PROSPECT, by Bill Littlefield, Mariner Books, New York, 2001, softcover. $12.

This is a surprising book. Yes, it’s about baseball, full of the game’s details, aspects most of us never see or would never notice if we did. But it’s also a story full of love, a gritty look at aging and the storehouses for old men and women we call nursing homes and a bunch of other euphemisms. What happens as you read this book that’s supposed to be about baseball is that you get involved with the people who are telling their stories and when you reach the end there’s a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes because they have become your friends and now they’re gone.

Unlike a great many contemporary novels, charged with tension, mayhem and emotional extremes, this is a gentle book, and all the better for it. But this gentleness is a kind of surprise; it takes some getting used to. It’s an anomaly, the kind of story you might expect to hear from an old guy sitting in his rocker on the porch of a true country store. But not a story you’d expect to find if you’re used to Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel or Jackie Collins.

Don’t let that bother you. When you start reading “Prospect” you’ll find yourself transported to a different sort of literary land, a place where time has a more human dimension, a place where you have the feeling you’ll know everyone you meet. Oh, you may not have met a baseball scout like Pete Estey. Perhaps you’ve never cared that much about baseball, its farm systems, its off-the-diamond members of the baseball fraternity, the folks who keep the game alive.

Estey is one of them, a baseball scout who’s spent his long life watching ball games with a sharp eye for talent that might make it in the big leagues. We meet him at the end of his career in a place called Fair Haven, one of those storage facilities where geezers and geezerettes are parked as they wait for Godot. His friend Louise works at Fair Haven and she recognizes right away that Pete doesn’t belong there; he’s got too much on the ball. So she recruits him as a boarder in her home where she lives alone. It just happens that Louise has a great-nephew who just might be a prospect, a young pitcher with the talent to make it … maybe.

She persuades Pete to scout him, and what happens as a result is the baseball narrative that gives this book its title. But it’s just one part of the story, a part that rings with baseball authenticity – you know Bill Littlefield knows his baseball. He also knows life, the essential humanity each of us shares, the frailties and heartbreak of aging, and the sustenance of love.

The book speaks in two voices; sometimes Pete is the storyteller; other times it’s Louise. At first, you’ll have to pay attention to the chapter headings to know, but soon the voices become distinct and recognizable.

Like Pete, you can’t help but love Louise; she is such a gentle, loyal, compassionate woman for whom honesty comes as easily as breathing. And you like Pete for his defiance, his refusal to let old age get the upper hand.

Most of all, you are in awe of his baseball knowledge, his incredible memory for minutiae, for data, and for the men who have given the game its remarkable presence in the nation’s cultural history.

“Most people,” Pete tells us, “who work in baseball do feel loyal to the game itself, and it’s this loyalty that sustains baseball men, who make up a fraternity based on about equal parts love of the game and gratitude for a job in it. That means baseball men – and I don’t mean players now, but old men who can’t play anymore, some who never could – are pretty clannish, more so than the Elks or Rotary or any country club. They’re suspicious of change, outsiders, and even insiders who don’t behave themselves.”

Both Estey and the book’s author are definitely baseball insiders. I don’t care how much you think you know about the game and its history, there are facts and anecdotes in this book you never knew before. If you do love baseball, you’ll come away enriched. More importantly, if you treasure life and the relationships it brings you will also treasure this book. It’s about much more than baseball, so much more you’ll be sad when it ends – sad enough to shed a tear.