Bird, Johnson sparked the real Madness, and other sports stories

For a good swath of the country, the month of March is not a noun but an adjective, and the word that inevitably follows it is "Madness." Now, as the March Madness of college basketball is upon us again, we have an explanation of why.

The NCAA college basketball playoffs weren't always the mega media monsters they are today. Their maturity into a signature event of the sports calendar occurred slowly, but it's fair to say that the 1979 final between Indiana State (and Larry Bird) and Michigan State (and Magic Johnson) was their coming-of-age moment.

The story of this game, of the players who made it sizzle on the screen, and of the implications of this vernal festival of basketball are deftly assembled by Sports Illustrated writer Seth Davis in "When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball" (Times Books, $26). The star power that Bird and Johnson provided is only part of the story. This legendary confrontation, won by Michigan State and earning the highest Nielsen rating ever for a basketball game, came at a special moment in sports history - when ESPN, the sports cable giant, was preparing to go live.

A novelist's touch

Now here's a literary double play: A baseball memoir by a man who writes about baseball memories. It's "The Fifth Season: Tales of My Life in Baseball" (Ivan R. Dee, $26.95), by Donald Honig, whose place in the pantheon of sports literature was assured with his 1975 classic, "Baseball When the Grass Was Real." This new volume is a splendid book, wistful and reflective about life and love and men (and opportunities) left on base.

Honig is a novelist as well as a baseball historian, and there is a novelist's touch to the prose. He calls the prewar baseball season of 1941 "that summer of menacing shades." Some of that season's stars were Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, of whom he says: "They were there to show you your game at its best, before disappearing back into whence they had come, into whatever mysterious sheath they had been drawn from."

The grace notes are the tales of Honig's own brief tryout in minor league baseball (thoroughly unremarkable) and his wonderfully eccentric family.

The greatest mystery in this baseball bagatelle is its title, and the mystery isn't solved until the last page, when Honig explains that many countries have four seasons but only America has a fifth, the baseball season, "a timeless time that arches over the full calendar, evoking and embracing hope and optimism, action and excitement, fantasy and reality, memory and reminiscence."

Books like this make baseball more than a game.

The country of umpires

Now to the least-known aspect of baseball, the mysterious men behind the plate. The hard-core reader will pick up Bruce Weber's "As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires" (Scribner, $26) and wonder why somebody hasn't written this book before.

Weber recounts umpire lore, umpire history, and umpire esoterica.

He also includes umpires' internal debates (such as whether it's better to call balls and strikes from a position with one foot in front or with the legs in a straight line) and umpire tribal customs (like making sure in those nose-to-nose confrontations with angry managers that the bill of the umpire's cap is always beneath the bill of the manager's cap).

This is the product of 200 interviews with umpires and almost three years of devotion to what Weber, a New York Times reporter, calls "an unusually isolated and circumscribed group, sort of like the inhabitants of a remote country that few people have ever visited."