Book excerpt: In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game -- Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.