'Man With Two Arms,' other baseball books hit a homer

Most great baseball fiction - books such as Bernard Malamud's "The Natural," W.P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" and Kevin Baker's "Sometimes You See It Coming" - are heavy on the realism, with a touch of the weird. Billy Lombardo's "The Man With Two Arms" (Overlook, $24.95) fits neatly on the same shelf.

Lombardo, author of a fine story collection, "The Logic of a Rose," is a Chicago writer and editor who is both a master of fiction and a consummate observer of the game, which is what makes his strange premise so oddly believable: Henry Granville, a baseball fanatic, trains his son Danny to pitch with both hands. Lombardo is as deft at handling the comic and tragic aspects of the story as Danny is at whizzing them in from both sides of the plate. Let's subtitle this "The Unnatural," and call it the best baseball-themed novel so far this decade.

Emma Span is a fan disguised as a terrific writer. In "90% of the Game Is Half Mental: And Other Tales From the Edge of Baseball Fandom" (Villard, $15 paper), she has a chapter titled "Pedro Pantsless and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle," about the extraordinary experience of seeing Pedro Martinez naked (you'll have to buy the book for a detailed description); "Bleeding for Baseball" recounts giving blood for Mets tickets; in "Crying in Baseball" she concludes, "It's a nice bit of dialogue but wildly untrue: Baseball is full of grown men crying."

Span is one of the quirkiest and funniest baseball writers around. In "Next Year" she tells us, "Recently I've been having a lot of odd, vivid baseball dreams. . . . There was one where Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez had been kidnapped, and for some reasons the police were no help and it was up to me to rescue them, racing against the clock." Again, you'll have to read the book.

Mark Kurlansky's new book, "The Eastern Stars" (Riverhead, $25.95), is subtitled "How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris," but reversing the words results in a more accurate subtitle. Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano and the Yankees' own Robbie Cano, to name only three of the most prominent game changers, are all from the impoverished village.

"The Eastern Stars" is a cutaway view of the step-by-step journey of dozens of players from the dusty streets of their hometown to wealth and fame in big-league cities in the United States. Each story is more thrilling and heartrending than the one before it. Not all the players are heroes, though as Mark Kurlansky writes, "heroics is a lot to expect from someone snatched away without education at age sixteen and handed fame and wealth at a dizzying speed."

(By the way, fans of the delightful 2008 movie "Sugar," about an aspiring Dominican player, should love this book.)

After reading Jason Turbow and Michael Duca's "The Baseball Codes - Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime" (Pantheon, $25), you'll feel you're watching baseball with 3-D glasses - that is, you'll see all kinds of patterns and hidden meanings you never thought to look for before.

In a chapter titled "Don't Show Players Up," they write: "At or near the top of any pitcher's peeves is the home-run pimp, a hitter who lingers in the batter's box as the ball soars over the wall. The first great player to fit this bill was Minnesota's Hall of Fame slugger Harmon Killebrew, by nature a quiet man who happened to take delight . . . in watching his big flies leave the yard."

From "Mound Conference Etiquette": "Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson implemented a rule with his pitchers. 'I don't want to hear you,' he said. 'Just give me the ball. I have no desire to hear a pitcher's feelings, because if something goes wrong, I'm the one who's gonna get fired, not the pitcher.' "

In perhaps their savviest chapter, "If You're Not Cheating, You're Not Trying," they shrewdly observe that "when it comes to cheating in baseball . . . many tactics that go against the letter of the law are viewed as perfectly acceptable, both by those who utilize them and those against whom they're used. . . . Think about it this way, because others certainly do: Deceiving an umpire is cheating, but deceiving an opponent (say, by stealing his signs) is simply hard-nosed competition."