BASEBALL

THE IMAGE OF THEIR GREATNESS: An Illustrated History of Baseball From 1900 to the Present (Third Revised Edition) by Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig (Crown: $15; 438 pp., paper). Not much type, mostly pictures, but they’re all there: Harry the Cat, Big and Little Poison, Sunny Jim, Sal the Barber, Minnie, Dazzy and Baby Doll. Here’s Cobb slicing into second with malice aforethought; the Splendid Splinter in a classic follow-through; Bobby Thomson doing it to Brooklyn; Curt Flood doing it to the owners, and even Cal Coolidge, clumsier than Nixon(!), tossing out the first ball of 1928 to the wonderment of Senator manager Bucky Harris (above). Perfect between-innings seat-spreader for a couch potato. Play ball!