Willie, Mickey and...the Scooter?

What we really need is a Baseball Hall of Names. So much melodrama and vaudeville echo in the monikers of old-time players: Lu Blue, Pebbly Jack Glasscock, Orval Overall, Baby Doll Jacobson, Heinie Manush. Sometimes a player finds a namemate from another era and forges a powerful link in baseball's memory chain. So this year let us induct Harvard Eddie Grant and Parisian Bob Caruthers, Goose Goslin and Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers and Mordecai Peter Centennial (Three Finger) Brown. Not to forget those matching tabloid headlines, Urban Shocker and Country Slaughter.

Some of these names are embossed on bronze plaques in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. All the names can be found in Bill James' new book, The Politics of Glory: How Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works (Macmillan; $25). For 452 sizzling pages, the game's premier stats solon and most passionate fan stir-fries the old debate about who does and doesn't deserve to be there. "The Hall of Fame," he writes, "has never really thought through the issue of how to identify the most worthy Hall of Famers." His evidence: comparison of players' records and eyewitness testimony. Exhibit A: Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto, whose exclusion from the Hall stoked a 30-year ruckus.

Sunday the Scooter will be in Cooperstown, to be honored along with the late manager Leo Durocher and Phillie fireballer Steve Carlton. They will join the 216 players, managers, umpires, executives and Negro League stars elected to the Hall of Fame since 1936. In its august glamour, this citation is a combination Nobel Prize for phys ed and Palm Springs retirement home. Rizzuto will surely feel he belongs there. But does he?

For decades the powerful New York baseball press has engaged in what James calls "a Rizzuto Exaltathon." By now the "Holy Cow!" boy is better known for the sprung poetry of his patter on Yankees TV broadcasts -- and for his call of "backseat petting" on Meat Loaf's hit song Paradise by the Dashboard Light -- than for his great-field, great-bunt playing days. But even then, James persuasively argues, he didn't have the numbers or the earned renown of Pee Wee Reese, a Hall of Famer, or of George Davis and Vern Stephens, who are faint memories.

At first you wonder why James, who blended statistical analysis and critical writing so brilliantly in his annual editions of The Baseball Abstract and later The Baseball Book (now, alas, replaced by a volume that merely handicaps players), would want to spend a year picking apart the Cooperstown selections. It's as if Pauline Kael were to write a book-length excoriation of the Golden Globe Awards. In his splendid Historical Baseball Abstract (1985), James wrote that for years he had been "refusing to comment on who should be in the Hall of Fame and who should not, for a simple reason: I don't care. It doesn't make any difference who they select."