Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, December 19, 1993                   TAG: 9312190218
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: D-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by BOB WILLIS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WORSHIP A GLORIUS PAST

DIAMONDS: THE EVOLUTION OF THE BALLPARK. By Michael Gershman. Houghton Mifflin. $39.95.

You say the exciting pennant races are past, and the World Series is history? You say long winter months separate you from spring training? And with the new three-division major leagues, you say the game may never be the same again anyway?

Is that what's bothering you, baseball junkie?

Never fear. Curl up with these volumes, forget the cold, and slip into an age long gone. "Baseball Archaeology" lets you see - up close and personal through photo blow-ups - what they wore and played the game with from the days of Henry Chadwick on down.

Here are the flimsy gloves, the funny bats, the evolving catcher's gear. Tickets and programs and souvenirs. Mickey Cochrane's mitt. The Babe's war club. A 1910 contract signed by "Nap" Rucker for an astounding $3,000 a season. And so on and on. Genuflecting isn't necessary, but hushed tones are appropriate.

Even better is "Diamonds," which weaves a history of the sport through an account of how major-league ballparks developed from virtual cow pastures, with rock-strewn infields and swampy outfields, into the luxurious stadiums of today. The ballfields of yesteryear all had 90 feet between bases; otherwise they were all different. Here you'll learn how they were different, and how the field surfaces and park fences influenced the way the game was played - and watched.

Gershman, a collaborator on the monumental "Total Baseball," has reservations about the much-praised Camden Yards in Baltimore, and mostly disdain for modern domes and "cookie-cutter" parks; he prefers the traditional like Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. Because the focus is on parks, there's more about owners, developers and politicians than about individual players.

But there are wonderful anecdotes _ e.g., do you know why double-play specialists Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker didn't speak to each other for 33 years? There are also delightful arcana, including priceless old photographs that I, a peruser of baseball books for more than 50 years, had never before seen. This 260-page volume is a treasure house.

Bob Willis recently retired from the editorial page of this newspaper.