BASEBALL, more than any other sport, has inspired good writing from important authors and gained serious attention from thoughtful people. From Ring Lardner’s ignorant and mean-spirited “busher,” Jack Keefe, to Mark Harris’s intelligent and warm-hearted southpaw Henry Wiggen, to Bernard Malamud’s mythical Arthurian hero, the “natural” Roy Hobbs, writers have used baseball and its players to say something about the world and the people in it. How someone sees the game and its players reveals the kind of person he is and what he values.