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What: “The Heavenly World Series”

Author: Frank O’Rourke

Publisher: Carroll & Graf

Price: $25

Frank O’Rourke was more than a lover of baseball. The versatile author, whose writings spanned five decades, was also a historian and storyteller of a game once known for its unbridled innocence.

In his new collection of fictional short stories, “The Heavenly World Series,” arranged in part by novelist Darryl Brock and O’Rourke’s widow, Edith Carlson, O’Rourke shares his deep knowledge and love of baseball.

“The stories in this new collection ... bring baseball history alive,” Brock writes in the book’s introduction, “from turn-of-the-century cow-pasture games to the small-town fever of the ‘30s, and on to the major leagues of the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

O’Rourke, a former sandlot player and manager who died in 1989 after producing more than 100 short stories and 60 books, was a master of mixing fiction and real-life historical events and people into a seamless baseball universe.

One of O’Rourke’s few challenges in recounting baseball’s past is the fact that he must adhere to its modernization--such as players’ salaries bellowing faster than their egos.

O’Rourke hits this low curve ball by always hinting that the game is bigger than its participants.

At the conclusion of “Flashing Spikes,” for example, we see how baseball’s purity prevails when a self-centered, up-and-coming star sees the error of his ways, but only after learning one of baseball’s many lessons from a member of the old Black Sox.

Information: (646) 375-2570 or www.avalonpub.com.