The National Pastime

...Rogers Hornsby is quite as remarkable a phenomenon as Paige...

...The title is a jab at Stengel as a martinet, and Houk is unpleasantly disingenuous about the firing of Stengel, pretending that it was retirement for reasons of age...

...umpire Tim Hurst, who spit on players...

...Jude, "asking him to help Roger reach his goal, if he thought he deserved it...

...The first of these books not written by a ghost writer, Arthur Daley's Kings of the Home Run (Putnam, 253 pp., $3.75), might better have been...

...He tells a funny story very well, and shows a good ear for the monotonous obscenity of ballplayers' conversation...

...His book, Pennant Race (Harper, 250 pp., $3.95), is a journal of the Reds during the 1961 season, when they won the pennant...

...Einstein writes not as an objective reporter but as a partisan Giant fan, so that I suppose this grim picture is a tribute to his honesty...

...Hornsby managed to become the greatest righthanded hitter of the game by a feat of total immersion...

...He plays professional baseball, he says, for financial security, and he hopes that his sons will not have to...

...He writes endlessly of his stunts on the field and his practical jokes, and he has a good word for everybody, including Walter O'Malley (who sold my team to Los Angeles and would sell all the players for mink food if there were a dollar in it...

...I found that I had forgotten how to keep a box score...

...Knoxville or Raleigh," Hornsby says...

...His autobiography, written in collaboration with Bill Surface, My War with Baseball (CowardMcCann, 253 pp., $4.50), is a portrait of a true fanatic...

...The books are not a distinguished lot...

...His book consists of potted biographies of the 19 batters who have hit at least 300 home runs in their lifetimes, from Ruth with 714 to Chuck Klein with 300, plus a chapter on Maris...

...With a few exceptions, they were a listless and spiritless team, cooperating in nothing but goosing the trainer on airplanes...

...Lee Allen's The American League Story (Hill and Wang, 242 pp., $5.00) is a sprightly capsule history...

...I wish only that the book had been dedicated: "To Luis Arroyo, Who Made Me What I Am Today...

...Much of the book is a game-by-game account of the 1961 season, when the Yankees won the pennant and the World Series, and Roger Maris hit I forget how many home runs...

...That's where the nice guys play...

...He is a good writer, an honest man, and a better relief pitcher than Chekhov...

...He is quite an intellectual for baseball: he reads Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller...

...He is now prepared to grin and bear it, explaining: "But this is the Yankees' way of doing things, and it has always worked...

...Finally, we have a real writer, Jim Brosnan, the right-handed relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds...

...The autobiography of Casey Stengel as told to Harry T. Paxton, Casey at the Bat (Random House, 254 pp., $3.95), is the shrewd elaboration of a fictional figure, Stengel the Kindly Clown...

...It is built around excerpts from Einstein's stories in the San Francisco Examiner about the 1961 Giants...

...Allen calls baseball "the business," but it is not that to the fans, and if the owners haven't bled it to death by now I suppose it is immortal...

...It is shrewdly ended before the World Series, which they lost...

...Rizzuto's book has a gem to match Houk's: "John Blanchard and Hector Lopez, both of whom would be starting in the outfield between Maris, who was the center fielder...

...My loathing of the New York Yankees remains undiminished, and I root for any team that plays against them...

...I had not been in a ballpark in years, but in June I took my two sons—the younger one had never seen a major league game— to the Polo Grounds to see the New York Mets play, and lose, a doubleheader with the Milwaukee Braves...

...the midget Bill Veeck sent up to bat, whose uniform number was "? "; and Babe Ruth...

...I still feel drawn to them, but faintly, as by the moon's gravitation...

...Much of the book consists of chapters on individual Yankee heroes of 1961...

...He has pitched in professional baseball from 1926, when he was 20, to the present, when he is 56...

...What makes this monster more than a monster, and gives his book its interest, is Hornsby's fierce competitiveness...

...The only players Hornsby praises are catchers who tag runners in the mouth, pitchers who throw at batters' heads, baserunners who spike pitchers...

...and when the 1899 Cleveland team won 20 and lost 134 games (Ah, hope for the Mets), with the hotel cigar-stand clerk pitching on the last day...

...Before that arm of mine gave out," Paige says he resolved, "I was going to taste that major league living...

...Brosnan writes truthfully about the feelings of a ballplayer, from crazy exhilaration at victory to sullen drunkenness after not being selected for the All-Star team...

...The parts of his book that ring false are colorful hokum along Archie Moore lines, like Paige's claim that he has kept his arm supple for a third of a century by rubbing it with Indian rattlesnake oil...

...Those were the days when whole baseball teams slept in one hotel room...

