The Pitcher.

The Pitcher, by John Thorn and John Holway (Prentice Hall, 300 pp., $12.95)

THORN AND HOLWAY, two accomplished baseball authors, have pulled off a feat that may be as rare as the pitching of a perfect game (done about once every ten years) in living up to dust-jacket hype, in this case that The Pitcher is "the ultimate compendium of pitching lore." The authors recognize that constant rule changes and the enlivening/deadending of the ball have continually shifted the balance of power between hitting and pitching; still, they maintain that "left unfettered, pitching is an irresistible force and will prevail." (Thus, they disagree with former Pirates pitcher Bob Veale, who said, "Good pitching beats good hitting, and vice versa.") Interested in improving the means of evaluating pitching performance, Thorn and Holway synthesize the work of a host of amateur and professional researchers who have recently devised new statistical pitching measures that are superior to traditional ones. A pitcher's won-lost record, for instance, can be almost meaningless since it is so dependent on factors outside the pitcher's control. Much more revealing is one of the new breed of pitching stats: Pitching Average (PA), the hitters' combined batting average against a pitcher; simply the mirror image or batting average, PA has always been around and, like the atom, has been discovered, not invented. Thorn and Holway put this and other new yardsticks to fascinating use, as they work toward a compilation in the chapter of the one hundred best pitchers of all time, uncovering numerous unsung pitching heroes and great performances, and demonstrating the need for new stats (such as "holds," "Squanders," and "half wins") that can more accurately reflect the enormous role now played by relief pitching. While statistics abound, they do not suffocate the book, which also teems with brief bois of great pitcher and great flakes who were pitchers, humorous anecdotes, and the sort of miscellaneous but wonderful information trivia champions are made of.

MIKE SHANNON