A Baseball Triple Play

Your baseball bookshelf may already be bulging dangerously during what must be the game's most productive literary season, but room should, nevertheless, be made for three volumes that touch bases historical, fictional and anecdotal. Charles C. Alexander's Our Game—An American Baseball History ( Henry Holt, $25) is a worthwhile primer for readers unfamiliar with baseball's absorbing past, and it should be required reading as well for those who fancy themselves informed fans but are so deficient in historical perspective that they think Honus Wagner was a German composer. Alexander, a professor of history at Ohio University and a biographer of both Ty Cobb and John McGraw, has the academic credentials for this vast enterprise. In fact, he teaches a course on baseball history. One lesson we learn here is that in baseball, as in life, there's nothing much new under the sun. The game's essential rules, the basic uniforms of players and umpires, the size and weight of the ball, the box score, The Sporting News, the curveball, the four-man pitching rotation and the players' vulnerability to drink and gambling were all established before the turn of the century. As early as 1914, a sportswriter, Irving F. Sanborn, was complaining that for far too many players "the figures on the bi-monthly paycheck loom larger than those on the score-board."

Unfortunately, Alexander's book runs at a pell-mell pace alien to this leisurely game, a result, I suspect, of trying to cover too much ground or, as the players say, "not staying within yourself." He somehow hurries us through about 150 seasons in chronological order and, to his credit, he doesn't miss much. He is attentive to the economic and labor-management issues that have long plagued the game. He gives us a capsule history of the black player's struggle for acceptance and recognition. In his passion for telling us everything, he does pass along some useful trivia. It's good to know that Cy Young won a cool 216 games after his 34th birthday, and that when Cobb finally retired in 1928 he had set 43 offensive records. We learn that attendance slumped so badly in the Depression that the St. Louis Browns drew only 1,271,579 for the entire decade of the '30s, attracting a low of 79,000 fans for the 1933 season. The game didn't do all that well in the '50s and '60s either. When the Giants and Dodgers moved west, the Yankees, with New York City all to themselves in 1958, suffered a 60,000 decline in attendance for that year.

But the professor is in such a rush that he doesn't pause long enough to tell us what we would like to read about some of baseball's more memorable personalities. He's an expert on Cobb and McGraw, but there's not that much new here about them. What about Brooklyn's "Daffiness Boys?" The tempestuous Lefty Grove? Or even Teddy Ballgame and DiMag? And for a scholar, Alexander commits some irritating errors. Bobby Thomson, for example, didn't hit Ralph Branca's first pitch for "the shot heard 'round the world"; he hit the second. Willie Mays is not a native of Mobile, Ala.; Henry Aaron is, and so is Mays's longtime teammate, Willie McCovey. Roger Maris did not hit 37 home runs in 1960; he hit 39. The San Francisco Giants did not surpass two million in attendance for the first time in 1987; they did it in 1989. The Orioles did not lose the first 22 games of the 1988 season; they lost the first 21. Research, Professor. Research!

Another baseball scholar, former Purdue linguistics instructor Peter C. Bjarkman, has collected in Baseball & the Game of Life (Vintage Books, $10) some new short fiction from such authors as Robert Coover, W.P. Kinsella, David Nemec and Jay Neugeboren. My particular favorites among these 15 stories are Kinsella's "Lumpy Drobot, Designated Hitter," a surrealistic account of a minor league designated hitter's penchant for getting hit with pitches, and "Pinstripe," by Lawrence Watson, the story of a disillusioned and ultimately rebellious relief pitcher. Bjarkman also offers a short course on the game's literature in his introduction and tosses in a recommended reading list as an appendix.

In Ernie Harwell's Diamond Gems (Momentum Books, $17.95), Harwell, the Detroit Tigers' regrettably lame-duck play-by-play announcer, recounts some of the favorite anecdotes he has accumulated in 50 years of broadcasting. These stories, like the man himself, are invariably good-hearted and entertaining. Watch out for the puns, though, particularly the one about the hot dog going "from the prying fan into the friar." The Tigers and the station that broadcasts their games will put Harwell out to pasture after this, his 32nd, season in Detroit. Apparently they have no idea what they are losing. They should be ashamed of themselves.