Perfectly Suited for This Baseball Season : No heroics in this stumblebum novel : THE NEW YORK YANQUIS <i> By Bill Granger (Arcade Publishing: $21.95; 288 pp.) </i>

As if baseball, in this long summer, fall, winter, spring of its discontent, weren’t in enough trouble, the literature that sticks to the game like double-knits in the August heat appears to have split a seam, as well. In “The New York Yanquis,” author Bill Granger has managed to come up with baseball’s first replacement novel.

“Replacement” is the operative concept here. Granger saw the handwriting on the line-up card, so to speak, and responded, both in content (where he legs out a hit or two before he’s done), and in form (where he commits some egregious A-ball errors). Should the established stars of the National Pastime’s Literary League (both fiction and nonfiction divisions)--the Mark Harrises, W.P. Kinsellas, Roger Angells and Tom Boswells--opt not to cross the picket line with their pens this season, Granger might be able to pull in a cursory fan or two. (This august critical organ clearly understood what we have here. Did it ask an Updike or an Oates to weigh in on “Yanquis”? No. In the spirit of the times, it went with a replacement reviewer.) Granger’s story sends to the plate one George Bremenhaven, the conniving Steinbrenner-esque owner of the once-proud New York Yankees. A fluffier and less menacing sendup of the Boss than even “Seinfeld” delivers, Bremenhaven quickly sells off his millionaire also-rans and--here comes the r-word in its literal sense--”replaces” them with 24 (we’ll get to the 25th guy in a minute) aspiring Cuban All-Stars via a deal brokered through the State Department with Havana hard-baller Fidel Castro himself. Hence, the “Yanquis.”

The curveball in Bremenhaven’s plot is Ryan Shawn, the novel’s narrator and protagonist. At 38, he’s at the end of the line. He drinks too much Miller Genuine Draft and watches too many Clint Eastwood movies (his most discernible character traits) and oozes with such pearls of personal revelation as “I always have felt the need to stand up for something like a principle, but I’ve never gotten to it” and “Telling the truth is just frying eggs in bacon grease. Lying is making an omelette.” A once reliable starting pitcher, he’s been relegated to mopping up the messes left by the higher-priced arms in the Yankee rotation.

As we meet him, his next stop should be a beer distributorship in El Paso, but Bremenhaven needs at least his verbal pitch; Shawn speaks Spanish and somebody has to communicate with the young Cubans, keep them in line, inculcate them into capitalism, and pass on at least some of the mysteries of playing the game at its highest level. As the Yanquis’ player-manager, Shawn’s job is to lead his charges to a respectable finish, but not to the pennant, or even the division title; Bremenhaven wants to teach baseball a lesson, not undermine democracy. In Shawn, he figures, he’s got his patsy. What he doesn’t realize is just how much Shawn has riding on this chance--how much he has to prove, and how much he needs to win. Like Sparky Anderson, he still has some respect for the game.

Not an altogether unclever idea, that, but ideas aren’t enough. Any Little Leaguer can tell you that lots of balls leave the park in batting practice; only execution under game conditions really counts. And it’s execution that makes “Yanquis”--and here comes the r-word again--a replacement novel, too. As baseball novels go, it simply isn’t Major League.

Granger doesn’t get far enough inside the game to make it interesting (he actually puts the Marlins in the American League--shame on him), and he doesn’t get deep enough inside his characters--particularly the Cubans--to make them compelling. (How can you tantalize imaginations with a power-hitter named Guevara and not trace his lineage back to Che, one of the all-time great lefties?) The essential plot moves along like a grounder through a rutted infield; its final bad hop is its unsurprising resolution and Shawn’s treacly coyness in delivering it.

“Yanquis,” in the end, is knocked out of the box by its cartoonishness; its universe is just a little off. When it tries to be funny, it isn’t funny enough; when it tries to be poignant, it isn’t poignant enough; and when it leans toward thriller--bumpkins from the State Department and the IRS pop in from time to time to pump up the pressure--it simply isn’t thrilling enough.

A final observation, and a final gripe. The observation: The route the cabdriver takes to ferry Shawn, returning from Cuba, from Kennedy Airport to his apartment in New Jersey just over the George Washington Bridge had me salivating. I wanted to reactivate my old hack license; at least that was skilled hack work.

The gripe: In a letter accompanying my review copy of the book, the publishing house’s associate publisher and executive editor concludes the usual pre-publication hype with a catalogue of “Yanquis’ ” virtues, including an allusion to Shawn’s pitching “the first ever no-hitter . . . in relief” between its pages. Sorry. Ernie Shore pulled off that oddity in 1917, and he had to replace Babe Ruth to do it. Maybe what we could really use are some replacement publishers.