CULT BASEBALL PLAYERS: The Greats, the Flakes, the Weird and the Wonderful <i> edited by Danny Peary (Simon & Schuster: $10.95; 383 pp.) </i>

As Tom Boswell, the Washington Post’s great baseball writer, once put it: “A baseball hero is a toy of childhood.” He can give a young fan both a sense of delight and discovery and a knowledge of “the profound uncontrollableness of nature.” Danny Peary’s wonderfully chosen collection of essays (many printed here for the first time) offer those same pleasures.

Thanks to ex-sports columnist John Schulian (who now co-produces TV’s “Midnight Caller”), we learn that Pacific Coast League sensation Steve Bilko was such a hit in 1950s L.A. that when young TV writer Neil Simon was hunting for a name for Phil Silvers’ conniving Army sergeant there was one name he couldn’t get out of his mind--”the name he read every day in the sports page, the name that almost chose itself for him: Bilko. Nothing like that ever happened to Mickey Mantle.”

What makes “Cult Baseball Players” particularly absorbing is the wide variety of writers who reveal a secret passion for the sport. Independent film director John Sayles praises slugger Dick Stuart. Pete Hamill reminisces about scrappy infielder Eddie Stanky. Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould raves about obscure Giants outfielder Dusty Rhodes. Film director Ron Shelton introduces us to hard-drinking minor-league phenom Steve Dalkowski, whose blazing fastball terrorized Hall of Famer Ted Williams. Unfortunately, his legendary arm was so wild that Dalkowski once hit an ump with a wild pitch and broke his mask in three places, and when the Aberdeen Proving Grounds tried to measure Dalkowski’s fastball with a primitive radar gun, it took him 40 minutes before he could hit the target.

In an essay on his father, the great Dodgers catcher, Roy Campanella II remembers the spectacular L.A. exhibition-game tribute attended by 94,000 adoring fans after his father was paralyzed in an auto accident. But at the Sheraton Hotel where the black Campanella family was staying, the management refused to let them use the pool.

That’s baseball, a game filled with delights and disappointments, heroes and flops. A game big enough for flakes like Bill Lee, mystery men like catcher Moe Berg (who worked as a spy for the wartime OSS) and aging journeyman Marvelous Marv Throneberry, who when he was unceremoniously shipped off to the minors at the end of his career, departed with the vow: “I ain’t done yet.”