NONFICTION - Aug. 2, 1992

GIRLS OF SUMMER by Lois Browne (HarperCollins: $19; 212 pp.) You’ve seen the movie--or perhaps you haven’t, if you were stopped in your moviegoing tracks by the New Yorker’s Michael Sragow, he of the sledgehammer pan of “A League of Their Own”--and now you can read the book. Canadian television researcher Browne stumbled upon the All-American League in the course of her work, and tells us everything she found out about the women’s professional baseball league, which lasted from 1943 to 1954. Repeating it sounds like an HBO promo for the film: women who had to slide into third wearing short skirts and go to charm school, lest they appear insufficiently feminine to draw a crowd; women who had a raucous time on the road; a league that finally fell victim to a dearth of qualified players, financial mismanagement and a postwar society ready to snuggle back down to traditional sex roles. This is “Rosie the Riveter” on the baseball diamond, the story of women who had an equal chance only as long as men were unavailable. Browne, a diligent researcher, packs her book with the minutiae of the league’s history, but she is not a graceful writer. Too often the book suffers from clumsy execution, sentences that bump up against each other. “Not that the Peaches, whose roster had been weakened by injuries, had received no help from the League.” I mean, I’ll take on a double negative any time, but wasn’t there an easier way to say that?