When Willard and his father come upon a roadster that had slid into a ditch, the boy was amazed to find the driver was the most outstanding left-hander in baseball - Babe Ruth.

The love of baseball is transmitted from father to son to granddaughter, and it is in that slow but certain transmission that the author conveys the beauty of the game. No other sport treasures its history so much. No other major sport is so unconstrained (at least, theoretically) by time.

Donald Hall has written an unhurried look at baseball, growth, and decline. We meet the young Babe Ruth as a star southpaw for the Red Sox, then follow (with the New Hampshire family portrayed here) repeated years of father-son baseball games, rooting for the Babe as he keeps breaking his own home run record, and then, briefly, the Babe's last, uncompleted year in baseball. Between the lines we see the dimmest outlines of a flawed man. The book is both a sentimental evocation of a New England family's enchantment with baseball, and an unstudied meditation on the passage of time.

Of course, the above is from an adult perspective. Elementary school kids (and older) will enjoy the depiction of times past, the two encounters with the young and the older Babe, and, most of all, the outstanding illustrations by Barry Moser. Like baseball, it can seem a little slow, but if you have the time and the inclination, the book will envelop you like an old familiar glove.