Well-researched bios cover the bases

REVIEWS BY MARTIN BRADY

The advent of a new professional baseball season brings with it the usual eternal optimism for last year's also-rans. In the book world, it means a wide range of related publications, from team histories to photo collections to statistical analyses. It's especially notable when a highly respected sports journalist produces a comprehensive, serious-minded biography. This year, two such major works help to signal baseball's return with in-depth celebrations of legendary athletes whose impact continues to be felt in the modern era.

Living the high life

In light of today's steroid scandals, it's both ironic and nostalgic to revisit a time when a baseball player's worst sins were womanizing and drinking. The great Babe Ruth was guilty as charged on both counts, and Leigh Montville's The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth makes no attempt to sugarcoat the Bambino's human failings. Montville, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, fully acknowledges the efforts of Ruth's previous biographers—even drawing upon some of their primary sources—then proceeds to take his own singular aim on the subject. Alas, many of the details of Ruth's early life are shrouded or not fully documented, and after he'd become a national sports hero of unparalleled wealth and fame, events were often filtered through a contemporary press that seemed more determined to inflate the man's image rather than publicize the unbridled truth. Montville makes a stylish effort to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and he further engages the reader by effectively putting Ruth in the context of his peers and the cataclysmic times that spanned the First World War, the Roaring '20s and the Great Depression. Yet the most compelling episodes concern the Babe's formative years, most of them spent at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, where a spartan order of Catholics essentially raised him, taught him baseball and facilitated his opportunity to turn pro, thus giving rise to a Horatio Alger story on a grand scale. Montville vividly presents the heroic details of Ruth's playing career, making it clear that, despite all the home-run-hitting prowess that changed the face of the game and set records that stood for decades, Ruth was also a dominant pitcher who could have had a Hall of Fame career in that position as well. What plainly emerges here is that Ruth was a simple, unreflective guy with huge appetites, who loved playing baseball, being a celebrity and spending his money on the good life. Montville captures these essentials with sufficient color, while also effectively describing the Babe's inevitable professional decline and his bittersweet final years outside of the game, where he lingered as a tame curiosity figure before dying of cancer in 1948 at the age of 53.


A charismatic hero

In contrast stands the life of former Pittsburgh Pirates great Roberto Clemente, whose undisputed talent, personal charisma and symbolic role as the major leagues' first Latin-American superstar have raised him to almost reverential regard. Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss' Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero is a detailed, well-researched testament to Clemente's intense, all-too-brief life, with focus on his humble Puerto Rican beginnings and his gradual rise to baseball prominence. Despite extraordinary skills as a hitter and fielder, Clemente was not an immediate star. Originally signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was somewhat buried in their minor league system, a shy, sensitive man struggling to communicate in a new language, before making his National League debut with the Pirates in 1955, for whom he would play his entire career. Often enduring the criticisms of reporters who misunderstood his taciturn moods—and, unfairly, made light of his halting English—Clemente persevered to forge Hall of Fame numbers with four batting titles, 3,000 career hits, 12 Gold Glove awards, one National League MVP (1966) and two World Series championships. Drawing upon previously published material, fresh interviews with teammates and even transcribed excerpts from radio broadcasts, Maraniss exposes us to a generally clean-living, family-centered individual, who retained fierce pride in his Puerto Rican ancestry, helped pave the way for the eventual huge influx of Latin ballplayers into the U.S. and earned respect through quiet example. The Clemente story is capped by his dramatic death at age 38 in a 1972 cargo plane crash, while en route to Nicaragua to assist the victims of a horrendous earthquake.


Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

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