Invincible Summer: Traveling America in Search of Yesterday's Baseball Greats

An intriguing premise: a junior high school American history teacher--and a baseball devotee turned off by the greediness of the current pro game--sets off on a journey in the spring of 1995 to visit the graves of every member of baseball's Hall of Fame. Along the way, the author travels across the country, gets mugged, falls in love with a lesbian and takes a lot of free showers at Holiday Inns. While even the most ardent baseball fans will learn about players they never knew, this travelogue suffers from some fundamental flaws. D'Antonio never explicitly explains how he learns where the Hall of Famers are buried; nor do we ever learn how many graves he visits. The prose is workaday at best (""When the past is ignored or forgotten or manipulated, a nation becomes rootless, a lost balloon"") and full of throwaway lines that distract from the author's main point. In an otherwise insightful chapter titled ""Friendship,"" for instance, he uses the following sentence to complete a comparison of life with the pursuit of a foul ball: ""And sometimes the beer guys gets in the way."" The book fails to provide either the literary quality or the insight into the players--and into people more generally--that would make it a compelling read. Only a baseball fanatic trying to kill time during a rainout will want to pick it up. (Sept.)