PARTING SHOT

Pele O’Brien steps to the plate now. Yankees 3, Rangers2,top of the ninth. Oddibe McDowell leads off second, a big lead now. Here’s the pitch… he’s going! O’Brien lines one wide of first.. .Mattingly dives.. .he can’t get it! The ball’s into the corner! Here’s McDowell around third to score, and this game is all tied up!

Excuse me. Just daydreaming. No, this is not a hot dispatch from Yankee Stadium or a very late bulletin from the Rangers’ spring training camp in Florida. For the thirteenth spring in a row, the heartless bosses of this journal refused to send a correspondent to spring training, citing the usual lame excuses about our lead time. So what if a story on spring training wouldn’t appear until the season was almost a month old? They always use logic when they don’t want you to have any fun.

Yes. the greatest game is back again. A brief history; in the Garden of Eden, baseball was played year round, with daily double-headers. After the fall (the gods were angered when a “designated sinner” was introduced), mankind was punished. Baseball was limited to six months of the year, and duller, more violent sports played by giants and gladiators were foisted on the race. Now baseball returns with the spring but departs, symbolically, when the earth is dying.

Of course, the return of a game really changes nothing, say the rational types who would rather read another article on tax reform than watch Larry Parrish park one in the left field stands. True, the game’s symmetry and beauty butter no bread. A gutsy double steal, a deft pickoff move, even the long throw from right to nip a runner digging from first to third-none of these will improve Reagan’s memory, raise money for AIDS research, or make our companies as good as Japan’s. (Come to think of it, Pete Rose used a Japanese bat to break Ty Cobb’s career hit record.) Still, the game survives its salary squabbles and coddled egos; attendance was up again last year, and not just at Arlington Stadium. The season is here, time for my own version of spring training-long browsing through the old baseball library, which yields this Murderer’s Row of great baseball reading. Few of the books are new; in baseball, the new is always suspect. 1. The Yearthe Yankees Lost the Pennant, by Douglass Wallop. Not great literature by any means, but makes the team for sentimen tal reasons. At the age of nine, I came across this story of a middle-aged fan whose deal with the devil makes him the savior of the hapless Washington Senators (who became, you know, the Texas Rangers). It may have been my first “real” novel, and Joe Hardy’s behavior was puzzling to a child’s mind. Why would a guy who could hit 500-foot home runs want to paddle around in a canoe with some girl named Lola? Why wasn’t he at practice? The ending, when even the devil can’t change an umpire’s mind, is priceless.

2. The Summer Game, by Roger Angell. Most everything in The New Yorker, where these pieces first appeared, is too long for people of average life spans; Angell’s med itations on the game are too short. His clos ing chapter, “The Interior Stadium,” is the best statement yet on how and why to watch baseball. Give it to the next cretin who whimpers, “They never doooo anything in baseball. They just staaaand there.”

3. The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn. An ex-sportswriter goes in search of the great Brooklyn Dodger team he covered in the Fifties-Snider, Reese, Robinson, Cam- panella. The game does change, this book shows. Billy Cox. the former third baseman, is tending bar in Yonkers, wiping the counter with World Series rings on his hand. Don’t look for Keith Hernandez to knock on your door selling encyclopedias.

4. Why Time Begins on Opening Day, by Thomas Boswell. Standout essay: “Bred to a Harder Thing Than Triumph.” In one of the great near-comebacks of modern baseball, the 1982 Baltimore Orioles almost caught the Milwaukee Brewers on the last day of the season. Boswell’s poignant ac count of this noble failure is tonic for fans sick to death of greedhead agents and bar room fights. Also good: “Lives of Noisy Desperation.” on umpires, for insight into the beleaguered men in blue. {Imagine being asked by a batter. “’Did your mother have any children that lived?”)

5. Fathers Playing Catch With Sons, by Donald Hall. Writers like Hall, a practicing poet, are sometimes guilty of over-intellec- tualizing baseball. Essays like “Baseball and the Meaning of Life” and descriptions of Bil ly Martin as “an inversion of Hotspur-a mock-heroic figure with Pistol’s brag gadocio and Falstaff’s gregariousness” seem pretty strained. Much better is “The Coun try of Baseball,” in which Hall leaves his pipe and study for a Plimptonesque stint with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

6. Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris. Henry “Author” Wiggins, pitcher and nar rator, learns that a slow-witted reserve catch er is dying of a terminal disease. Eloquent despite its semi-literate cast, deeply emo tional but never syrupy, this novel far tran scends the jock-book genre.

7. “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” by John Updike. The title affectionately mocks sports headlines; the essay pays tribute to Ted Williams, who may have been the game’s finest hitter, in his last game at Fen way Park. The article is found in Updike’s Assorted Prose.

8. All About Baseball, by Leonard Kop- pett. It’s worth haunting the used book stores for this 1974 jewel, a book for the fledgling fan. the veteran, everyone. A good comple ment to the high poetic mode of Angel! and Hall, this is a guidebook of nuts-and-bolts information about the game inside and out side the foul lines. Check out ’”What a Manager Really Does.” a humbling read for fans who love to second-guess, which means all fans. You may even feel sorry for Doug Rader. Also, Koppett explicates Durocher’s famous and misunderstood quote, “Nice guys finish last,” once and for all.

9. The Dixie Association, by Donald Hays. A life-crammed, wise, and funny novel about a raunchy hodgepodge of a minor- league team and the one season they put it all together. The games happen, batting av erages rise and fall, but this is really a hymn to the rebellious human spirit. What the nar rator says of Eversole*s perfect game might be said of this near-perfect book: “It was pure baseball, pure art. and it changed noth ing but that one night, when a man’s right arm delivered us all for a while from our selves.” A game that can inspire a book like this must be wondrous. Hey, there’s another reason to love baseball.