THE NEWS AND OBSERVER: "Play ball! As the boys of summer look forward to a new season, authors celebrate the sport's past" - April is time for the new baseball books, and the gem of this year's crop is "Crazy '08" by Cait Murphy (Smithsonian Books, $24.95, 368 pages). It is centered on the far-fabled major league season of 1908, which for excitement and controversy remains foremost among historical pennant chases.

The 1908 season not only featured three-team stretch runs in both major leagues, but the National League race involved the renowned Bonehead Merkle game, which included the most controversial umpiring call in baseball history. Here's what happened:

On Sept. 28, 1908, the New York Giants are batting with two outs in the bottom of the ninth against the Chicago White Stockings. The score is tied 1-1 and the Giants have runners at first and third when Al Bridwell singles over second base. Young Fred Merkle on first, seeing the runner score from third, races joyously for the clubhouse without bothering to take second. Big mistake. "Under the rules of baseball," Murphy writes, "if the third out is a force, the run does not count."

The Chicago center fielder retrieves the ball and tosses it back. A New York base coach intercepts it and heaves it into the crowd. The ball, or in any event a ball, is thrown back on the field, whereupon Chicago's Johnny Evers grabs it and steps on second base.

By now hordes of Giant fans are pouring out onto the diamond, and players, managers and clientele are shouting and arguing. Meanwhile the September sun is receding behind Coogan's Bluff.

Umpire Hank O'Day makes the call; it is a force-out, the run doesn't count, and the game, remains tied at 1-1 but is called because of darkness (no floodlights back then).

Then and afterward the aggrieved Giants yell bloody murder, but the league stands behind the ump. Two weeks later the regular season ends with Cubs and Giants tied for first. The tie game is ordered replayed, Chicago wins the replay and the pennant, and in the World Series trounces the Detroit Tigers, four games to one. As for Fred Merkle, he acquires a nickname that lasts for a lifetime.

The Giants, Cait Murphy writes, lost the pennant on a technicality -- but, she adds, baseball is a game of technicalities.

All this is recounted vividly in her book, along with a great deal else that happened in 1908 and with a remarkable feel for the Dead Ball Era in general. The stars and planets of early 20th-century baseball are present in force -- Tinker-to-Evans-to-Chance, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, John J. McGraw, Three-Finger Brown, Ty Cobb, Iron Man McGinnity, Rube Waddell, Nap Lajoie, Turkey Mike Donlin, Ed Walsh, Bugs Raymond, etc., etc. A baseball galaxy, truly.

And Murphy, an editor at Fortune magazine writes so well -- sagely, with much good humor. She delights in the game's high jinks, and she knows that purple prose is almost never the right way to write about baseball. "Crazy '08" is worthy to stand alongside Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory of Their Times" and a very few other books of baseball history -- which is to say, out in front.

- Louis D. Rubin Jr., Raleigh, North Carolina

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(Sports Illustrated, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal)