Soiled Pinstripes

For several seasons it has been hanging over our beautiful summer game, a storm cloud of controversy that casts a dark and evil shadow across the golden basepaths, across the wide sweep of outfield, even across the sport pages where the exploits of our sunshine superstars are chronicled day by day.

This game of style and elegance, of doubles by Yastrzemski and catches by Mays, this pokey, leisurely, dreamy, and forever enthralling game is soiled now. It is dishonored and disgraced, besmirched by contract feuds, law suits, and nasty tempers. And the sorry symbols of the decline of this storied, rich, and fascinating game are the soiled pinstripes of the Yankees.

In sunnier years, the Yankees gave the sport its greatest honor and grace. Today's Yankees, as Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock make all too plain, are different Yankees, their pinstripes cut from a rougher, meaner fabric. There was a time when the nation wrote ballads to Joltin' Joe DiMaggio and sang "We want you on our side." All that is over now, dead. The Yankees of old, of Ruth and Gehrig, of Mantle and Maris, were not obedient altar boys, but there was something ennobling about the way they swung their bats and tipped their hats and - let it be said - kept the rest of the truth from us. Sparky Lyle, on the other hand, tells all the world he likes to sit nude on birthday cakes. "For a little fun," he says - and you can look it up - "I'd take my clothes off and go and sit on it."

What is the message of The Bronx Zoo? Part of it is that, for all its newfound faults, baseball is still a world where a team can fight all the odds (and a hugely talented team from Boston) and still win out. And part of it, alas, is that baseball now is a world much like our own.

THE BRONX ZOOby Peter Golenbock '67 and Sparky LyleCrown, 1979. 248 pp. $8.95

David Shribman is a member of the Washingtonbureau of the Buffalo News and a longtimeBoston Red Sox supporter.