BASEBALL FOR THE FUN OF IT: Hall-of-Famers Tell It Like It Was

How the Babe, Casey, Willie, Mickey, Campy, and 64 other Hall-of-Famers feel about their decisions to become ball players, their rookie seasons, their spectacular feats, their disappointments, their October heroics, their twilights, and their own mortality--via 500 snippets (by his own counting) that Connor has culled from published memoirs or recent interviews. Readers are left, as he notes, to draw their own conclusions--which may amount to observing that the words-worth-quoting go back 20 years or more (and Billy Herman gets as much space as Babe Ruth). Much of what's here, by the same token, will already be familiar to the serious fan (from Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, especially); on the other hand, what isn't here--any reflection of the gut issues of recent years--may strike readers of Ball Four, and the like, as a cop-out. Still, mixed with the gush (Roberto Clemente, just before his death: ""I would be lost without baseball"") are intimations of the game's less cheery aspects (Jackie Robinson, on his tragically alienated son: ""We lost him somewhere""). And the selective enthusiast--who wants to follow Ty Cobb from cow pasture to disgusted old-fogeydom, or check out Johnny Evers and Ted Williams on Managers--can use the index as a short-cut and skip the rest.