INSIDE B-BALL TIM McCARVER'S BASEBALL FOR BRAIN SURGEONS AND OTHER FANS Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro By Tim McCarver with Danny Peary Villard 344pp $23 For cryin' out loud, as the familiar saying goes, it isn't brain surgery. It's only baseball! Or is it? Spend too much time at any one sitting with Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans, and you're liable to feel like you've been boning up for the medical boards. But if you take it a few pages at a time, preferably with a game on the TV and the sound turned slightly down, savoring his strategies and theories--''A curveball on a 1-1 pitch slows the bat down; a fastball on 1-2 can cause the batter to swing late,''--you'll understand the action as never before. This is the Gray's Anatomy of baseball. The game's preeminent broadcast analyst, along with sportswriter Danny Peary, identifies, isolates, and then fuses the ganglia of this remarkably complicated activity. They show how this simple playground game has nuances and imagery extending far beyond that of any other sport. It's safe to say that McCarver might never have reached this level of knowledge had he been, say, a slugging, one-dimensional left-fielder or, worse yet, the player that Ted Williams always called ''the dumbest one on the field,'' a pitcher. But McCarver was a catcher, one of the better ones of the 1960s (batting .311 in three World Series). Catcher, of course, was the position that practically none of us wanted to play as kids--except the ones who recognized, early on, that in the dust behind home plate, in that perpetual crouch, taking wicked foul tips amid 86-mile-an-hour sliders and 94-mile-an-hour fastballs, the catcher runs the game. By virtue of his position on the field, the catcher is the only player who actually sees the game as it unfolds, offering the potential for insights that few others can have. In the vast library of baseball books, Brain Surgeons is a singular work. It doesn't follow in the ''baseball-is-a-funny game'' path, walked so well by his fellow former St. Louis Cardinal catchers-turned-broadcasters Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker. The superb ironies of the game are only used as illustrations. And this is certainly not another entry in the baseball-as-literature category. McCarver's language is resolutely matter-of-fact, containing only the most direct evocations and imagery, like the sound of bat meeting ball--preferably the fastball that he'd be looking for on a 2-and-0 or 3-and-1 count: ''Bam-m-m!'' In fact, I'm not sure this book--so heavily laden with information on specific hitting, pitching, and running situations--wouldn't have been easier to follow in diagram-and-chart form. But then with the quantity (and quality) of McCarver's insights, such a book might have required a thousand or more diagrams. And Baseball for Brain Surgeons is just fine for what it does. It peels away at the Great American Game, revealing layers of strategy and action that even the most serious fans have rarely, if ever, considered. His readers, like his broadcast audience of nearly two decades, will be all the more perceptive for his efforts. BY RAY HOFFMAN RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans'' Return to top of story

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