BOOK REVIEW : Veiled Poignancy in All-American Game : THE DREYFUS AFFAIR: A Love Story <i> by Peter Lefcourt</i> ; Random House; $20; 297 pages

Peter Lefcourt, a Los Angeles novelist and television writer, thanks his editor in the acknowledgments of “The Dreyfus Affair” for buying the book “on a one-sentence pitch.” And within a dozen pages you know (unless you’ve cheated and read the flap copy) exactly what that pitch must have been: All-star shortstop falls in love with second baseman. It is an appealing, almost irresistible idea for a comic novel, and in Lefcourt’s deft hands it becomes a thoroughly enjoyable send-up of professional baseball.

Although “The Dreyfus Affair” is not intended to be taken very seriously, there is, nonetheless, a serious question at its core, one that no doubt inspired Lefcourt to name the book after one of the great political scandals of the 19th Century: Do we, as a nation, want positions of social significance to be filled by the most qualified people, or only by those who have passed some cultural litmus test?

Randy Dreyfus plays for the Vikings, an American League expansion team created in 1995 that plays in a 125,000-seat stadium in the San Fernando Valley.

The team is competitive, largely because it is solid up the middle: Dreyfus hits in the .330s and fields like Ozzie Smith, while his equally smooth second baseman, the loner D. J. Pickett, hits .285 with 50 to 60 RBIs every year. The Vikings, as “The Dreyfus Affair” unfolds, are in the pennant hunt, and Dreyfus is in the midst of contract negotiations that could bring him a salary close to $7 million a year.

Dreyfus isn’t quite into the game these days, slumping at the plate and missing easy grounders, but his lack of focus has nothing to do with escalators and performance clauses. He’s begun to experience some unusual feelings--feelings he’d be happy to have around his stereotypically beautiful wife, Susie, or even some sexy road groupie, but not in the Vikings’ locker room and not about his double-play partner.

Dreyfus is terrified that he may be homosexual and soon begins going secretly to a therapist, Dr. Fuad, in the hope that the images haunting him can be talked away. Lefcourt makes Dreyfus’ sexual confusion funny yet endearing by capitalizing on the enormous gap between the player’s embryonic feelings and the Neanderthal approach to sexual relations condoned, even encouraged, by professional athletics.

Dreyfus asks quite seriously in his very first session with Fuad: “Doc, do you think it’s possible for a guy who thinks Pia Zadora’s a fox to be queer?” Fuad does, and in fact encourages Dreyfus to explore his feelings.

Dreyfus subsequently asks Pickett out to dinner, they agree to meet in an out-of-the-way restaurant, and in the course of the evening the second baseman reveals that he is gay. Pickett warns Dreyfus about the dangers of being gay in a high-profile, presumptively macho profession, but a few weeks later, after a chance, wee-hour encounter, they give in to temptation.

Their clandestine relationship deepens over the next road trip, and as it does Dreyfus and Pickett carry the Vikings into first place. In Dallas, however, they make an enormous mistake: They’re caught necking, on videotape, in a Neiman Marcus changing room, and the deputy sheriff who arrested them swears that they committed sodomy.

It’s a public relations disaster for the Vikings, but the club brilliantly stage-manages the episode--greatly helped by the district attorney’s refusal to release the videotape--so that it appears to be no more than adolescent horseplay fueled by alcohol. Dreyfus and Pickett, who hardly drink at all, are forced into a substance-abuse program, and they realize that they have little choice but to remain in the closet.

The Vikings, meanwhile, win the division and the pennant, but when the Neiman Marcus tape is stolen from the D.A.’s office and released, Dreyfus and Pickett are banned from the game for “conduct detrimental to the best interest of baseball.”

That’s not the end of the story, of course, for like Alfred Dreyfus in 1898, Randy Dreyfus has his Zola--Milt Zola, the suspicious reporter mentioned above and head baseball writer for the Valley Tribune. He even writes a column titled “I Accuse,” which creates a furor.

At one point in the novel, Lefcourt tells us Dreyfus’ thoughts: “He was hitting .338 and had a shot at MVP. And he was in love with a wonderful guy. What more could he want?” Lines like that encourage one to think of this book as no more than a role-switch story, but Lefcourt (author also of a novel called “The Deal,” episodes of “Cagney & Lacey,” and, curiously, television adaptations of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel) has given the book unexpected substance.

It won’t be mistaken for high art, but “The Dreyfus Affair,” at its best, is pointed and poignant at the same time.