PITCHER’S STORY: INNINGS WITH DAVID CONE, by Roger Angell. Warner Books, New York, 2001, hardcover, $24.95.

“At batting practice one weekend afternoon, a boy with an autograph book called from behind the dugout. ‘Mr. Jeter! Mr. Jeter! I’m looking for someone.’

“Barely turning his head, Jeter said, ‘Who are you looking for?’

“‘David Cone,’ the kid said.

“‘We’re all looking for David Cone,’ Derek answered, almost to himself.”

Five short lines from the more than 300 pages of this fine book, but they explain very clearly how Roger Angell has earned his reputation as the best baseball writer of his time. First, he does his homework. He’s down on the field for batting practice. He’s working on a weekend. Second, he’s a journalist. He observes. His sensitive antennae record every relevant detail. And, finally and most important, he is not just a baseball writer; he is a Writer with a capital W.

He could have written about a batboy for the Atlanta Braves and the book would have been a good one. But when Angell began this story of one of the best pitchers in the major leagues, the book was going to be about the science of pitching, the minute, mysterious physics of fingertips meeting a baseball’s red-thread seams, the human dynamic that creates curve balls, fastballs, sliders and splitters as if by magic.

David Cone had been performing this magic for 15 years. The year before Angell tapped him for this book, Cone had pitched a perfect game, just the 16th in all of baseball’s long and ever-so-diligently documented history. No runs, no hits, nobody on base; every batter retired in order. No pitcher can do more. It is perfection attained.

With perfection in his resume, with remarkably consistent performance records, low earned run averages and a deserved reputation as an intelligent and articulate athlete, who better than David Cone as the subject of a book about the physics and metaphysics of superlative pitching.

That’s what was supposed to happen when Roger and David became dance partners at the start of the 2000 season. They were going to waltz through the season, David winning his 20 games for the New York Yankees, Roger writing in articulate detail about how such excellence is attained.

Neither expected reality to cut in. As David Cone said toward the end of his tortured season, “It isn’t the book that was planned. This was going to be about the technical things pitchers do … who owns the pitcher’s arm. But it changed.”

What changed was David Cone’s performance on the field. He lost his edge. And he never found it. Instead, he spent the summer of 2000 struggling and losing games. The music stopped.

Both partners despaired. “I wanted a better ending,” Angell writes, “not for the book, but for him. And if aging and disappointment were as much a part of the story for a great athlete as the repeated glories of his peak years – a more human and elucidating part, at that – then this last lurch of events, with his injury and near helplessness, couldn’t be left out either.”

Instead of an examination of pitching, this book became an unflinching portrait of a human being, a brave, complicated man, who happened to be a major league pitcher, facing life’s bitter truths. Which makes it a much better book.

Yes, it’s a book about baseball. Is it ever. As circumstance would have it, I was reading about David Cone as he pitched his first game at Fenway for the Boston Red Sox. Watching the game on television as I read, I realized how much more I was seeing. Which is what Roger Angell does, and always has done, for baseball. His work, his insights, his assiduous reportage, adds dimensions to the game for all of us average fans. We may think we know what’s going on out there on the diamond. We can second-guess the managers or complain (often justifiably) when an umpire makes a bad call, but we don’t know the game as Roger does. But when we read what he writes about baseball, we are much the better for it. We begin, at least, to comprehend the game’s intricate designs, the marvelous inter-reactions of its players, and the wonderfully complex dynamics of pitching.

Thus we are improved by a book like this one. We will watch the games with a bit more understanding, and will be more richly rewarded. We will also never again see David Cone as a one-dimensional ballplayer. Which, of course, he never was and never will be. But few of us would have known that if we hadn’t been lucky enough to read this remarkably honest, human and insightful book. Which is, as you must know by now, about a great deal more than baseball.