BASEBALL AND LESSER SPORTS

Thirty years' worth of Sheed's shining sports essays, harvested from sources as diverse as The New York Review of Books and TV Guide. As the title indicates, about half of the nearly 40 pieces here deal with the author's first love, baseball, with several more devoted to sportswriting and a few covering football, cricket, golf, tennis, soccer, and boxing—including ``The Anti- Boxer Revolution,'' Sheed's reasoned defense of that sport (``Danger and beauty are not incompatible''). Throughout—in essays on the baseball strike of 1980, Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson, the Hall of Fame (put in Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, Sheed argues), Howard Cosell (this roasting subtitled ``A Riddle Wrapped Up in a So-Called, Self-Appointed Enigma''), violence in football- -the author's good-humored, critically astute caring for sports persuades you of the truth of his introductory comment: ``Baseball and other sports are alternatives to life, stories we tell ourselves to take our minds off life but also to add something to it, as art does.'' And as Sheed's artful sportswriting does, too.