When the summers lasted long BY AL DIAMON

Baseball is like politics.

(Actually, baseball is nothing like politics. Unless you count congressional steroid hearings. Baseball is Manny being Manny. Politics is Rummy being Rummy. I only wrote that sentence in hopes the editor, feeling lazy as Labor Day weekend approaches, stops reading, figuring the rest of the column is some tortured metaphor about how the National Pastime explains the National Waste of Time. If nobody notices it isn’t, I can devote this space less to political spin and more to pitching rotation.)

I’ve spent much of the summer watching and reading about baseball. Sometimes, there’s a disconnect between the two.

Sitting in Hadlock Field, home of the Portland Sea Dogs, Double-A affiliate of the Red Sox, I was struck not by the ball, but by how often shortstop Hanley Ramirez appeared to have his mind on something other than the game. Maybe he was thinking about running for office rather than running the bases. It wasn’t unusual to see Ramirez jog halfheartedly to first or fail to take the extra base. While he occasionally thrilled the crowd with a hot-dog play, he also made 22 errors. On one occasion, when the team was shorthanded, he failed to show up for batting practice, knowing the manager couldn’t sit him down as punishment. Ramirez is just marking time until his elevation to Fenway.

You’d never know that from reading the Portland Press Herald.

"He is more than a top prospect," reporter Kevin Thomas wrote during spring training. "Ramirez is one of those unique, special players who do not come around often."

At mid-season, Thomas claimed Ramirez, batting a mediocre .271, "seems to shine when the crowd is bigger, when the occasion more important."

In late August, with Ramirez hitting .276, Thomas said it was "somewhat surprising" he hadn’t been promoted.

Fortunately, there’s honest baseball writing around.

"Baseball writers coddle players," wrote Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly. "They spend so much time with these undereducated, overpharmacied brats that they begin thinking like them."

As recent books by Maine (or Maine-connected) writers demonstrate, some journalists manage to avoid that pitfall. Mostly.

Ed Rice of Orono, author of Baseball’s First Indian: Louis Sockalexis: Penobscot Legend, Cleveland Indian, has been on an 18-year campaign to win acknowledgement of Sockalexis as the first of his race to play major league ball and the inspiration for the Cleveland club’s name. In both cases, he provides convincing, if not conclusive, evidence.

Sockalexis, born on Indian Island, made a big splash in the big league (there was only one) in 1897. In spite of rabid racism, he became one of the game’s best players. For half a season. After that, booze and brothels brought him down.

Rice is thorough to the point of obsessive in compiling his facts. Old newspaper accounts he discovered call to mind the Press Herald’s coverage of Ramirez. After Sockalexis made a great catch, a New York writer claimed the crowd yelled, "Socks, you’re a peach."

Portland-based Associated Press reporter Clarke Canfield’s Those Damned Yankees: The Not-So-Great History of Baseball’s Evil Empire is a listing of everything awful about the Bronx Bombers. As a Red Sox fan, I found it entertaining, although I couldn’t help noting that for every instance of corruption, ineptness, and racism attributed to the Yanks, a similar case could be made against Boston.

Swinging for the Majors by Michael Cousineau of the Manchester Union Leader is an account of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats’ 2004 season. Cousineau goes even easier on errant Cats than Thomas on bad Dogs, but there’s some interesting stuff about the Manchester-Portland rivalry for the affections of Red Sox fans.

In late September, Jim Baumer of Durham will publish When Towns Had Teams, an exhaustive account of amateur and semi-pro ball in post-World War II Maine. While I only got to read a partial manuscript, Baumer’s efforts to preserve this fragile bit of sports history proved fascinating.

Finally, there’s Jim Collins’s The Last Best League, an account of a summer in the Cape Cod League. The book’s connection to this state is tenuous (a couple of University of Maine players have minor roles), but I mention it because this is the finest baseball book I’ve read since Roger Angell was a rookie.

Here’s Collins on a crucial late-season moment:

"He jammed Steve LeFaivre with a fastball, and LeFaivre got wood on it but missed the sweet spot. Off an aluminum bat the ball would have lofted into the outfield for a routine out. But this was a wooden-bat league, a league that gave as much as it took away, and the blooper fell into shallow right field for a base hit, and Simon Williams — with the effortless glide and the major league body and the bad stance and the bum shoulder — sprinted home with the run that won it."

That’s baseball writing so good, it almost makes me forget the season is ending.

Take a swing at my stuff by emailing ishmaelia@gwi.net