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.

Title: “A Clever Base-Ballist”

Author: Bryan Di Salvatore

Publisher: Pantheon Books

Price: $27.50

When John Montgomery Ward was named to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1964, followers of the game had two questions:

* Who is he?

For the few who did know of him, the second question was:

* Does he go in as a pitcher or a position player?

Ward was one of the game’s great 19th-century players, a pitcher who in one season, 1879, had a 47-19 record, pitched baseball’s second perfect game and won 164 National League games before an arm injury ended his pitching days at age 24.

Then his career took an odd turn.

Ward switched to center field, where he learned to throw left-handed. Later, he became a top-flight shortstop, willed himself into a .300 hitter and led the NL twice in stolen bases. In baseball’s bible, Total Baseball, his career statistics are shown both in the position player and pitcher sections.

But Ward, who retired the year before Babe Ruth was born, was far more than a prominent “base-ballist,” as sportswriters then termed ballplayers. He was a student-athlete at Penn State, breaking into pro baseball in 1878. While playing later with the New York Giants, he studied law at night at Columbia and graduated with honors.

And he was a leader of men, guiding an 1889 player revolt against baseball’s reserve clause, a movement that led to the ill-fated Players League of 1890. About 100 major leaguers fled the NL to join the new league, but it folded after one season.

Di Salvatore’s scholarship is impressive, right down to Ward’s life at Penn State, but most of all for the rich detail of what passed for a big-leaguer’s life in the 19th century. In 1880, Ward--a superstar, remember--earned $1,700, or about five times the pay of an average wage earner in the U.S.

It was a era when players were charged 50 cents a day for board on trips, $30 per season for their uniforms--which they were required to launder themselves.

Verdict: A sports biography of the first order.