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Title: “Nolan Ryan: From Alvin to Cooperstown.”

Publisher: The Sporting News ($29.95).

Here’s a novel format for a sports biography. The Sporting News, using solely its own and other newspaper stories, tracks Nolan Ryan’s life from teen Texas flamethrower to the final day, in 1993, when he blew out his elbow on his last major league pitch--a fastball to Dave Magadan.

It’s packaged from the first story, a 1966 piece about Ryan’s first full pro baseball season--beginning at Greenville, S.C.--and of Met scout Red Murff, who’d begun following Ryan as a high school sophomore in Alvin, Texas.

And why was Ryan the 295th player taken in the 1965 baseball draft?

For one thing, he weighed 150 pounds. And although he had a 100-mph fastball, he had no idea where it was going.

But for one thing, Murff said, he might have passed on Ryan.

“Murff was different because he met my parents once,” Ryan recalled. “He saw how big my dad was [6 feet 4, 240 pounds]. He saw my genetic potential.”

And this, from a 1971 story, after Ryan had struck out 16 San Diego Padres, from San Diego Manager Preston Gomez:

“Every one of those 16 strikeouts was on a swinging third strike. And half of those were on high pitches . . . balls. But that’s the way [Sandy] Koufax used to get his strikeouts. The ball comes in and looks like it’s going to be a strike and then because of velocity, it rises. But by then the batter is swinging.”

This book has everything--even Ryan’s recipe for rattlesnake oil.

In 1972, Angel pitcher Clyde Wright confirmed that Ryan had cured his sore shoulder with the stuff.

“You gut the rattlesnake and boil the oil,” Ryan told writers. “You’d be surprised how much oil you get out of a three- or four-year-old rattler.”

Rub the oil into the sore joint, then apply a heating pad, Ryan said.

And now you know how that right arm of his held up through 27 major league seasons.