Angel in the outfield

Roberto Clemente, the superb right fielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972, the year he died in a plane crash, exists in a baseball Eden of the mind. Cut down just past his prime and just before the free-agency era, he avoided the embarrassments the sport hands out to its greatest stars: mercenary team-hopping, years of declining performance, drug scandals, card shows. For those who can remember, he’s forever winding up for another monstrous throw to home plate.

Roberto Clemente, an "American Experience" documentary on most PBS stations Monday night, is not out to disturb this picture. If anything, it wants to put the halo more firmly in place, concentrating on his pride in his Puerto Rican heritage and his roles as a racial trailblazer and humanitarian. (He was taking supplies to earthquake victims when he died.)

"Clemente is the first athlete to transcend race and nation and culture," historian Robert Ruck says in the programme. "He's also not defined by commercialism. It's about pride. Less than a decade after Jackie Robinson debuted in the majors, Clemente embarked on what would be a noteworthy 18-year career. He started with two strikes against him. "He was coming here as an American, playing baseball in his country, but he was being treated as a black American [and] as a foreigner," friend Juan Gonzalez says. "The way he was being identified just didn't jibe with his reality."

The documentary, narrated by Jimmy Smits, follows the usual praise-by-numbers style of rare photos (like that team picture) and footage mixed with interviews of experts, pundits, friends and family, including Clemente's widow, Vera. The rags-to-riches rise - and heroically tragic death - is a familiar tale. But here, its intelligence allows for introspection Clemente himself would appreciate. This absorbing account of his life also reminds us that the picture was more complicated. Clemente faced discrimination, suspicion and ridicule through much of his career; he was a moody, private and sensitive man who had a tense relationship with the press. “I can’t say I enjoyed talking with him,” the Pittsburgh sportswriter Roy McHugh recalls.

Though the Latin American population in baseball has exploded - the 2008 Pirates, for example, have five Latinos on their 25-man roster; the Mets have 12 - Clemente likely would be even more uncomfortable playing in today's world of canned sound bytes, quoted clichés, and irresponsible irreverence for social causes. Really, what would a man who railed against segregation, welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. to his homeland, and died at 38 personally transporting earthquake relief supplies to Nicaragua think of "SportsCenter?"

"It's clear at that time, that this is a guy who's interested in what's going on around him," Ruck says. "And has opinions about that." It seems likely that if Clemente were playing baseball today, he’d join Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds in the ranks of baseball’s tabloid antiheroes, worshiped when hitting well and vilified the rest of the time. The film’s reference to his early adoption of protein shakes and other “odd concoctions” even makes you wonder what he would have done if told that the occasional shot of human-growth hormone would help his injuries heal faster.

The programme does not fall into fawning hero worship. It pointedly addresses Clemente's reputation as a "oversensitive hypochondriac" and his "awkward dance of mutual incomprehension and often hostility" with the media. "Clemente played hard all the time [and] he played all the time," George Will says. "But he talked, all the time, about how hard it was to do what he did."

The attractions of Roberto Clemente include interviews with Pirates teammates like Al Oliver and Manny Sanguillen and fascinating film of the Puerto Rican winter league when it was a haven for African-American players unwelcome in the majors. Fittingly, the programme premieres on the 21st of the month, because it supports the idea that Clemente's uniform number, 21, should be retired by all of baseball. His other numbers - two World Series championships, four batting titles, 12 Gold Gloves, 15 All-Star Games and exactly 3,000 career hits - can't begin to measure what he meant. One complaint: the emphasis on Clemente’s life outside baseball cuts into the time spent on the field. And no matter how admirable his sentiments, the true poetry of Roberto Clemente lies in the uninterrupted flight of a baseball from the warning track to the catcher’s mitt. You can’t watch that too many times.