Stolen Season: A Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues.

ALMOST thirty years ago, The New Yorker's roger Angell wrote that the blossoming of the first box score is an immensely exciting occurrence, heralding as it does the arrival of baseball and spring. Today, as every bookseller knows, an equally predictable harbinger is the annual blooming of baseball books, remarkable for their profusion: some 350 (257 of them new) were published last year alone. This vast outpouring, covering every conceivable (and, in some cases, inconceivable) aspect of the national pastime, far exceeds the literature of all other sports. Obviously people love to read about baseball. But why?

No other game is so widely played. None is so intimately share by fathers and sons (and now daughters). None is so deeply embedded in the American psyche. Of course, none of this adequately answers the question, but no matter, the outpouring of books continues, and three new ones are especially effective in evoking the spirit of baseball.

In Once More around the Park, Roger Angell calls baseball "the writer's game." Unlike football, basketball, and other team sports, he maintains, basedball is a "linear" game; "something happens and then something else happens as a consequence." This allows the writer to distill memories and impressions of the game on which he can reflect at his leisure.

No one writes about the game better than Angell, and in this anthology he has broungt together some new essays and many of the best from four previous books (The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, and Season Ticket). Old-timers and rookies alike will find the book quite satisfying.

Because Angell is an occasional writer, a baseball essayist, he is free of the daily reporter's preoccupation with minutiae. He is able to sit in the stands and savor the game, to gauge its impact on those around him, and to reflect on those aspect of it that catch his fancy--in short, to be a fan: an extraordinary literate one, but a fan nonetheless, and in his essays the fan's love of the game is articulated in prose of a high order.

The author writes that this anthology is not a "best of" collection, but longtime Angell readers will in fact find many of their favorite pieces included--among them "The Interior Stadium," to my mind the finest reflection on the game ever written. In this essay he observes that,

Within the ballpark, time moves differently, marked by no clock except the events of the game. This is the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball, and perhaps explains why this sport, for al the enormous changes it has undergone in the past decade or two, remains somehow rustic, unviolent, and introspective. Baseball's time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our father's youth and even back then--back in the country days--there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.

Baseball in America is not a writer's book. Except for some brief reflections on the game by Peggy Noonan, Charles Kuralt, and a few others, the book is mostly photos--but it is no less successful in its own way than Angell's in capturing the essence of the game'js appeal for Americans.

Under the direction of Karen Mullarkey, more than fifty well-known photographers traveled through the United States with the mission of recording the national pastime from sea to shining sea. There is a section on the major leagues, but for the most part the book is given over to the game as it is played by ordinary people. The locales of the games vary widely, from the grimness of Harlem and a New Orleans housing project to a game played at the foot of majestic mountains in Yosemite National Park.

Some of the photos are exotic, such as the one of Navajo children playing in Arizona's Monument Valley and another depicting Minnesotans playing baseball in snowshoes. And others are homespun, such as the photo of a small baseball park as seen by a woman hanging up laundry in a West Virginia town.

Among my favorites are two that bring out the universal appeal of the game--one of an 18-month-old boy playing tee ball and the other of a 98-year-old player on a St. Petersburg, Florida, senior-citizens team (minimum age of eligibility: 75). Particularly wonderful is the photo of a boy from the winning team at the Little League Championships in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, dutifully signing autographs for admiring fans.

There is also a beautiful, wistful photo of a game being played in a small Massachusetts town, the green field visible through the trees and the whole scene suffused with the soft haze of a lazy summer afternoon. The ultimate in nostalgia, however, comes fittingly on the last page--a photo of three happy Little League boys in the back of a pickup truck headed to (or from) a game, somewhere in America. For anyone who played the game as a kid that picture says it all.

Baseball in America is in many ways a fitting companion to David Lamb's Stolen Season: A Journey through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues. The little comes from the leave of absence the author took from the Los Angeles Times (and from adulthood) to travel around the country watching life in the minors. For Lamb, who had spent eight years in Africa and the Middle East, the trip was an opportunity to rediscover American by rediscovering baseball, the game that had been (along with Tootsie-Rolls) the great passion of his youth.

There ensued a five-month-long, 16,000-mile journey around America in a used RV dubbed "Forty-Niner." The adventure begins in Stockton, California (whose team, the "Ports," is a descendant of Mighty Casey's famous Mudville Nine), and continues across the South to Atlanta, up the Eastern Seaboard to Elmira, New York, back west through Montana to the Pacific Northwest, and finally, full circle, to Stockton in time to see the Ports win the championship.

Lacking an itinerary or deadline, Lamb was free to ramble at his own pace through the countryside and small towns of America, lingering where, and for as long, as he wished, getting to know minor-league players, managers, and fans along the way. The result is a portrait of the sort of baseball we remember from a simpler, more innocent time.

Far from the world of the majors with its big-money contracts and celebrity endorsements, Lamb was free to experience baseball in cities like El Paso, Texas, and Chattanooga. Tennessee, where "players work for less than the minimum wage, feast on Big Macs and chocolate shakes, endure 17-hour bus trips from say, Medicine Hat (in Alberta, Canada) to Salt Lake City, and share more fun and more camaraderie than millionaire major leaguers could ever know."

In his prologue, Lamb tells an astonishing baseball story from his boyhood. A crestfallen fan of the Braves, who had abandoned Boston for Milwaukee, the 14-year-old Lamb wrote the sports editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel asking for permission to write a column about the Braves. To his amazement the request was granted and young Lamb began a weekly column that ran for five months and became the sensation of Milwaukee. The payoff to his incredible dream came when a wealthy Milwaukee couple paid for him to spend a week in Milwaukee attending games and hanging out with players he had idolized: Warren spahn, Eddie Mathews, Chuck Tanner.

Lamb resolved to track down as many of the old players as he could during his sabbatical. He succeeded in many cases, and the accounts of these meetings, woven throughout Stolen Season, provide some of its most appealing pages.

These players--even the giants like Warren Spahn--were paid modest salaries in their day and as a result live modestly in retirement. As we meet them along the way--Boston Red Sox shortstop Don Buddin in his liquor store; Eddie Mathews sitting in Lamb's RV in Durham, North Carolina; Chuck Tanner on a tractor on his Pennsylvania farm--they look so ordinary, ensconced in comfortable middle-class retirement. Yet this is altogether appropriate, for in their old age they are fading back into the tableau of small-town America, which gave rise to baseball in the first place and where (at least in the mind's eye) the game still uniquely belongs.

Mr. Roberts, president of Radio America, is producing a radio history of baseball.