It does not matter how mad March is or how huge the Super Bowl television ratings come up, baseball is and forever will be the American game and our pastime! Why? Because we can see the players in all their peculiar humanness. Since they disport themselves in all manner of poses, we get to study and become familiar with their mannerisms and tics. We get to know them as more than athletes. Basketball players move too fast for this, and football players are hidden under helmets and layers of padding. The baseball fan knows players, even obscure ones like Jeff Stone and Duane Hosey, as individuals. Nothing is more American than being recognized for who you are, but this is only the half of it. Baseball is a team game. The individuals on the team have to live and work together over a long season of 190 games, or more if they make the playoffs. To become champions they must mesh, must find in their individual skills a collective will over the long haul. Is there anything more American than this?

Nicholas Dawidoff has given us the Library of America’s take on how the hickory has met the horsehide in our literature. His credentials are that he is an editor, journalist, and author of a biography of one-time Red Sox catcher Moe Berg. (There is a fine " inside baseball " essay in his book from the brainy Berg, of whom it was said that he could speak seven languages but couldn’t hit a curveball in any of them.) What’s more, his immigrant grandfather, who’s invoked in the book’s introduction, became a Red Sox fan in 1948. Dawidoff writes, " The Boston Red Sox became his team, and like most fans of that nine, he became immediately long suffering. Every year the Red Sox filled their supporters with hope, and every year they found romantic ways of letting them down. "

This is unfortunate enough to give any true Sox fan pause. Through the 1950s and up to 1967, the Pumpsie Green–Don Buddin–Billy Consolo–Dick " Dr. Strangeglove " Stuart Red Sox never were cause for the headline " Pennant Fever Grips Hub. " Ted Williams notwithstanding (a pungent vignette in this book from Jim Bouton’s Salinger-esque Ball Four shows Teddy Ballgame taking batting practice), these Sox teams were terrible, as totally unromantic as their sore-as-a-boil alcoholic manager, Mike " Pinky " Higgins. " The Curse of the Bambino " did not begin until after 1967. That team’s quest was called the " Impossible Dream " because it was a 100-1 shot. After 1975, after Luis Aparicio slipped while rounding third in Detroit, after Bucky " Bleeping " Dent and the nameless one who like Michael Jackson wore a glove for no apparent reason, the legend of ultimate, dramatic Red Sox failure got set in concrete. But Dawidoff’s grandfather did not suffer this at the start of his fandom. The moral is that if you publish a baseball book that refers to the Red Sox, you must remember that Boston is the Athens of America. Triple-check your facts — some fan will know the truth.

I am not about to bury Dawidoff’s book for his minor indiscretion. It is a good book. I think it could be improved, but this is invariably the case when you look closely at an anthology. The stars are certainly here, from Earnest Lawrence Thayer’s " Casey at the Bat " to Don DeLillo’s masterful vision of the 1951 Dodgers-Giants " Shot Heard Round the World " playoff game. DeLillo is one of the few major American writers in this book. In my opinion, the others who qualify are William Carlos Williams, James Thurber, J.F. Powers, Bernard Malamud, Robert Frost, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Bernadette Mayer (one of Dawidoff’s inspired choices), Philip Roth, Stephen Jay Gould, and Red Sox fan Stephen King. You will not find Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald (I would have included his elegy for Ring Lardner), Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Eugene O’Neill, Paul Auster (who loves the game and has written about it), or Norman Mailer (a fan whose home-town Dodgers broke his heart when they moved to Los Angeles). And there is but a single Ernest Hemingway sentence

What this points to is that baseball is, and has been since the game became organized in the late 19th century, surrounded by words. Indeed, unlike the time-limited games of football or basketball, it is a great spoken game, a leisurely game that invites argument and excites memories of other games and other players. Radio — there are no announcers in Dawidoff’s book! — is a far better medium for the game than television. Baseball is written about at length every day in season and increasingly during the hot-stove-league months. Dawidoff’s anthology is built on the writing — Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, Roger Angell, etc. — the game has provoked in what we now call real time. What has occurred in literary time is a bonus.

Any fan with an appetite for the lore and legends of the game — and that includes every true baseball fan — will at least pause to flip through Dawidoff’s book. I have read it with pleasure, and to anyone who’s considering coughing up $35, I recommend you base your judgment on Laurence S. Ritter’s interview with Sam Crawford, Ring Lardner’s stories, Red Smith’s two columns, May Swenson’s poem, Bill Veeck’s " Eddie Gaedel " piece, the excerpts from Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, Robert Creamer on " The Ol’ Professor " Casey Stengel, the excerpt from Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and the excerpts from Mark Harris. There is more cream here, but this will get you started.

I do have one suggestion for a section that could be incorporated into a second edition. Baseball has a history of immortal one-liners, from Branch Rickey’s " Luck is the residue of design " through Leo " The Lip " Durocher’s " Nice guys finish last " to the innumerable Yogi Berra–isms popular today. Why not collect a few pages of these? And I hope room might be made for Peter Gammons (the best baseball beat reporter I have ever read), Gilbert Sorrentino’s essay on baseball and time that appeared some years ago as an op-ed article in the New York Times, an excerpt from Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (I suggest the sex scene because couples still go from first to second to . . . home!), a passage from George Will’s Men at Work, B.H. Fairchild’s poem " Body and Soul, " something from Donald Hall’s book on Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, Abbott and Costello’s " Who is on first? " (how could this not make the cut?), and some pages from Bill James.

OVER THE PAST 25 OR SO YEARS, James must have written more words about baseball than all the journalists covering the Red Sox and Yankees combined. He is a statistician who has studied the game intensively and written about it first of all for his own pleasure and second to get at the truth of this most statistical ( " You can look it up, " as Casey Stengel so often advised) of games. James is a Kansas City Royals fan who loves the game and his research as only an amateur can. The latest, completely revised version of his Historical Baseball Abstract remains bracingly opinionated and healthily crude. He still names the ugliest players in each 20th-century decade, a practice that rained boos on his head last time around but one that I applaud because what baseball players look like is an essential part of the game.

The core of James’s book is his ranking of the 100 greatest players at every position excluding DH and his ranking of the 100 greatest players of all time. His Top 10 are, in order: Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Willie Mays, Oscar Charleston, Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Walter " Big Train " Johnson, Josh Gibson, and Stan Musial. He has invented the formulas ( " Win Shares " is the new one), crunched the numbers, and marshaled statistical chapter and verse to back up every ranking, #1 through #100. I have to insist that Ted Williams ranks above Mickey Mantle, and that is where the fun begins. Is Houston Astros second baseman Craig Biggio really the fifth-best second baseman in history and 35th-best player all-time (Yaz is ranked 37th!)? James bases his case for Biggio on what he calls the " little stats, " the overlooked aspects of the game, like Craig’s going an entire season without hitting into a double play. He has found a way to compute the value of that.

At heart James is a moralist, passionately in pursuit of the truths that we fans blinded by the beauty of the game do not see. He demonstrates, for instance, the relative unimportance of a high batting average. He goes off the field as well: his examination and questioning of the evidence that Pete Rose gambled on baseball games is so cogent and convincing that it ought to be answered by someone in authority — preferably lawyer John Dowd, who led the Rose investigation. James takes nothing at face value, and he has opinions on everything, including the rumors that J. Edgar Hoover crossed-dressed. His prose is conversational and salty, the perfect companion for a long winter or a rain delay. Dawidoff’s anthology is above the game, which is as it should be. Bill James’s book is on the field, between the lines.

WILLIAMS ILLUSTRATION BY DALE STEPHANOS; YASTRZEMSKI PHOTO BY PETER TRAVERS