I loved that Sunrise asked Joey if they had jet packs and flying cars in the future, and how Joey starts to realize that hippies were not just cartoonish people in Halloween costumes, but people who had a very intense social and political agenda. Hitching a ride back to her town of Cincinnati, where Clemente is playing, he manages to meet the ballplayer and tells him the perils he faces, but Clemente is determined to continue to help people.

Joey plans to go back to warn Clemente about not getting on planes, but ends up in Woodstock, where he meets Sunrise, a girl his age who has run away from home. Clemente, an active humanitarian, had promised to revisit her and bring medicine that would have helped- but he was in a fatal plane crash while on a mission to help victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. Joey finds out that his Spanish teacher (whose class is his weak spot) met Roberto Clemente as a child when she was suffering from a disease that eventually crippled her. I love how Gutman weaves in the history and illustrates with period photos.

When his first attempt fails, he returns with a doctor to try to bring 21st century medicine to heal the brain injury. Things are different during this time- Joey meets Babe Ruth (again) at a speakeasy, finds out that women have just gotten the right to vote, and comes up against complications in getting Chapman to avoid being hit. Batting helmets were unheard of in the 1920s, so Joey sets off to save the life of Chapman, and the career of Carl Mays, who threw the killer pitch and was haunted by it for the rest of his life. In this ninth book of the Baseball Card Adventures series, Joey gets hit in the head while pitching at a baseball game and is in a coma for two weeks, when he wakes up, his coach tells him about Ray Chapman, the only pro ballplayer to be killed while batting.

Roberto & Me by Dan Gutman