “Lumber Company” era in Pittsburgh. The victory over Philadelphia that night came during a torrid 18-5 stretch that allowed the Pirates to win the NL East. Pittsburgh went on to beat San Francisco in four games in the NL Championship Series before rallying from a two-game deficit to edge heavily favored Baltimore in the World Series.

“You could never underestimate what we thought we could do as a team, because we could beat anybody,” Cash said. “Baltimore had beat everybody else, but they hadn’t beat us.”

Not with Hall of Famers like Clemente in right field and Stargell in left and Oliver usually in between. It’s telling that the only thing Oliver noticed about the lineup wasn’t its racial makeup but his spot in it: seventh.