Homers of the Homer

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Listen to Walt Whitman on baseball. "Baseball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character," he said in 1888. "We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race." Nice, isn't it? Just as compelling, in its own way, is the simple fact that Walt Whitman wrote something about baseball.

What draws intellectual types to the sport? There's something about the mere act of punishing a ball with a stick that brings about a truce in the eternal struggle between jock and nerd, and lures such luminaries as John Updike, Richard Ford, George Plimpton and the late Stephen Jay Gould to take their cuts. Are they slumming for street cred, trying to show that, like good postmodernists, they can switch-hit: both high-and lowbrow?

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This year the three finest living baseball writers — Pulitzer prizewinning journalist David Halberstam, lifelong baseball scribe Roger Kahn and Roger Angell, a writer and editor at the New Yorker — have each, as if by a common agreement among the game's village elders, produced a new book, making the spring of 2003 quite possibly the all-time greatest single season of baseball writing ever. But it raises the question once again: Why do people who have way more important things to think about think about baseball?

Halberstam was born not far from Yankee Stadium, but The Teammates (Hyperion; 217 pages) deals not with the Bronx Bombers but with their eternal archrivals, the Boston Red Sox and not so much with their playing careers as with the diamond-shape holes baseball left in their lives when they left the game. Halberstam, whose previous subjects include Vietnam and Bill Clinton, focuses on the four players who formed the core of a powerhouse Boston lineup in the 1940s: Johnny Pesky, Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio (kid brother to Joltin' Joe) and the troubled, tyrannical genius Ted Williams, the last man to finish a season with a batting average over .400.

The curtain rises on the twilight of the boyhood idols: in October 2001. Williams, "the Splendid Splinter," was on his deathbed in Florida. Pesky and DiMaggio, both in their 80s, embarked on a 1,300-mile car trip to visit him. Halberstam braids together the story of their road trip — that other great American pastime — with an account of their bittersweet seasons as Red Sox. Though they played as a foursome from 1942 to 1951, minus a few years for World War II, they never won a World Series, and in 1949 they lost the pennant to the New York Yankees on the last day of the regular season on a dying-quail blooper. ("I can still see it with my eyes closed," Williams would remember, five decades later. "It's funny how you can remember something so painful so clearly.") Halberstam captures the full Housmanian drama as time catches up with them one by one. "Growing old in America, the country of the young, is never easy," Halberstam writes, but these four men, whose lives up to that point had prepared them only for permanent adolescence, do it gracefully, if reluctantly. Their lives are definitively American, and although they lack second acts, Halberstam has given them a glorious, flaming, autumnal epilogue.

It's doubly sad whenever time claims a ballplayer, because the game is predicated on the suspension of ordinary temporality. "Uniquely among team sports, baseball proceeds outside of time," Roger Kahn observes in his new book October Men (Harcourt; 382 pages). "There is no clock." But the air of eternity that lingers over the grass only shows up the ephemerality of those who play on it — baseball is not a sport of the gods, it's a sport of mortals, and ballplayers are even more human than other athletes. They tend to be of average size and weight, unlike the Star Wars cantina of humanoids who participate in football and basketball. October Men is about a baseball team that was all too human.

Baseball is often held up as a microcosm of or a metaphor for America, and it's rarely true — but in 1978, in the Bronx, it was. A turbulent country was reflected in the tempestuous Yankees locker room, where racial tension crackled, where women sportswriters were allowed for the first time and where the first wave of baseball's free agents — led by two Yankees hurlers, Catfish Hunter, the son of a North Carolina sharecropper, and Andy Messersmith — were pulling down astronomical salaries. At the center of the maelstrom, stirring it for all he was worth, was manager Billy Martin, a man who once took pitcher Goose Gossage aside — before a spring-training game in which he would face a black player — and told him, "I want you to drill the little n_____ in the head." Meanwhile the team's slugger was Reggie Jackson, an emerging black superstar who the previous year had hit four home runs in the World Series with four successive swings of his bat. The irrepressible Jackson, who had an IQ of 160 and quoted Frost fluently from behind his mirror shades, is the book's hilarious, hyperverbal hero. He once baffled a reporter with this spitball of a question: "If my team loses a big one, and I strike out with the winning runs on base, are you aware that 1 billion Chinese don't care?"