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What: “O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto.” Edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely. The Ecco Press.

Price: $10 (paperback only). All royalties go to children’s charities including: Saint Joseph’s School for the Blind in Jersey City, N.J.; the Hale House in New York, and the Children’s Specialized Hospital in Mountainside, N.J.

How Tom Peyer and Hart Seely got the idea to turn transcriptions of Phil Rizzuto’s play-by-play announcing into a collection of, um, poems is probably pure silliness. But after reading “The Selected Verse” it seems to border on genius.

I don’t know why exactly--maybe it’s the sheer visceral power of the phrase “Holy Cow!”

No, can’t be that. Rizzuto, a former Yankee shortstop and in his third decade as the team’s broadcaster, doesn’t even use the phrase much in this collection.

Maybe it’s the fact that so little of it is strictly about baseball, but rather life in general. For example:

HAIKU

Ice, I can’t stand it.

I cannot stand anything

Cold on my body.

(May 31, 1991. Milwaukee at New York, Julio Machado pitching to Hensley Meulens. Eighth inning, no outs, bases empty, score tied, 2-2.)

Who thought to make that a Haiku? Once you overcome your sense of “Why?” you gain a sense of song.

Perhaps, like the Yankee broadcasts themselves, the charm is in the continuity of dialogue and not in the snippets. It’s not educational, there’s very little insight and it’s not side-splitting humor.

But it is whimsical and charming in its way. You start to understand the man they call “Scooter.”

Understand him?

O Holy Cow!