Baseball touches more literary bases -- fiction, folklore, oral history, statistics -- than any other sport. Here's a scorecard on the best new titles of 2008.

This is the only collection of baseball writing with three essays about the writers' gloves. Because the book is co-edited by Creative Non-Fiction's Lee Gutkind, longtime devotee of the personal commentary, the odd inclusion makes perfect sense.

Otherwise, several pieces addressing wider issues make this book great reading for devotees of baseball.

Superb are Kevin Baker's lively "At The Park," a condensed history of urban baseball; John Thorn, historian of the game in New York City, writes about the lives of fans in "You Gotta Believe"; and a crazy, funny piece about umpiring, "The Inherent Human Transgression that Is Umpiring: A Slovene Case History" by Rich Harsch, a novelist living in Slovenia.

-- By Bob Hoover

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Triumph is issuing similar titles about other Major League teams, selecting McCollister, a Lutheran minister who has ministered to members of the Detroit Tigers and Lions, to chronicle the Bucs' ups and downs.

p>It's a solid collection of the memorabilia and minutiae of 120 years of Major League Baseball in Pittsburgh, but if this season continues on its present course, it might be hard to find anybody who wants to read it.

Among the highlights: The story of Elroy Face's last appearance as a Pirate. The little relief pitcher was brought into a game Aug. 31, 1968, and starting hurler Steve Blass went to left field. The object was to let Face break Walter Johnson's record for pitching in the most games for one team.

The Baron of the Bullpen retired one batter, left and Blass returned to the mound. After the game, Face headed to Detroit after being sold by the Pirates to the Tigers.

-- By Bob Hoover

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The Philadelphia Phillies were the last original Major League team to win the World Series. When they finally won in 1980, the championship didn't reverse their fortunes but only brought on a new cycle of misery for the city and its fans, whose cynicism always seemed to will defeat into reality. Kashatus' fascinating chronicle of a dynasty that never was is also his own fan's notes, a "redemption for a miserable, century-old legacy of losing as well as the highlight of my love affair with baseball ..." "Almost a Dynasty" is a catharsis for Phillies fans and bound to make the fans of just about any other team feel better about themselves.

-- By Allen Barra

(Editor's note: Well, maybe not Pirates supporters as Pittsburgh seems poised this year to tie the Phils' record for most consecutive losing seasons.)

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Ty Cobb won a record 12 batting titles, slashed infielders with sharpened spikes and once bragged about killing a mugger with a penknife. He was a racist and at least a borderline psychotic. He was also, it turns out, a startlingly complex man, the first professional athlete to become wealthy through business investments (Coca-Cola) and a man who cared deeply enough about his community to help fund the Cobb Memorial Hospital in Royston, Ga., which evolved into the Ty Cobb Healthcare System.

Don Rhodes of the popular "Ramblin' Rhodes" syndicated music columns may be the first man ever to make Cobb appear human, which is not to say normal. "Safe at Home" is the best book to date about baseball's most extreme personality.

-- By Allen Barra

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"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America," Jacques Barzun once wrote, "had better learn baseball." Ten-year-old Maggie-O Fortini, the nickname courtesy of her father, whose favorite baseball player is Joe DiMaggio, understands that instinctively. As a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the early 1950s, she gets her first lessons in loyalty, community, and heartbreak from following her team. Newbery medallist Linda Sue Park's novel is being marketed for young adults, but it's unlikely that anyone who loves W.P. Kinsella's classic "Shoeless Joe" wouldn't love "Keeping Score" just as much.

-- By Allen Barra

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The premise here is both simple and ingenious: Take eight major changes in baseball since 1960 and record the testimony of eyewitnesses. Oral history, probably because most of it is unfocused, tends to be dull. "Change Up" combines the perspective of history with the immediacy of journalism.

-- By Allen Barra