More than any other sport, baseball is a game that's been analyzed to death, as though studying nine grown men playing a kids' game is somehow going to explain the meaning of life. That's asking a lot of any writer, but it doesn't mean we should stop trying.

Some of our best practitioners have been people like Roger Angell and Jane Leavy and Tom Boswell who could all write well about anything but just happened to pick sports. And there's W.P. Kinsella, who graced us with his book "Shoeless Joe," later turned into a classic movie. It's the one where the ghosts of long-dead baseball heroes walk out of an Iowa cornfield onto a diamond and wonder if they've finally made it to heaven.

Another good baseball writer was Donald Hall, an actual poet, who got his start back in the 1950s as a teen-aged sportswriter in Connecticut. His book "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons" (North Point Press, 1985) ought to be required reading for fans, who mostly just want stories about the boys of summer and may not care that much about philosophical entreaties or the contextual analysis of baseball literature.

In the introduction to his book, Hall writes that "half of my poet- friends think that I am insane to waste my time writing about sports and to loiter in the company of professional athletes. The other half would murder to take my place."

There was a time, some decades back, when a few famous writers got the notion that they needed actual playing time in a pro sport so they could give their readers an authentic inside account. George Plimpton took a few snaps at quarterback in the waning seconds of a Detroit Lions' football game and later wrote a whole book about it.

The idea trickled into the hinterlands. A Little Rock sportscaster played third base for one inning with the Arkansas Travelers and let a routine grounder go through his........

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