As he runs from his home in the American South, Troy Maxson, the son of a black sharecropper, is borne north by the great migration of his people searching for the promised land.  Unskilled and unwanted, he searches the streets of distant cities until the day he kills a man to stay alive.  He learns how to play baseball in jail, rises to prominence in the Negro leagues, but is barred from playing in the …showed first 75 words of 244 total…

…showed last 75 words of 244 total…compelling and to the point.  Babe Ruth was everything Troy is: large-spirited, a drinker, and womanizer, physically imposing, and a slugger.  It suits August Wilson's purpose, perhaps, to imply their divergent destinies.  If Yankee Stadium is, by repute, linked with Ruth, then Troy gives rise to a quite different set of associations: a back-alley of Pittsburgh, the life his family leads on his garbage collector's pay, the rag ball he hits with a dusty bat.