" It’s like going to a concert or listening to the opera, " is how Bill " Spaceman " Lee describes fellow pitcher Luis Tiant’s virtuosity in Tom Adelman’s majestic evocation of the 1975 season, The Long Ball (Little, Brown). " The orchestra comes out and everything starts banging and it shakes the place. Then it comes to the middle part of the symphony, and things get very calm and sweet. . . . Then, all of a sudden, you sense that the end is coming. Everyone starts getting noisy again. The whole gang is letting out with all the instruments. Then, boom! The whole show is over. "

Adelman hears music in baseball too. Which is no surprise given that his alter ego Camden Joy is one of music criticism’s most vivid essayists/novelists/polemicists. In his first non-pseudonymous book, Adelman cools the wild-eyed, funny febricity that’s a hallmark of his music writing but spares none of its passion or inventiveness. His sprawling, intricate history, which traces the arc of the ’75 season from spring training through the thrilling agony of an improbable match-up between the juggernaut Cincinnati Reds and our eternally star-crossed Sox, reads like a novel — one that’s no less gripping for its preordained conclusion.

It’s not just the roster of colorful characters like quirkily quotable Spaceman, unflappable, cigar-chomping Tiant, fervid Carlton Fisk, and indefatigable Yaz. Neither is it simply the dynamic narrative, which builds toward the greatest-ever World Series, that makes this tale sing. Nineteen-seventy-five — which dawned with Catfish Hunter becoming the game’s first free agent (and first million-dollar commodity) and closed with the demise of the reserve clause — marked baseball’s paradigm shift. For all the autonomy free agency afforded players, the huge money and shifting loyalties it heralded changed the game. For Adelman the ’75 World Series, which pitted one team Òfull of old-time personality, playing for a veteran owner in a quirky, prewar ballparkÓ against a ÒBig Red Machine . . . in a concrete behemoth,Ó was a battle between the past and the future. The future won. But it took seven games.

All these makings might be squandered if Adelman were a simple sportswriter. Instead, he channels his Òpop fabulistÓ flair into reportage, using nearly 60 histories, biographies, and autobiographies and stacks of yellowed dailies to revivify verdant afternoon idylls and bring to life characters’ emotions, interior monologues, even one of Mickey Mantle’s drunken dreams. Sometimes his character sketches evoke the portentous voice of Don DeLillo; sometimes they recall the existential angst of a Raymond Carver story.

As Adelman reconstructs these characters down to their tobacco-packed cheeks, he also homes in on subplots that remind us of their participation in history outside the ballfield. Jim Rice arrives in this city as the bussing crisis rages, Òyoung, strong, and black in Boston at the worst possible time.Ó In one vignette, Senator George McGovern visits Havana and, in a meeting with Castro, tries to secure a US visit from Tiant’s aging parents. Musing that the Òshape of last year’s Red Sox season provides the clearest model for the imperial destiny of the United States: the early brilliance, the promising middle, and the inevitable decline,Ó Fidel grants it. ÒHe feels a keen pity for the followers of the Boston Red Sox.Ó

At its heart, of course, this is a book about sports, and Adelman nails the details of innumerable innings without getting bogged down in numbers or impeding narrative thrust. He describes complex games crisply, economically, poetically. His play-by-plays are woven with imagistic gems like third base coach Don Zimmer waving a runner through, Ògesturing like a mad prophet,Ó or Don Gullett Òthrowing the ball like he’s throwing a punch in a John Ford Western.Ó One pitch approaches slow and heavy, Òlike a pregnant watermelon.Ó If Adelman sometimes overreaches, gushing that Òthe glow in his [Fred Lynn’s] soul erupts and bursts, shining over the entire outfield,Ó he redeems himself with sense memories like Òthirty-five thousand frenzied mouths smelling of beer.Ó

As for Fisk’s hope-inflating Game 6 home run, it gets the lyric treatment it deserves. Adelman describes the deep left field shadow into which the ball disappeared for a seeming eternity before Pudge’s histrionics willed it fair as Òan old shadow . . . black as the eye of Tony C. and the wrist of Jim Rice, and yes, naturally, as black as the ink on Babe Ruth’s Yankee contract. It’s a shadow comprising all the things that kept the Red Sox from being world champions since the days of Duffy Lewis, a dark haunt in which all their failures and tragic figures fly.Ó

The Sox have handed us many heartbreakers, but those have rarely seemed as sad and beautiful as this one.