Ready for the first pitch

Morris’s aim, briefly, is to identify the first time any particular maneuver or type of equipment or material arrangement appeared in the game and to determine who availed himself of it; why he did so, especially at that particular time; what sort of a reception it received; and what its fate was. Put that way, I have to say the project doesn’t sound terribly interesting to one who does not have a fetish for brute facts and first-evers. (That would be me.) But, in reality, the book is simply enthralling, and amounts to a history of the game and its place in American society refracted through innumerable unlikely lenses. Morris is attentive to the rich and intricate context — cultural, social, and economic — of every innovation from playing fields to broadcasts, from technique to equipment, and would seem to relish the hunt as much as the quarry. He is also a virtuoso of period quotation, bringing us joy in the mock-heroic cadences and flowery bombast of sportswriters of yore, whose plenitude and variety remind us that this was once a nation of newspapers and that baseball was spread as much through their pages as on the field. He also possesses a wry wit, which leavens the book throughout.

“A Game of Inches” certainly bears out the sardonic observation with which we began. The evolution of baseball has been driven in part by players operating where the rules didn’t, finding a porous spot in the regulations and pushing the advantage until it was either accepted or outlawed for varying reasons, themselves revelatory. The infield fly rule is probably the best known example of regulation eliminating a strategy that flouted rules without breaking them (purposely dropping a fly ball to force out runners); but it is the rules governing pitching that truly reflect the game’s coming into itself. “While the history of hitting is a tale of techniques,” Morris writes, “the history of early pitching is a saga of legislative attempts to restore baseball to the way it had once been but would never be again — when the pitcher’s role was to give the batter something to hit.”

The sections on the curve ball and its ilk — the spitball (“the cuspidor offering”) and other rogue or exotic pitches — are absolute triumphs of historical research and exposition, and a brilliant conjuring up of changes in the nation’s cultural climate. (Harvard president Charles Eliot was particularly scandalized by the curveball, which made him regret that baseball was played at his school: “I understand that a curve ball is thrown with a deliberate attempt to deceive,” he observed gravely. “Surely this is not an ability we should want to foster at Harvard.’’) Morris runs through the many claimants of the first curve-baller, widening and complicating the question rather than simplifying it, engaging along the way with past and present historians, reporters, and braggarts. What we have in the end is not only a history of the pitch, but also an exceptionally entertaining history of its history.

The title “Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Players of All Time” announces what I would call an impossible act. Still, “favorite,” unlike “greatest,” covers a multitude of sins and allows for personal reflection which is what this book, edited by Sean Manning (Da Capo, paperback, $15.95), is all about. Manning’s own contribution is a pugnacious apologia for Michael Jordan, while former major leaguer Jim Bouton (as writer) picks Steve Dembowski, a player who never made it further than two months in the minors despite his preternatural on-base percentage, the result of an audacious talent for getting hit by pitched balls. Seth Mnookin fingers Pedro Martinez, a player whose image adorns my own wall. Jonathan Eig, naturally enough, chooses Lou Gehrig and tells how reading Laura Hillenbrand’s “Seabiscuit” inspired his fine biography of the great Yankee workhorse. Steve Almond plumps for Rickey Henderson — I can see that — while Whitney Pastorek picks Roger Clemens — which I cannot see — except she covers herself by noting that he’s the only baseball player to have broken her heart.

Given the idiosyncrasy of the picks, I was surprised by the absence of Roger Maris. He would seem to have much to recommend him: persecution by the jackals of the press and pillorying by the headless mob; small-town integrity and big-league execution; and no pharmaceuticals. His story is told again in “Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero” by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary (Touchstone, $26.99).

Shy, stubborn, prickly, and, in the words of New Yorker writer Thomas Meehan, “roughly as garrulous as Calvin Coolidge,” Maris had the great misfortune of breaking the Bambino’s single-season record for home runs in the American League’s first 162-game season (expanded from 154). What’s more, he did it in competition with his popular Yankee teammate Mickey Mantle. But it was the overt hostility of baseball commissioner Ford Frick, a friend of and ghostwriter for Babe Ruth, which made the season hell for Maris. When Frick saw that his old pal’s most famous accomplishment was in jeopardy, he declared that if the record were broken in more than the 154 games a “distinctive mark” should appear in the record book next to the entry. This mischief occurred in mid-season and took “the joy out of the race,” in the words of sportswriter Maury Allen. “He stepped into the middle of it and made it ugly.” That “distinctive mark” is the famous asterisk that never was, though for a time the official record cited both Ruth’s and Maris’s accomplishments thereby diminishing Maris’s feat.

This is a sympathetic biography of a man who was not one of baseball’s truly great players, but who broke the game’s most famous record and paid dearly for it. As it happens, that 61st home run pitch was served up by Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.