By Richard Dorment
Baseball is the literary sport of America, so it's fitting that, just in time for the new season, the Library of America—a non-profit organization committed to preserving our literary heritage—is publishing Baseball: A Literary Anthology.

This 750-page 76-author celebration, edited by Nicholas Dawidoff, contains over a century's worth of strikeouts, scandals, and World Series rivalries. "Casey at the Bat" is there, on the first page, and so is almost every other piece of great baseball writing—from an early Thomas Wolfe story to John Updike's seminal profile of Ted Williams for the New Yorker.

The publishers describe the book as "a definitive collection of baseball prose." It's also, for a baseball or book lover, sheer romance ($35; 800-327-6391; www.loa.org).