The subtitle says it. Clemens may be many things. But among those, he is a true believer. He had a chance to be one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, and like his counterparts in religion or politics, he lost sight of what were the right and wrong ways to achieve that.

Jeff Pearlman writes with sympathy and care about Clemens’s childhood (which was a wreck) and his social isolation. And he is clear that Clemens was self-made; he was by no means a standout in high school, and it took his own determination (and some intelligent coaching) to make him a star in college.

By the time he arrived in Boston, he was billed as the savior of the franchise. It took him until his third year to become that, but in 1986 he was astonishing. (To his credit, Pearlman documents more thoroughly than I’ve seen anywhere else that Clemens never asked to be taken out of the infamous Game 6; it was John McNamara’s decision, and McNamara lied about it.)

As the years went on, it became apparent that some of Roger’s comments were at right angles to the common reality. A young man with a troubled psychosocial background and few verbal skills, he came to epitomize the arrogant superstar athlete. By the time he left Boston, for Toronto, he was almost as persona non grata as Dan Duquette, the brain-on-a-stick general manager who wished him well in the “twilight of his career.” One of the things that rattled fans, perhaps, is that we’ve gotten used to players who arrive in the majors as fully-formed megalomaniacs and either grow up or don’t. Clemens, rather, descended into megalomania and a hypocrisy that didn’t appear in his background. (Perlman makes a case that some of it had been there all along, but this seems to be based on interviews two or three decades after the fact.)

Oddly enough, as Pearlman points out, had Clemens been playing by the rules, Duquette would have been right. But then artificial enhancements came along, prolonging his career by a decade, partially shedding his reputation as a pitcher who couldn’t win in the post-season, but becoming, eventually, regarded with contempt in every city he played for.

Overall, though, this was a flawed book. The tone jumps between sympathetic and judgmental, without a discernible pattern. There are occasional zingers—Dave Barry with a mean streak (“For someone making enough money to clothe and feed Ethiopia through the year 4197, Clemens sure liked to complain”)—that appear, obviously don’t fit in with Pearlman's overall style, and disappear. The story told here is sordid enough without the jangled and inappropriate emotional jumps I often felt were going on.

The next book I looked at after this one was an autobiography by Mark Rudd, late of SDS and the Weather Underground. I decided, at least for now, not to read it. Mark Rudd and his comrades did to progressive politics what dope fiends like Roger Clemens did to baseball: give it an identity that was very visible and very hard to recover from. I have noticed that The Rocket that Fell to Earth hasn’t been flying off the library shelves in my locale on the periphery of Red Sox Nation. Nor have I seen extravagant displays in any bookstores. Maybe nobody up here cares about Roger any more. ( )