The Seventh-Inning Stretch

By WALTER SHAPIRO

This is embarrassing to admit, but this review is a little late. I was supposed to assess all of this year's baseball books, weighty tomes like Mickey Mantle's most recent epic, a reminiscence in the manner of Marcel Proust, My Favorite Summer 1956. But dazzled as I was by his emotionally evocative sentences ("I met up with Billy at the St. Moritz coffee shop for a quick cup of coffee"), I confess that I yielded to temptation. Instead of scrupulously working my way through a pile of new books as oversized as Cecil Fielder's strike zone, I frittered away my critical faculties watching real- life baseball on TV, even slighting sleep for the red-eye ESPN night games from the Coast. Eventually I found -- in extra innings, it is true -- seven baseball books that survived the toughest test of all: competing with the game itself. Each of these books is analogous to an opposite-field hitter; instead of trying to drive the ball up the middle, they offer glimpses of the game from odd angles and use the sport as a metaphor for something larger.

Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent David Lamb, the author of Stolen Season (Random House; $20), is a middle-age man on the lam from his own life. Rather than acting out his mid-life fantasies with the aid of a red sports car, Lamb buys an RV and sets out for a magic summer in quest of the heart of America, minor-league baseball. Writing in the spirit of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Lamb forsakes dramatic narrative for an endearing travelogue filled with small piquant details. His odyssey is oddly humbling. He encounters a boyhood hero, Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Matthews, now a sixtyish minor-league batting coach nursing a fearsome hangover and brooding that his young disciples "don't know who I am, what stats I put on the board." Lamb himself, used to sparking conversations with tales of his globe-trotting adventures, quickly discovers that baseball is a closed universe devoid of curiosity about life beyond the base lines. "The players viewed me with % studied indifference," he writes. "Baseball was the only common denominator of discussion, and the older a player was, the more uncomfortable he became talking about topics other than himself."

The players may be self-absorbed, but fans crave an understanding of how it feels to play this child's game for a living. Perhaps the best recent glimpse of baseball's inner life can be found in The 26th Man by Steve Fireovid (Macmillan; $18.95), a poignant journal of the 1990 season by a career minor-league pitcher still dreaming of one more cup of coffee in the big leagues. The story line is simple and honest: Fireovid, then 33, a righthander who gets by more on guile than God-given talent, posts the second best earned- run average in the American Association while gamely stifling his disappointment as many of his younger teammates are called up by the Montreal Expos. The Expos are not heartless: they want Fireovid to trade his glove for a clipboard as a minor-league pitching coach. But Fireovid cannot let go of his dream. As he admits in August, "Earlier in the season . . . I was positive I'd be retiring from baseball. Now I'm not so sure. I'm pitching as well or better than I ever have, and baseball is what I do best."

This year Fireovid is still getting them out for the Pittsburgh Pirates' top minor-league club. But for sheer endurance his story is overshadowed by the resurrection of Warren Cromartie, 37, who returned after six years in Japan to become a backup first baseman for the Kansas City Royals. In Slugging It Out in Japan (Kodansha International; $19.95), Cromartie, once a star outfielder with the Montreal Expos, vividly recounts his frustrations as a gaijin home- run king with the Tokyo Giants. The transformation of baseball to fit Japanese cultural norms is familiar terrain for anyone who has read Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa. With Whiting as his co-author, Cromartie illustrates the insidious ways the Japanese both honor and humiliate migrant American ballplayers. "We were constantly being watched," Cromartie complains. "We had to submit ourselves to incessant badgering and nitpicking, which began in camp and continued all year long. That was Japanese-style quality control."

Americans are not exactly innocents at the game of exploitation for the greater glory of baseball. In Sugarball (Yale University; $19.95), sociologist Alan M. Klein examines the underside of baseball in the Dominican Republic, the poverty-stricken nation famous for two cash crops: sugarcane and big- & league shortstops. Klein depicts the Dominican "academies," where teenage prospects are recruited, trained and evaluated by major-league clubs, as "the baseball counterpart of the colonial outpost, the physical embodiment overseas of the parent franchise." Even though Klein's ire is sometimes ill-concealed and the book actually contains a section called "Baseball and Symbolic Analysis," Sugarball serves as a reminder of the true meaning of the baseball term farm system.

Hank Aaron's autobiography, I Had a Hammer (HarperCollins; $21.95), written with Lonnie Wheeler, is as much a provocative primer on baseball's race relations in the 1950s and '60s as it is a superstar's account of his triumphant march to breaking Babe Ruth's all-time home-run record. Aaron, who spent much of his career overshadowed by mediagenic players -- both white and black -- like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, can claim with some justice that he was belittled by stereotypes. "Because I was black, and because I never moved faster than I had to, and because I didn't speak Ivy League English," Aaron writes, "I came into the league with an image of a backward country kid who could swing the bat and was lucky he didn't have to think too much."

Aaron was still a fearsome, albeit fading, slugger when he surpassed Ruth in 1974. In contrast, baseball purists should cringe at the way Pete Rose, his skills long vanished, was lionized for his Captain Ahab-like quest to break Ty Cobb's record for career base hits. Collision at Home Plate by James Reston Jr. (HarperCollins; $19.95) is a cautionary tale about the dangers of hero worship. This joint biography of Rose and baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti -- the former Yale University president who banished Rose from baseball in 1989 and then died suddenly little more than a week later -- never quite works. The irony is too heavyhanded, the juxtapositions too stark, the character of Rose too pathetic in his heedless self-destruction. Oddly enough, it is Giamatti, the exuberant intellectual fleeing Yale for the greener pastures of baseball, who dominates the book, as Reston paints a complex portrait of a flawed but fascinating administrator a bit too taken with his own public image. Still, Reston indulges in too much quotation of Giamatti's orotund utterances on the cosmic meaning of baseball and provides too little insight into the off-the-field politics of the game itself.

The journalistic obsession with anniversaries has reached Ruthian (or should | I say "Aaronian") proportions this year as sports pages are running day-by- day updates on the fabled 1941 season. Personally, I have already overdosed on Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams' .406 batting average. But if you must read one book on the subject, let it be Baseball in '41 by Robert W. Creamer (Viking; $19.95). A veteran sportswriter now pushing 70, Creamer artfully weaves his own 1941-college-boy-on-the-cusp-of -war persona throughout the narrative. There are wonderful asides, ranging from Red Barber's early days as the Brooklyn Dodgers radio announcer to the draft woes of Detroit Tigers star Hank Greenberg. But hard as Creamer tries, I never caught the magic of the 1941 games themselves. For how could they compete with the joys of a simpleminded slugfest on ESPN?