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My shelves, and maybe yours, hold many linear feet of books that purport to describe the character and caprice of baseball. Some are elegies, some are poetry, some are simply collections of photographs. Many of them are the scratchings of yokel hacks out to make a buck rewriting their old clippings and regurgitating what the latest superstar did last season, adding the de rigueur up-from-nothing or father-in-jail or heroic-single-mother or studious-loner-in-a-rat-infested-school element. Many of these volumes defy Canadian Food Inspection Agency guidelines: they have a limited shelf life, but for reasons beyond understanding, they remain on display across the continent.

Andrew Forbes’s Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living is something different, a literary version of the “kick change,” the pitch with the unusual vertical break that emerged last season to bedevil hitters from Rogers Centre to Dodger Stadium. This book is a series of...