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What: “Babe Ruth Slept Here--The Baseball Landmarks of New York City”

Publisher: Diamond Communications

Author: Jim Reisler. Price: $18.95.

This is an item-by-item look at famous baseball sites in New York City, be they onetime baseball parks, Lou Gehrig’s birthplace or saloons where epic baseball brawls occurred.

Problem is, Reisler fails in many cases to say whether a site he describes still exists. Example: Reisler describes in compelling detail the 12-room mansion at 1116 Fifth Avenue and East 93rd Street that was home to Col. Jacob Ruppert, owner of the Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig Yankee teams. The mansion had “peach and apple orchards” in the backyard and a staff that included a butler, maid, valet, cook and laundress, the author writes.

He offers this disclaimer in the introduction: “Don’t go looking for some of these landmarks because they might not be there anymore--John McGraw’s pool hall is now a parking lot and Lou Gehrig’s birthplace is a nursery.”

He does finish with the birthplace of Gehrig, who weighed 14 pounds at his 1903 birth. He serves up a photo of the birthplace site, 1994 Second Avenue and East 103rd Street. At the site now is a joint called “JFK Fried Chicken” and a nursery.

Another highlight: A treatise on the gruesome death of Arnold Rothstein, who allegedly bankrolled the fix of the 1919 World Series.

In 1928, Rothstein lost $300,000 in a poker game and refused to pay up. The next day, a hit man shot him. The final irony: Friends said Rothstein would have collected $570,000 for all the bets he’d made on Herbert Hoover over Al Smith in the presidential election.