'50s baseball novel still packs a wallop of a fun summer read

What I don't know about baseball would fill a baseball stadium. Which, not surprisingly, I don't help do very often.

However, I do like the idea of liking baseball, an attitude that people who love baseball treat as beneath contempt: You either like baseball, in their opinion, or you're degenerate.

Also, I like baseball novels, a taste which, ditto, people who love baseball say are nothing like baseball.

Oh yeah? I say a baseball novel might take eight hours to read, and a baseball game seems to take eight hours to play.

Thus is Einstein confirmed.

One baseball novel I remember with special fondness is "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," by Douglass Wallop — upon which the stage and movie musical "Damn Yankees" is based.

The book was published 50 years ago, and, with the baseball season in full swing, I thought it would be interesting to re-read it and see how it holds up.

Wallop, a former wire-service reporter who wrote one earlier novel, "Night Light," died in 1985, and "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant" is only slightly less out of circulation than its author. A paperback edition, under the title "Damn Yankees," was brought out in the 1990s, in conjunction with the revival of the stage musical, but has since gone out of print. However, the book is widely available in used copies on antiquarian-book Web sites for prices starting below $5.

You may remember something of the Faustian plot: Joe Boyd, a 50-year-old real-estate agent in Washington, D.C., is a never-say-die fan of the old Washington Senators, perennial also-rans of the American League. Though the book was published in 1954, it is set in 1958, when, to Joe's unspeakable frustration, it looks as if the hated Yankees are headed for their 10th consecutive pennant and the Senators for their customary cellar.

Joe sells his soul to the devil — a Yankees fan doing business here under the name of Applegate, a crafty fellow who affects loud shirts and yellow saddle shoes and who strikes matches on his skin — in exchange for Joe being transformed into the twentyish Joe Hardy. Young Joe joins the Senators and, as a come-from-nowhere Galahad, slays the loutish Yankees and pushes his team within an inch of the pennant.

Though these are the days before free agenting, Joe sells his soul on an option basis — not for nothing is he in real estate — and so we can sense some wriggle room here. We can also sense that, Joe being Joe, none of that wriggle room extends to the moral dilemma facing him in the form of a luscious lady named Lola.