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Then there are books by writers who have covered baseball for living, such as two of my favourites of this sub-genre, Roger Kahn's classic Boys of Summer and Mike Shropshire's somewhat less known Seasons In Hell.

The former is an ambitious effort from Kahn, who covered the Dodgers for the now-defunct New York Herald-Tribune for two pennant-winning seasons in the early 1950s. A Brooklyn native, Kahn somehow earned the Dodger beat at all of 24 years old, which would be unheard of today, but he held his own in a hypercompetitive news market which included the likes of Dick Young and Red Smith.

Nearly two decades after he covered the team, Kahn caught up with several famous and forgotten names from the Brooklyn days, setting out to portray them as "something more than baseball-playing men." Where his sales were concerned, Boys of Summer, published in 1971, hit bookstores at the right time. The generation who remembered Campy, Jackie, Pee Wee and Duke and their teammates was just hitting that 30-something age where one usually rediscovers an interest in baseball and/or history. Additionally, Brooklyn and New York City was in a period of turmoil created by a steady urban decay, so it's understandable if one wanted to wallow in nostalgia, harken back to an era that can never be retrieved. It's not for nothing that the book ends with Kahn visiting the apartment block which stood (and presumably stands there still) one the former grounds of Ebbets Field.

A drawback to The Boys of Summer is it impossible to separate it from the "Brooklyn Dodgers kitsch" in spawned, as typified by Ken Burns' interminable documentary Baseball.

Shropshire's book, which draws on his raucous experiences covering the Texas Rangers for a Fort Worth paper from 1973 to '75, is in no risk of being written off as mawkish sentiment.

On the first page, he writes, "I doubt Ken Burns ever experienced hours five and six of cross-country charter with the Rangers, when the plane to on the air of field day at Attica (Prison). Nor do I suspect Burns devoted approximately 1,000 semester hours studying under two of the greatest practitioners of baseball strategy, Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin -- lecture sessions that were heavily fortified by John Barleycorn."

Not unlike Kahn, who lucked into covering a legendary team in his first job at a daily newspaper, Shropshire landed in the right place when he was assigned to cover the laughingstock Rangers in 1973.

As someone who says, "I never thought of myself as being even slightly involved with the newspaper business," one of his previous assignments had been a scam called 'television editor-critic.'

Unthinkable though it may be in the age of media consolidation and bean-counters who nickel-and-dime each and every one of their subsidiaries whenever they can, he once recalled "interviewing Dick Clark for four hours.... and signing a drink tab that exceeded $500, which was a hell of an accomplisment in 1970 prices."

In other words, Shropshire and the writer he shared the Rangers' beat with in '73, Harold McKinney, had free rein to live life to the fullest, and the players, fully aware the team was going nowhere and unable to file for free agency, were of a similar mindset. The divisions which exist between players and members of the media were not yet entrenched, meaning "a cerebral group of journalists and professional ballplayers" closed down more than a few bars.

McKinney, who would die of cancer two years later, was the perfect foil to Shropshire during his first spring training in Florida. "For every dollar of company money I was spending, Harold was spending three to five. And in my humble opinion, the stuff he was filing back to Texas made my stuff look like John Steinbeck." McKinney, as Shropshire relates, had a novel approach to this work: "Good writing is too goddamned much trouble."

And make no mistake, just as the book was set in an interesting period -- or at least one I find interesting -- the Rangers were a colourful bunch. The left-fielder was Alex Johnson, the much-travelled one-time batting champion who once spiked a teammate who tried to shake his hand after he homered. In centre-field and other positions was Cesar Tovar, whom Shropshire describes as the "quintessential blithe spirit, who insisted everyone call him Pepi, although other names probably came into use since he was rumoured to be married to three women in three countries."

Then there was left-hander Jim 'Bones' Merritt, who earned a brief moment in the spotlight when he admitted to throwing a "greaseball" after pitching a shutout one Sunday afternoon in Cleveland. (Producing a tube of K-Y jelly, Merritt told reporters, "I would like to announce I am coming out of the closet.")

Another notable was pitcher Jim Bibby (uncle of the Sacramento Kings guard), who possessed a certain bodily part "that might qualify for display in the Smithsonian." For a time, legendary flake Jimmy Piersall was a Rangers employee whom according to the author "viewed his job as going around telling doctors and lawyers to fuck off."

In Boys of Summer, Kahn portrays Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen -- the genius who brought in Ralph Branca to pitch to Bobby Thomson on Oct. 3, 1951 -- as something of a surrogate father who is fairly brimming with salt-of-the-earth wisdom.

Shropshire did not need to use any creative or literary devices with the Ranger pilots, Whitey Herzog, who "presided over a comedy of errors in 1973," and Billy Martin, who managed one full season before getting his first gig in Pinstripes. (Typical exchange between sportswriter and skipper: "This team has some fairly controversial characters on it. How do you plan to deal with them?" Martin: "Who's more controversial than I am?")

Herzog's best moment as Rangers manager likely came in Milwaukee, when he accused the home team of using Bernie Brewer to steal Texas' pitching signs. Martin, for his part, is banned from a Dallas-area country club after he and drinking buddy Mickey Mantle allegedly ran over Ben Hogan with a golf cart.

Seasons In Hell succeeds because Shropshire's recollections are far more vivid than those of Kahn, who seemed to idealize his subjects. As a working reporter, I hang my head in shame because, unlike Shropshire, I have never gone on an assignment with a splitting hangover, much less attempted to cover a Bat Day doubleheader in Milwaukee. Confronted with the ear-splitting din created by 31,000 Wisconsin youth pounding their giveaway bats against the grandstand, Shropshire's recourse was to "place my head down next to my typewriter and pray for the swift arrival of the Angel of Death."

Ultimately, Shropshire's warts-and-all take on the diamond game resonates more with me because I suspect it reveals more about the the reality of covering a major-league baseball team than The Boys of Summer. When you cover any team, invariably there will be instances which for all their hilarity, can't be reported on the sedate pages of the newspaper. (For me, this vignette of seeing a junior hockey player wearing panties for a shower cap will have to remain in my memory banks.)

While Kahn had all the ingredients for a best-seller, Shropshire had something more difficult to work with -- a collection of tall tales about a long-forgotten team, and make it breath again. Somehow, reading about a bunch of has-beens (Rico Carty, Jim 'Bones' Merritt) and never-weres (David Clyde) makes for compelling reading.

I won't stand here telling you Boys of Summer doesn't deserve to be in the "canon" of baseball books. However, Shropshire captures the experience of covering a baseball team, and if you like an unfeigned, brass-knuckles look at the game we know and love -- one that eschews sentiment -- track down Seasons In Hell.

I'd offer to lend you my copy, but it's falling to pieces.