Take Me in to the Ballgame : The companion book to Ken Burns’ PBS series may offer relief to the strike-stricken : BASEBALL: An Illustrated History, <i> By Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Alfred A. Knopf: $60; 469 pp.)</i>

They’ve taken away our game, damn them. Its stately pace, its exquisite subtleties, its charm, its chance, its estival elegance--gone, this year, in the name of Mammon.

The season’s questions have been frozen in time, then wrenched upright into a single, ugly exclamation point. Will Matt catch the Babe? Will the Big Hurt jolt one to Jupiter? Will Maddux’s anachronitic arm prevail over the hinky Haitians who wrapped the ball, this season, tighter than Walter O’Malley’s wallet? Forget it. There’s only one answer now:

Strike!

Not that baseball has vanished from what Red Smith was pleased to label “God’s green footstool.” There are still the minors, thank God, and the beer-belly bunds and the sandlots; give a kid a stick and what we used to call a “spaldeen” and in his mind, uncluttered by salary caps, he is Willie, plain and pure. And now there’s Ken Burns.

You remember Burns. The guy who conjured up that incomparable “Civil War” series for PBS, as well as “Brooklyn Bridge,” “Huey Long” and “The Shakers.” Now he’s turned his talents to The Game. “Baseball,” it’s called; in nine parts. It starts tonight, not a moment too soon, and there’s a book to go with it. A big book, generous in size as well as scope; a coffee-table book, you could call it, except that if you get coffee on this sucker you’re in for some serious grief.

There are splendid pictures--scores of them, hundreds, a lot of them rare--as well there should be: Baseball is as visual as it is physical and cerebral. And there are words, rollicking reams of them, by Burns and award-winning historian Geoffrey Ward, co-author of “The Civil War,” and essays by the likes of Roger Angell and George Will, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Bill James, The Times’ own David Lamb and Gerald Early, who puts a spin on the black baseball experience, both player and fan, that’s original, impertinent, insighful.

You’ll probably thumb through the photos first (gently, gently; lets not be bending the pages now); kids choosing up sides by the high-tech method of fist-around-the-bat; the Dartmouths hosting the Harvards in a game-on-the-green in 1882; a hand-tinted print of the old Cincinnati Reds, each position player sporting a different-colored jersey and cap for easy ID (an idea that mercifully died aborning); an old geezer on a porch under an American flag, portable radio pressed to an ear that hasn’t yet heard better days. The hands--just the hands--of Honus Wagner. Yaz poised, Musial coiled, Sandy staring, Jackie spiking, Yogi thinking, DiMag doffing, Williams not doffing, Maris balding, Bell barnstorming, Keeler bunting, Satchel relaxing, Ruth ripping, Willie in flight . . .

And the stories, Lord, the stories! There are the familiar ones; Shoeless Joe Jackson of the bribed Black Sox pleading with Commissioner Landis for another chance (a fat one at that: Judge Landis, while on the bench, once sentenced an old-timer to 15 years for robbery. “I’m 75,” the felon said. “I can’t serve that long.” Landis: “Do the best you can”). And the unfamiliar ones: Playing in 1931 for the Crawford Colored Giants on a circuit that was at least of major-league caliber, Josh Gibson hit more than 70 homers, inspiring legends that still circulate. Hit one so high, they say, that it never did come down, Next day, in Philly, a ball drops form the sky into an outfielder’s glove. Ump points to Josh: “You’re out--yesterday in Pittsburgh.”

Many already know that Cleveland shortstop Ray Champman was killed in 1920 by Yankee Carl May’s beanball, a tragedy called “baseball’s first fatality.” Less publicized is that fate of one James Creighton, “baseball’s first real star” and furtive inventor of the curveball. Batting for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in 1862, Creighton swung so hard he ruptured his bladder, and died four days later. Apropos of the curve, more than one league banned it outright. Said Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, “I am instructed that the purpose of the curve ball is to deliberately deceive the batter. Harvard is not in the business of teaching deception.”

No need to reheat the hash here: you’ll see it on the tube--Bobby Thomson’s homer, Gehrig’s farewell, the integration that finally made baseball the national pastime. It will delight you in the main, depress you some, rekindle the affection for the game you’ve carried in your mental mitt since you first lashed out at a ball so taped, retaped and reretaped it looked like a wounded muskmelon. But for lasting pleasure, the Book’s the Thing, something you can take shelter in, something you can quote:

Casey Stengel on being fired by the Yankees: “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 years old again.”

A losing pitcher on the Athletics’ huge first baseman: Jimmie Foxx wasn’t scouted, he was trapped.”

Satchel Paige: “I never joked when I was pitching. That ball I threw was thoughtful stuff.”

PA announcer Tex Rickards: “A little boy has been found lost.”

Umpire Silk O’Laughlin: “The Pope’s for religion. O’Laughlin’s for baseball. Both are infallible.”

George Bernard Shaw: “Who is Baby Ruth and what does she do?”

Finally, Walt Whitman: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game--the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, given them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.”

Strike that, you bums.