A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “The Cultural Encyclopedia of

Baseball” by Jonathan Fraser Light.

McFarland & Company, Inc.

Price: $75 hardcover.

This book may contain more information about baseball than anyone truly needs to know. Consider an entry about Babe Ruth on page 764:

“Ruth was criticized early on for wearing the same sweaty underwear both during and after the game. In response he simply stopped wearing underwear for a few years.”

Author Jonathan Fraser Light, a Camarillo lawyer by day, spent seven years gathering overlooked morsels about the grand old game. He spent weeks pawing through boxes of documents at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

The result is a compendium of 20,000 historical tidbits and short biographies on everyone from Hank Aaron to Cy Young, along with enough statistics to satisfy most number-heads.

But the strength of the book is its oddball minutiae, the folklore and humor that underscore the game.

Light tells of whalers who, icebound above the Arctic Circle in 1894, divided themselves into seven teams and formed the first known Alaskan baseball league. He writes that Rogers Hornsby didn’t watch movies, read any more than what was necessary or look out the window of a moving train for fear of losing his batting eye.

The $75 cover price may scare away all but die-hard fans. But, as historian Bruce Catton said:

“Baseball’s legends are, in some ways, the most enduring part of the game. Baseball has even more of them than the Civil War, and its fans prize them highly.”