Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- This summer, pennant races, pitching masterpieces and batting feats have been overshadowed by steroid charges. It’s only fitting that a new book about baseball’s Hall of Fame portrays many of the immortals as big-time drinkers, gamblers, fornicators and all-around scoundrels.

The book is Zev Chafets’s “Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame” (Bloomsbury, $25), and you can be sure the confidential stuff isn’t about what a great husband Steve Garvey was and how Jimmie Foxx and Paul Waner were secret supporters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Nothing particularly new here, though reading about all these antics together is nothing short of breathtaking.

Chafets thinks it’s silly to judge on-the-field mastery by off-the-field comportment. Indeed, he says that no other assemblage of greats is judged by the standards applied to baseball. Otherwise, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would be as empty as, well, the rest of Cleveland.

Chafets also argues that there’s no proof steroids and other drugs substantially change a ballplayer’s performance. The question naturally arises whether Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez will make it to Cooperstown. They might, if Chafets’s view prevails.

‘Headless Horsemen’

Humans aren’t the only members of the animal kingdom taking steroids. Jim Squires’s “Headless Horsemen: A Tale of Chemical Colts, Subprime Sales Agents and the Last Kentucky Derby on Steroids” (Times Books, $25) examines the drug culture in horse racing, along with everything else that’s wrong with what we used to call the sport of kings.

Squires writes that his years with horses “made my years in the rough-and-tumble worlds of big-city newspapers and politics seem like a picnic in short pants.” A former political writer, editor of the Chicago Tribune and adviser to Ross Perot, he is now, thoroughly and devoutly, a horse man with a writerly touch.

His book is a story of drugs, greed, breeding practices, training techniques, the economics of the horse business, the medicine that underpins it, the thrill of the race, the anxiety of the auction, the beauty of the rotary gallop -- but mostly it is a book about love.

Love? Squires didn’t cry in public over the death of either of his parents. “But twice I have broken into tears in front of veterinarians and strangers over the death of a horse I had been trying to save,” he writes.

Racetrack Crisis

Squires examines the crisis in the horse business -- overproduction of yearlings, over-breeding of stallions, declining racing revenue, a leadership vacuum and the collapse of the sport’s business model.

Through his tale trot Nijinsky II, Man o’ War, Seabiscuit, Eight Belles, Seattle Dancer, Personal Ensign and, of course, Monarchos, the 2001 Kentucky Derby winner he bred. Through the veins of the story course Winstrol and Equipoise, steroids that built the strength of horses but weakened the sport.

There are shelves full of management and leadership books and most aren’t worth the effort it takes to remove them from the stacks. “The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership” (Portfolio, $25.95) is different, and not only because it’s by Bill Walsh, the cerebral and successful coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who died of leukemia in 2007.

The book was prepared by his son, Craig, and Steve Jamison, with reflections by such members of Walsh’s circle as the quarterback Joe Montana.

‘Money Talks’

Walsh was known as a genius and a winner, and the management tips in this volume are singular because they grow out of aphorisms that you actually might want to share with your kids. Like: ‘Money Talks. Treating People Right Talks Louder.” And: “Seek Character. Beware Characters.”

The book’s title grows out of the Walsh philosophy, which is that if you do the right things, the score will take care of itself. Or, as Montana puts it: “He taught us to want to be perfect and instilled in the team a hunger for improvement, a drive to get better and better.”

Inscribe the Walsh view on every wall of every school and the SAT scores will take care of themselves.

(David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: David M. Shribman at dshribman@post-gazette.com.

Last Updated: August 24, 2009 00:01 EDT