David Maraniss's Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (Simon & Schuster, $26) promises to be one of the meatiest and timeliest baseball books of the spring, particularly with the push to have the Puerto Rican legend's No. 21 retired throughout the major leagues, as Jackie Robinson's No. 42 was back in 1997. Roberto Clemente was not the first Latino in the big leagues or the first Puerto Rican or even the first Puerto Rican star—his countryman Vic Power beat him to the All-Star game by five years. But he was the first Puerto Rican superstar, and, more than that, his regal bearing and devotion to the people of his country and other areas of Latin America made the man a legend, even before his death on a mission of mercy to Nicaraguan earthquake victims on New Year's Eve, 1972.

Clemente was without a doubt a trailblazer. When he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1955, less than 1 percent of that city's population was Hispanic. After a disastrous stint rooming with his Cuban teammate, Roman Mejias, in a building that turned out also to house a brothel, Clemente ended up living with a black family in the Schenley Heights neighborhood for almost a decade. But details about those early days in Pittsburgh, a crucial element of Clemente's story, are largely missing from Maraniss's book; he leaps from Clemente's rookie year, 1955, directly to the Pirates' championship season of 1960, passing over his assimilation into American culture. There appears to be almost no history of Clemente during this time—in large part because the press, so invasive in the personal lives of sports figures today, back then had no idea what to make of the ballplayer.

So they mocked him. Perhaps it was unwitting, but for a good ten years into Clemente's career, the papers quoted him in broken English, slurred and caricatured to ridiculous lengths. Clemente, a proud and dedicated man, worked endlessly to improve his speech, rehearsing lines from western movies to help smooth out his English. Yet as late as 1960, five years after he had arrived in Pittsburgh to stay, the Post-Gazette was still quoting Clemente as saying, "I bet you that Doggie's ball, she bent iron bar over the right-field fence. That's how hard he hit son-mo-gun."

Oddly, white reporters weren't the only ones who treated Clemente like Jose Jimenez. That same season, Bill Nunn Jr. of the Pittsburgh Courier, the city's black weekly, gave Clemente a guest column, which began: "Som' Co-lored people I understand saying 'Clemente, he do not like co-lored people. . . . This is not the truth at all. Look at me. Look at my skin. I am not of the white people. I hav' color the skin. That is the first theeing I straighten out. I like all the people, both co-lored and the white; and since I am co-lored myself, in the skin, I would be seely hate myself."

Clemente, not surprisingly, clammed up in the face of this treatment. "Here was a very bright man who had taken verbal risks with English before and had been burned and didn't care for that to happen again," teammate Steve Blass told Maraniss. Catcher Don Leppert put it more succinctly: "They tried to make a buffoon out of him."

"I know I don't speak as bad as they say I speak," Clemente himself complained. "I never in my life start a sentence with 'me.' I start with 'I.' The sportswriters [make it] 'me.' 'Me Tarzan, you Jane.'"

Much of the problem was the provincialism of Pittsburgh. In New York, where a teenaged Clemente had hoped to play, writers tended to sympathize with Hispanic players. After the Cuban outfielder Sandy Amoros made a spectacular catch to save the 1955 World Series for the Dodgers, the Daily News's Dick Young—never noted for his sensitivity—paraphrased Amoros's answers, which were "one-worded, for the most part," according to Young. "He came to within a yard of the box seat screen to make the catch, he estimated," Young wrote in his game story. "No, he never gave a thought to colliding with the boxes. He came 'long way' for the ball. Got 'good jump.'"

But in Pittsburgh, Clemente found not empathy but exile. We may never know how the young Clemente dealt with blue-collar Pittsburgh or with the ignominy of being doubly marginalized by virtue of being both black and Hispanic. Much of Clemente's life is now lost to history. In the wake of the Pirates' thrilling game seven victory over the Yankees in the 1960 World Series, while his teammates were celebrating Bill Mazeroski's improbable game-winning homer, Maraniss found Clemente in a corner of the locker room, packing his gear. The game ended at 3:37, and Clemente had a plane to catch for home at 6:00, World Championship or no World Championship. As ever, he was isolated and silent.