...Stengel's replacement as Yankee manager, Ralph Houk, has also produced an autobiography, taped and edited by Charles Dexter, entitled Ballplayers Are Human, Too (Putnam, 247 pp., $4.50...

...Since then I have assiduously read all the baseball books published this year, hoping to find old passions simmering within me...

...Feeling it improper to pray for home runs, Maris prayed that no injury ruin his chances at Ruth's record, while his wife discreetly prayed to St...

...Nothing did...

...It is certainly democratic...

...Like the moon, they are so far away, and they shine while I sleep...

...Maris says that only poor boys become great players, but, to name only two, Frank Chance was the son of a banker, and Ty Cobb of a state senator...

...Paige is rather a remarkable phenomenon...

...I used to trip, kick, elbow or spike anybody I could," he says blandly...

...Ten baseball books published in a few months, and no end in sight...

...Maris is not bright, but he is bright enough to know that he is not giving his all for God, for Country, and for Yale...

...What Stengel cannot entirely conceal is that he is as fierce and ruthless a competitor as Hornsby, that he is very intelligent, and that the last laugh is his...

...Hornsby's mother's dying message was: "Tell Rogers that I don't want anything to interfere with him playing in the World Series...

...For one more rattle of the bones, we have Maris' own story, written in collaboration with Jim Ogle, Roger Maris at Bat (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 236 pp., $2.95...

...I heartily concur, and I am glad that he did not...

...I wish, though, that his tone were less repellent...

...He did, but too late and too briefly, and he is now back in the minors...

...The most recent book is Charles Einstein's A Flag for San Francisco (Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., $4.50...

...in the tense last month, a coach told Brosnan: "The boys suggest you don't read so much...

...From 1929 to 1958 he pitched winters too, and he once pitched every day for a month...

...A terrible old man, and would that the Mets had 25 of them...

...Maybe I'll Pitch Forever (Doubleday, 285 pp., $4.50) is the autobiography of Satchel Paige, as told to David Lipman...

...It is interesting to learn that Whitey Ford has gout—perhaps it will spread...

...This follows him through the season, home run by home run...

...The tone is folksy and corny ("Yes, big men weep, too...

...Daley is the Times' sports columnist, and an invincible comball...

...It is not as colorful as Allen's The National League Story, published last year, because the National League goes back into the 19th century...

...No less an authority than Dizzy Dean has said that Paige in his prime was the greatest pitcher he ever saw...

...I was a loudmouth fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers until they went West...

...Phil Rizzuto and Al Silverman give us another look at the same collection of brittle marvels in The "Miracle" New York Yankees (Coward-McCann, 209 pp., $3.95...

...and Houk managed to produce, and Dexter to tape, one of the worst metaphors I have ever encountered: "I had a bee under my tail, however, with a baseball between its stripes...

...As for me, I now know what the Yankees wore in 1903 (cardinal jackets with pearl buttons), and I know what I would like them to wear in 1962, but I still don't know how to keep a box score...

...when Old Hoss Radbourn pitched 73 complete games and won 60 of them, with an earned run average less than 1; when two Detroit infielders believed the earth was flat...

...Einstein is full of whimsy when the team wins, nasty when it loses, and terribly gushy about Alvin Dark, the manager...

...Daley's mawkish and tearjerking accounts of the death of Ruth, of Ted Williams getting autographs for a little crippled boy, of the Brooklyn priest who told his congregation to "say a prayer for Gil Hodges" in a slump, would melt the chocolate off a Mexican chicken...

...Pennant Race is a funny book, and valuable for its honesty about baseball experience, in contrast to all the ghostly books and hokum...

...He has no vices but baseball, and never saw a movie or read a book, lest he strain his batting eye...

...Regard everybody you play against as your enemy...

...Some of the white players emerge as racists and Willie Mays-haters, with Dark himself "a Bourbon" when the team loses...

...Rizzuto tells how the Yankees reduced him to fury and tears by firing him without warning on Old Timer's Day in 1956...

...when the Cubs beat him he goes to see a Chekhov play, to "compare his pathos with mine...

...Sometimes Brosnan writes a little too gorgeously ("as cold as the seat of a gravedigger's consciousness") or pretentiously ("A damp jockstrap is almost doubtfully utilitarian...

...The part of Paige's book that rings true is his resentment of the fact that for the first 22 years of his career he could not break into major league baseball, because he is a Negro...

...His picture of the 1961 Giants is horrifying...

...Restricted to the 20th century, all The American League Story can produce of comparable color is Rube Waddell, a great pitcher and formidable eccentric...

...Maris describes a letter in which a fan "said that he would hate to see a bum like me break Ruth's great record...