Baseball's Outcast

From the prison cage to the batting cage, Ron LeFlore’s journey to the major leagues was anything but ordinary.

When twenty-three-year-old Ron LeFlore played his first organized baseball game, it was in a yard at the State Prison of Southern Michigan where he was serving five to fifteen years for armed robbery. An extraordinary athlete, the Detroit native had luck on his side: his coach, a convicted felon, had connections to the Detroit Tigers. Within three-and-a-half years, Ron went from a prison inmate to a Tiger centerfielder.

In Baseball’s Outcast: The Story of Ron LeFlore, Adam Henig tells for the first time in full the unbelievable life and career of Ron LeFlore. Blessed with blinding speed and a powerful swing, Ron shed his jailbird past to become one of the game’s premiere hitters and its most dangerous base stealer during the latter half of the 1970s. His rags-to-riches life story became a bestselling book and a made-for-television movie starring actor LeVar Burton, fresh from his performance in Roots. But the good times did not last. Less than a decade after making his Major League debut, Ron was finished with baseball.

Baseball’s Outcast is not just another book about the rise and fall of a troubled athlete. Henig goes deeper, tracing the star player’s family roots, exploring the segregated world that Ron was raised in, examining the criminal justice system he was subjected to, and revealing how childhood trauma shaped his success and downfall. Filled with insight from Ron himself, as well as from former teammates, coaches, front-office personnel, inmates, childhood friends, and relatives, Baseball’s Outcast provides unprecedented access into Ron’s life story and the obstacles he faced every step of the way.

Author Biography

Adam Henig is the author of the well-received Watergate’s Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night Watchman, which Kirkus Reviews called “powerful” and an “absorbing biography.” Henig is also the author of Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey and Baseball Under Siege: The Yankees, the Cardinals, and a Doctor’s Battle to Integrate Spring Training. Henig’s writings have appeared in Time, Tampa Bay Times, Washington Independent Review of Books, Detroit Metro Times, The Biographer’s Craft, and Blackpast. He is an active member of Biographers International Organization and the Society for American Baseball Research. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.