THE ERA: 1947-1957 When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World By Roger Kahn. Ticknor & Fields, 372 pp., illustrated, $22.95. Roger Kahn is to books about baseball what Carl Yastrzemski was to baseball itself. Kahn wrote...

PW: How did the writing process for October Men [reviewed on p. 62] compare to that of your other books? Roger Kahn: It all tends to be a pattern of two to three years of work. All my books tend to have...

A lot of writers have asked Willie Mays over the years if he would cooperate with them on a book, and almost every time, the baseball legend has refused their advances. About two weeks ago, however, at the age of 76, the Say Hey Kid...

Clem Labine, a relief pitcher who threw two of baseball's most significant shutouts in his role as a part-time starter and pitched for two Dodgers World Series championship teams in the 1950s, died Friday. He was 80.Labine had been in a coma at Indian River...

Baseball is too often confused with the Major Leagues, or even with Joe Garagiola and the Game of the Week. But baseball is also college and Little League, high school and vacant lot and American Legion and Class A. "A Season in the Sun" takes its form from Roger Kahn's notion of baseball's scope. To make this book, Kahn spent last summer touching down at the four corners of the baseball world…. From the affluence of Chavez Ravine, Kahn's "Season" slop...

"The Seventh Game" is a novel about an aging pitcher on the mound for the last game of a world series (probably the last game of his career), and of the life he has lived up until this particular October afternoon. Mr. Kahn commits enough writerly sins to send himself back to the minors. The book is littered with borrowings, from his own work (he tosses compliments at friends he encountered and evokes the places he visited on his summer's research for "A Season in the Sun"...

There are many ways to waste one's youth; I wasted mine rooting for the Yankees and the Republicans. They were my teams, not because they won but because they were near: Yankee Stadium was an hour's drive from my home; the Democrats, a little farther. Brookyn was terra incognita—no one I knew had ventured there—though when my radio wandered off-course I could hear Red Barber speaking a nearly familiar language from a place called Ebbets Field. Not everyone, I knew, worshiped [Tom...