The Sandlot Game

With so much good baseball writing curving past the out-of-print side of the foul pole, any new collection that gathers such all-stars as Roger Angell, Jimmy Breslin, Tom Boswell, Arthur Daley, David Halberstam, W.C. Heinz, Roger Kahn, Jim Murray, and Red Smith immediately attains major league status. In The Sandlot Game all are represented by terrific selections: Murray on Sandy Koufax, Breslin on the '62 Mets, and Smith on the death of Jackie Robinson are master works of the genre. But it's the unexpected--such as Pat Jordan's profile of out-of-control minor league fire-baller Steve Dalkowski and the stream-of-consciousness snippet from Peter Cohen's 1961 novel Diary of a Simple Man, that really puts this collection in a league of its own among recent baseball anthologies.