First Fiction From California : CALIFORNIA RUSH <i> by Sherwood Kiraly (Macmillan Publishing: $17.95; 288 pp.) </i>

A reader can’t help but be a little apprehensive when a novel opens with too overt a reference to a literary classic. “Call me Charlie,” invites the baseball-playing, good ol’ boy narrator of Sherwood Kiraly’s first novel, “California Rush.” (All the books reviewed in this column are debut works by California writers.) But here the “Call me Ishmael” echo is a double reference: Philip Roth begins his own baseball book (“The Great American Novel”) in exactly the same way: “Call me Smitty.”

Actually, the bow to “Moby Dick” seems an obvious start for a baseball novel: Will a reader want to plow through detailed descriptions of the professional ballplayer’s superstitious daily routines, catalogue of injuries, obsessive ambitions and painful rise through the ranks of the minor leagues until finally he stands at the plate in his first major league ballpark? Will they tolerate this any better than they tolerate lengthy descriptions of whaling? Yet they must; the technicalities of the occupation are indispensable to the story.

Kiraly, like Roth and Melville before him, has not written just “a book about whaling.” Charlie Tyke’s story concerns a game he has just witnessed that has become instant legend: a 54-hit shutout that caused spectators practically to lose their minds. The reasons such an extreme situation could even occur require explanation, Charlie says, and he wants to assure readers that “Baseball is not at fault.” As one television commentator said after the game: “This is what happens when lunatics play by the rules.”

Kiraly’s novel, while tracing the careers of three players whose peculiar relationship make possible this crazy shutout, is really about the flexibility of the rules of baseball and, by extention, about the flexibility of the novel form.

Within the literary form that the author has undertaken to stretch, Kiraly manages to discuss some very unusual things, such as where the human soul’s urge to scream obscenities comes from. In his childhood, Charlie broke his leg (an injury that would, of course, affect his later baseball career). During the doctor’s examination, “It hurt so bad I screamed, but he bent my knee again, and I wanted to scream something foul and bad at him to show him how much I hated him, but I didn’t know any curses yet. The only bad thing I knew to say was ‘Shut up!’--I’d gotten in trouble for saying that to my parents once--so I just screamed ‘Shut up!’ at the old guy over and over, which must have perplexed him since nobody else was saying anything at that moment.”

Along with his novelist’s observations about human nature, Kiraly has naturally written lots of sports-story color: nicknames and how they were acquired, great barroom pick-up techniques, fear of the 90-mile-per-hour fastball, not to mention the exact set of circumstances that could produce a 54-hit shutout. But “California Rush” is not “just a baseball book.” It is a very entertaining story that should amuse even readers who are not fans of the sport.