Ah, autumn. The season when green leaves transform to beautiful colors before falling from their lofty perches and the crisp air makes one reach for the heavy sweater. Baseball fans however aren't quite so enthused or ready to give up on summertime. The World Series, aka the Fall Classic, is the last handhold they can enjoy before the bleak days of winter set in.

Since the inauguration of the "second season" in 1903, there have been countless thrills --- Don Larsen's perfect game; dramatic home runs by Carlton Fisk, Bill Mazeroski, Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter; "Game Six" in 1986 (no other explanation is necessary); and Jack Morris's extra inning, complete game 1-0 shutout to give the Minnesota Twins the championship in 1991. On the other hand, there have also been a fair number of uninspiring performances.

The mix of feast or famine is the gist of Joseph Wallace's WORLD SERIES: An Opinionated Chronicle - 100 Years.

Like his previous works --- THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BASEBALL and THE BASEBALL ANTHOLOGY --- WORLD SERIES is richly illustrated and thought provoking in its prose. The "opinionated" aspects are ripe for considered discussion as Wallace presents cogent arguments as to why some "goat" labels are deserved while others are not, just as he believes some perennially heralded performances by individuals and teams are overrated.

The glossy format of WORLD SERIES lends itself well to the stature of the event where patriotic bunting hangs from the grandstands and even non-fans take interest.

With the hopes of making the games interesting for that demographic, the networks call up their big guns, their most eloquent voices to wax poetic about the grandeur of the Series. Similarly, some of the best sports writing have come out of these games. Bill Littlefield, host of National Public Radio's "Only a Game" and Richard Johnson, author of several baseball books, have collaborated on FALL CLASSICS: The Best Writing About the World Series' First 100 Years, a collection of commentaries, stories and reportage by some of the best in the business. Some of the pieces are spot reporting, while others are excerpted from biographies and histories. Presented in a roughly chronological order, the high and low points are given equal shrift; while you have the elation of Fisk's homer, you also have the shame of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal.

The editors have selected a "Hall of Fame" lineup of writers, including Roger Angell, the dean of the baseball literati; Thomas Boswell, the insightful columnist for the Washington Post; and the astute analyst Peter Gammons.

Past generations are also represented in FALL CLASSICS, including such legends as Ring Lardner, Jim Murray, Jimmy Powers, Damon Runyon, Red Smith and Dick Young.

During the series, it's not unusual for a newspaper to hire a player, hoping to get an insider's perspective. So the editors have included pieces from Satchel Paige, Tris Speaker and Christy Mathewson.

With the centennial of the World Series at hand, it's only fitting that the Red Sox are once again in the "hunt for October." Two books take note of the team's unique place in baseball history.

AUTUMN GLORY: Baseball's First World Series and WHEN BOSTON WON THE WORLD SERIES: A Chronicle of Boston's Remarkable Victory in the First Modern World Series of 1903 each look at the Series' origins.

Relatively more scholarly in approach, these volumes examine not only the games between the Boston Americans (as the Red Sox were formerly called) and Pittsburgh Pirates, but at the tense --- and at times downright nasty --- relationship between the older, established National League and the upstart American League. (The New York Giants refused to play against Boston in 1904 because their manager viewed the American League as an inferior product. It would mark the only time until the 1994 strike that the Series would not be played.)

Louis Masur, a history professor at City College in New York, intersperses a full narrative of each of the Series' games with the backstory of the Pirates and Red Sox seasons and the history of war and peace between the leagues.

Bob Ryan writes in a more "folksy" manner, delving into the personalities of the players, managers, owners and other parties involved. He includes accounts from the newspapers of the day, gossipy tidbits reporting the comings and goings, and the reluctance of the players to compete without additional recompense (this, long before the advent of the Players' Union). The old-time photos belie the youth of the participants, making them seem much older than their years.

Both books reveal a certain charm at a time when technology was not around to interfere with the enjoyment of the game.

As Boston Red Sox fans know only too well, their team hasn't won the World Series since Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1920. They have been haunted by "the curse of the Bambino" ever since, losing in heartbreaking fashion in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986, some under the most bizarre circumstances. Two new titles look at the unique place the Sox have in the baseball firmament.

In THE BOYS OF OCTOBER: How the 1975 Boston Red Sox Embodied Baseball's Ideals - and Restored Our Spirits, Doug Hornig contends that even in defeat the Bostonians provided exciting fare for a country under the crush of Watergate, Vietnam and general social unrest. Fisk's "midnight home run" in the sixth game teased Sox fans into believing they had a chance to finally break the dry spell, but the Cincinnati Reds came back to take the finale, further evidence of "the curse."

And while the Sox didn't make it to the Series in 1978, Roger Kahn's OCTOBER MEN: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees' Miraculous Finish in 1978 is another reminder that if the team didn't have bad luck, they wouldn't have any luck at all. They were ahead of the Yankees by more than a dozen games late in the season, only to decline at such a precipitous rate that a face-off between the two teams was necessary to determine the division winner. The Sox were ahead late in that game, only to be beaten by a home run off the bat of the legendary Bucky Dent. This book will be joyful for Yankee fans, painful for Sox fanciers.

Kahn, perhaps more than any author, is credited with the resurgence in interest in popular adult (as opposed to academic) baseball titles. His opus magnus, THE BOYS OF SUMMER, is the standard by which subsequent books have been measured.

There's no better way for fans to get into the spirit of this year's World Series than to check out these informative, entertaining and nostalgic books. And while fans wait for next year's spring training, they can take comfort that this collection of Series titles will help keep them warm in the cold months ahead.

   --- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (RonKaplanNJ@comcast.net)

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