The Bases Are Loaded With New Titles

The annual spring deluge of baseball books is upon us and this year, in at least one sense, may represent a high-water mark. The sheer volume of titles is overwhelming. Here's a guide through the flood, which includes books to curl up with during a rain delay and one to leave on the bench.

Starting with the statistical side of the game: The 2,875-page Baseball Encyclopedia (Macmillan, $45), the most widely used argument settler, has a rookie challenger, Total Baseball ( Warner Books, $49.95). Its 2,294 pages have been divided into two parts, part one consisting of essays on such subjects as the origin of the sport, "Baseball Nicknames," "Black Ball" and "Women in Baseball." Part two is an alphabetized register and statistical record.

Total Baseball reflects the increasingly sophisticated ways in which followers of the game are using statistics. Augmenting the usual batting and pitching categories are such new ones as the "Clutch Hitting Index," developed by the Society for American Baseball Research ( SABR); "Runs Created" is a Bill James creation; and "Total Average," a formula devised by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post. Baseball traditionalists may blanch when they see revered entries like Ted Williams's .406 batting average surrounded by numbers that are meaningless to all but stats filberts. Moreover, Total Baseball sometimes lapses into a self-righteous, pedantic tone: "Let's start with...that venerable, uncannily durable fraud, the batting average. (It consists simply of hits divided by at-bats.)"

Hey, I kind of like baseball's simplicity. Part of the fun of playing with stats is understanding them without using the sine function of a calculator. Still, the scope of Total Baseball will make it the baseball reference work for years to come. What's more, it's just as good as The Baseball Encyclopedia for settling arguments—a blow over the head with either tome will instantly stop any disagreement.

Though the small type makes the entries in The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball (St. Martin's, $16.95) as difficult to find as Eddie Gaedel's strike zone, this paperback, with stats organized team by team for each year, is a reasonably priced phone-book-sized paperback alternative to the two hardcovers.

That this is a particularly rich year for stat books comes as little surprise. Even the most obtuse publisher could see that the explosion of Rotisserie Leagues around the country has created a huge demand for books that present column upon column of comparable digits. Two of the game's originators have produced a 1989 edition of Rotisserie League Baseball ( Bantam Books, $7.95). Edited by Glen Waggoner and Robert Sklar, Rotisserie includes, along with pertinent stats and impertinent wisecracks, additions to the league's constitution and an introduction to an advanced form of the game called Rotisserie Ultra.

Two other books for Rotisserie players are The Fantasy Baseball Abstract 1989 (Perigee, $8.95), by Wayne M. Welch, and Patton's 1989 Fantasy Baseball Price Guide (Fireside, $8.95), by Alex Patton. Both rank players by position according to the stats that are most important to Rotisserie devotees, and both are reliable resources for drafting a team or justifying a trade. Patton's more compact book includes helpful minor league stats and even offers some entertaining prose, such as this comment on Rafael Santana: "Raffle smokes cigarettes. Other than that, I think he's got it just about totally together."

A valuable addition to any fan's reference shelf is James Mote's Everything Baseball (Prentice Hall, $14.95), a compendium of references to baseball in different areas of American culture, including film, theater, television, radio, fiction, art and music. Browsing through the book, a delighted reader will discover entries like this one under "Baseball in Theater": " Mickey Mantle Ruined My Life, 1984/Comedy in one act by Roy London/...A male dancer declares his hatred of baseball after years of self-reproach."

Believe it or not, some baseball fans have no use for statistics, and there are plenty of books for them, too. Two in particular are admirable compilations of tales familiar, unusual, funny, and apocryphal. Beginning with Abner Double-day and ending with Bill Buckner's boot, Baseball Anecdotes ( Oxford University Press, $18.95) by Steve Wulf—a senior writer at SI—and Daniel Okrent employs a concise, straightforward style. In it, you will find the expected moments, like Don Larsen's perfect World Series game, interspersed with arcane tales, like that of Clyde (Pea Ridge) Day, who pitched in '31 for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Day flapped his arms and let out a deafening hog call whenever he struck out a batter to end an inning.

The approach of The Man Who Stole First Base (Taylor Publishing Co., $9.95 paper), by Eric Nadel and Craig R. Wright, is more scattershot, jumping from era to era while showing a particular affection for offbeat personalities. One memorable example is Bill (Suitcase) Sisler (no relation to Hall-of-Famer George), who was the living definition of "career minor leaguer." In 25 years, he hooked up with 50 teams.