June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Just in time. Father's Day is Sunday and your local bookseller has the gift you hope is presented to you just after the bill for brunch. It's John Feinstein's latest, ``Living on the Black'' (Little, Brown, $26.99), and it's a worthy addition to the thinking man's shelf of sports books.

Like many Feinstein predecessors -- about the PGA tour, college basketball's Bob Knight and more -- this is one of those ``year with'' books, in this case a look at a year with two gifted, thoughtful pitchers. The subjects are Tom Glavine, formerly of the Mets, and Mike Mussina of the Yankees, whose performances in New York last year make for a leisurely, intelligent meditation on the state of the national pastime.

In these pages the lessons come from showing -- how a pitcher hurls, or how he responds to pressure -- rather than from telling. You will search in vain for the sort of high-concept elegies to the game that have become as much a part of contemporary baseball as the seventh-inning stretch. Feinstein is a journeyman, and his work -- ``stuff,'' you might call it, if you were in the dugout with him -- isn't art. It's, well, workmanlike.

Still, Feinstein is the insiders' insider, with the patience and experience to provide a glimpse of the pitcher's life, and the peculiar view of the world that comes from standing on an elevated six-inch slab of white rubber 60 feet, 6 inches from the batter. And if you're wondering what the title means, ``the black'' refers to the beveled edges of home plate. It's where pitchers want their throws to cross the plate, and it's where, on good days, the soul of a pitcher lives.

`Everything They Had'

David Halberstam, who added the phrase ``the best and the brightest'' to our political lexicon, was among the best and brightest of American sports writing. Now, after his death last year, there appears ``Everything They Had'' (Hyperion, $24.95), an anthology that has Halberstam on sculling, fishing, basketball and baseball, among other things.

There is a lovely reminiscence of visiting his brother in 1949 for the Harvard-Princeton game -- the first of many Ivy League contests he witnessed after entering Harvard himself.

``It is almost 40 years since I was a freshman,'' he says, ``and over the years those games have blended, scores have faded from memory, yet the colors of the Saturdays have become, if anything, sharper: the huge crowds across the field in blue (coats, jackets, sweaters, scarves) for Yale or orange and black for Princeton or green for Dartmouth.''

`Fathers & Sons & Sports'

There's a certain kind of reader who will buy any book with a title like ``Fathers & Sons & Sports.'' You know who you are. This one's produced by ESPN ($24.95), with an introduction by Mike Lupica, and inside its pages are some gems from the game of catch across the generations.

The jewel is from Donald Hall, poet laureate of the U.S. and of the Republic of Baseball, a title earned by these two sentences alone: ``Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death. This diamond encloses what we are.''

Here, too, is what I have always regarded as the most beautiful part of Norman Maclean's tribute to the solemn work of fishing done on the river that runs through Montana, with an aside that screams with insight: ``If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.''

And the lovely reminiscence by Jeremy Schaap of the mastery of his father, the sports reporter Dick Schaap: ``I would love to go with him to one more game at Lambeau Field or Madison Square Garden. But what I'd really like is to wake up once more to that sound, the clack-clack of the keyboard -- the soundtrack of his life.''

Wish I'd written that. Wish, more than that, more than anything, that my kids might think the same, some Father's Day years from now.

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

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

Last Updated: June 13, 2008 00:01 EDT