Play Ball!

An assortment of the sports books of summer.

THE SOUL OF BASEBALL A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America By Joe Posnanski Morrow. 276 pp. $24.95

First as a player for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League of the 1930s and '40s and later as the team's manager, Buck O'Neil did much more than collect base hits and victories. He gathered stories, on the field and off. He played, roamed and cavorted with Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. He rode broken-down buses and ran bases on weedy fields in seedy segregated towns, all of it with stellar athletes who were kept from the big leagues because they were black.

Joe Posnanski, a sports columnist for the Kansas City Star, caught up with O'Neil in 2005, when this grandson of a slave was 93. Just in time. Undertaking the obvious -- to mine O'Neil's memories while the gold was still there -- Posnanski traveled the land with the aging but ever-alert and lively star, who died last October at 94.

They were at Buck O'Neil Day at the Minneapolis Twin's Metrodome. They were in Washington, where O'Neil testified before a Senate subcommittee, asking that the Negro League museum in Kansas City be given a national designation. In Posnanski's caring and capable hands, O'Neil -- who finally made it to the majors as the first black coach -- shows no bitterness over having endured decades of racism.

To the end, Posnanski writes, "he still loved baseball. He loved people. He forgave, but so easily that it hardly seemed like forgiving."

-- Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, is the unpaid CEO of Home Run Baseball Camp at Friendship Playground in Washington.

THE REAL ALL AMERICANS The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation By Sally Jenkins Doubleday. 343 pp. $24.95

Fans and critics alike frequently describe American football as a metaphor for war. But if you think the rivalry between the Redskins and the Cowboys is fraught with tension and historic animosity, you're in for a shock. The Real All Americans, by Washington Post journalist Sally Jenkins, makes it painfully clear just how accurate that metaphor is: "The rising popularity of football had closely followed the ebbing of the frontier wars. It was as though America, at a loss for what to do with itself once the wilderness was subdued, had hit on football as an answer."

The foundation of the sport as we know it today was built in the university system around the turn of the 20th century. Jenkins focuses on the rise of the widely successful football team at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, inventors of the hidden ball trick and pioneers of the forward spiral pass. Given the violence perpetuated against the indigenous cultures of North America, the early competitions with the all-white and notoriously violent Ivy League powerhouses carried enormous symbolic implications. The descriptions of those games in particular, some of which featured Jim Thorpe, prove how clearly the history of the gridiron reflects the history of the United States -- and vice versa. Jenkins's painstaking research into the social context of the times makes The Real All Americans required reading for anyone interested in the complex ways that football -- arguably our real national pastime now -- still so accurately reflects our national identity.

-- Andrew Ervin's short story "The Phillie Phanatic" will appear in the next issue of Fiction International.

THE NIGHT CASEY WAS BORN The True Story Behind the Great American Ballad "Casey at the Bat" By John Evangelist Walsh Overlook. 220 pp. $25

Savants of baseball can supply the dates of heroics or ignominies and, if old enough, can tell you how they cheered or moaned as the events happened.

And then we have poetry and the mighty Casey of the Mudville nine. Who doesn't know the immortal final lines of the country's most enduring baseball poem?

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,