The Innocent Man

Ron's relationship with baseball is a thread that runs through the entire book, and serves as a direct barometer of Ron's fortunes. During his early life, he is playing constantly, and everyone agrees he has great things ahead. As his baseball career declines (far more rapidly than he had imagined it would), Ron has more and more trouble keeping his life together. His brief marriage starts soon after he signs to a minor-league team, and endswhen he is cut from the team. Once he is permanently benched by his injuries, it also gradually becomes more obvious that Ron has mental health issues, as well as a substance-abuse problem. Without the structure offered by practice and game schedules and team rules, Ron's life falls apart over the course of several years.

Ron's self-image is also greatly tied to his identity as a baseball player. He lived for the small-scale stardom he experienced as a teenager. Long after he had been cut for the last time, Ron still tells anyone who would listen that he was just about to be called back up, that his greatness was still there, and someone would recognize it soon. But as his legal troubles escalate and he becomes distraught, imagining how his neighbors' opinions of him must have changed. In the public eye, he has gone from sports hero to accused rapist, and then convicted murder. Being falsely called a killer in front of his whole community, and seeing that almost everyone believes it, torments Ron and exacerbates his emotional problems.

As his condition worsens, baseball is often at the center of Ron's delusional thinking. He tells people he was good friends with Reggie Jackson, when in actuality, the baseball star had dismissed Ron contemptuously the one time they met. However, baseball was also an area where Ron displayed his characteristic determination: although he is clearly not able to play pro baseball, his relentless calls to scouts and agents earn him multiple seasons in the minors, even after his injury, and he is able to lengthen his career by sheer persistence, a quality which would help Ron to survive the torturous years on Death Row.

After his ordeal in prison is over, Ron is invited to New York for a talk-show filming, and his friends arrange a private tour of Yankee Stadium for him. This is a bittersweet moment, representing both lost dreams and enormous accomplishment. The promises of greatness which had hovered around Ron's youth never came to fruition, due in part to the difficult-to-treat mental and emotional disorders that haunted him. But in his release from prison, he had beat huge odds and come out a victor from a fight that had often seemed unwinnable. The trip to the "sacred ground" of Yankee Stadium, where Mickey Mantle himself had played, serves as both a memorial to what might have been, and a victory lap after an arduous journey.