BANGOR – For the generations that still consider baseball the national pastime, the game remains serene yet full of emotions. It’s passion and pain, tribute and tradition, and mostly fun.

Those emotions are the backdrop for “Baseball Songs Sports Heroes,” a CD recently released by Bangor songwriter Joe Pickering Jr.

Pickering had his baseball sensibilities shaped by his upbringing in Lynn, Mass., in a family of Boston Red Sox devotees, a story told in “Who’s the Greatest Red Sox Fan?”

“Baseball wasn’t a religion in my mother’s and father’s house, but my brother and I were only allowed to pray for one Major League Baseball team, the Boston Red Sox,” joked Pickering.

This 16-song collaboration with singer Phil Coley touches all of the emotions inherent in following pro baseball in New England.

“Fenway” salutes one of the biggest sources of baseball memories anywhere, the park that opened in 1912 and remains home of the Red Sox. But most of those memories are less than celebratory. “Babe Ruth’s Curse I” is self-explanatory as it relates to the team’s World Series drought now in its 84th year since the trade of the Babe to the New York Yankees.

“Babe Ruth’s Curse II” relates to something much more intangible, life after the elusive next Red Sox World Series championship – if that ever comes – and the problems that would create for fans of the Olde Towne Team who would be lost without that annual sense of futility.

Beyond the curse, the hated Yankees are targeted in “Baseball’s Mortal Sin” and “God’s Not A Mets Fan,” songs that might be anthems for the “anybody but the Yankees” fraternity.

This CD also has a more serious side, as Pickering pays tribute to sports heroes ranging from Penobscot Indian athlete Louis Sockalexis to former Negro League star Smokey Joe Williams and New England sports legend Harry Agganis.

Along with biographical tributes to Sockalexis and Williams, Pickering uses “I’m Not Your Mascot, I’m a Man” and “Let’s Not Forget” to address to address the plight of minority athletes in baseball history before the color line was broken by the late Jackie Robinson.

In “The Golden Greek,” Pickering takes special pride in sharing the tale of Agganis, the college football All-American and Hall of Famer and former Boston Red Sox from Pickering’s hometown who died at age 26 before his athletic tale was fully told.

“Growing up in Lynn, I was aware of Harry Agganis because of his athletic abilities, but as I got to know him more I realized that his quality as a human being was even greater,” Pickering said.

Even Bill Buckner, who has come to symbolize the Red Sox failures through his error in the 1986 World Series, gets a spirited defense in “Who,” as Pickering highlights the first baseman’s career as a borderline Hall of Fame candidate before that all changed on one routine grounder to first base.

Beyond the baseball songs and tribute tunes are two efforts uniquely Maine, “Larry the Lobstah” and “The Wild Blueberry Song.” Both are humorous compositions about two of the state’s staples by Pickering, whose earlier comedic work, “The Ballad of Paul Bunyan,” won the American Eagle Award for Comedy Song of the Year in 1997 from the Country Music Organizations of America. Fundamentally, though, this CD is about passion and pain, tribute and tradition, and perhaps the dose of reality that has hardened in the minds of New England baseball fans through eight decades of curses, Buckners, Bucky Dents and Roger Clemens in pinstripes.

Because a look at the CD’s cover, which features drawings by Jessica Gandolf of Portland, shows a Yankees celebration featuring Joe DiMaggio above a trio of determined Red Sox batters, including Ted Williams.

Once again, as Red Sox fans have so painfully experienced, the Yankees are on top.

“Baseball Songs Sports Heroes” is available at the following Bangor locations: Bull Moose Music, The Grasshopper Shop, Rebecca’s Gift Shop, Center Beauty Salon & Barbershop and My Collectibles; all Mr. Paperback outlets in Maine and on amazon.com, CDBaby.com; GrandSlamMall.com and AegeanBooks.com.