The New Baseball Reader (1991)

For sheer pleasure at the richness of the game, you can't do better than one of Charles Einstein's anthologies. The New Baseball Reader is his sixth, and it's crammed with delightful moments, some tart, some odd, some goofy. Here we have the last six lines of William (Sugar) Wallace's poem ''Anthem,'' which is built out of nicknames: ''Jigger, Jabbo/Jolting Joe/Blue Moon/Boom Boom/Bubba/Bo.'' But there is serious fiction by the likes of Bernard Malamud and Robert Penn Warren, as well as reporting, biography, and history. A-