A character in W. P. Kinsella's 1982 baseball novel, Shoeless Joe, calls baseball "the one constant throughout all the years." The signpost, then, along the way has been the World Series.

The first official World Series was played in 1903 between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Boston Americans, but in "The First Fall Classic," New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro makes a good case that the first series to truly capture the imagination of the American public was played in 1912 between the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox.

The eight games -- the second game was a 6-6 tie, called for darkness after 11 innings -- would, in Vaccaro's words, "elevate the World Series from a regional October novelty to a national obsession." The standouts were Hall of Famers Tris Speaker of the Red Sox, Giants manager John McGraw, and his ace righthander Christy Mathewson, "The Christian Gentleman" and the country's first baseball hero.

Vaccaro, author of "1941: The Greatest Year in Sports," does a fine job re-creating the atmosphere of vibrant pre-World War I America, particularly the swan song for Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive "Bull Moose" Party, and putting a fine nostalgic haze on the time. Said Giants' pitcher Rube Marquard, who was on the losing side, years later, "I wish we could gather together and play a game number nine tomorrow."

That must be how the Red Sox felt after losing the seventh game of the 1975 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Ah, but that sixth game! Mark Frost, author of one of the best books ever written about golf, "The Match," has you on the edge of your seat helping Boston catcher Carlton Fisk wave his 12th-inning game-winning home run away from the foul pole.

Like all great books about great World Series, "Game Six" sums up everything that came before it and points toward everything that came after. The next season would bring free agency to baseball, and the game would never again see such a collection of superstars as Fisk, Carl Yastrzemski, Luis Tiant, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan in one series.

Tiant, the Cuban-born cigar-chewing Boston pitcher with the corkscrew windup, gives Frost his epithet: "You come here with two pockets. One is the winning pocket, and the other is the losing pocket, and you have to carry them both with dignity."

Tiant's words apply to Bob Gibson (7-2 as a starting pitcher in three series) and Reggie Jackson (five series rings and 18 postseason home runs). Lonnie Wheeler, coauthor of outstanding bios of Gibson and Hank Aaron, has picked a fine pair to discuss the art of pitching and hitting with grace under pressure.

"Sixty Feet, Six Inches" is written in the form of a running dialogue between the two Hall of Famers. And not just on baseball. Both men are quick to air grudges held onto for decades.

Jackson: "Yes, I was sometimes labeled a troublemaker. When a white player would speak out, he'd be described as a coach on the field. ... When a black player spoke out, he was a troublemaker."

Gibson: "I was a troublemaker all my life. I read in the paper just the other day that I was outspoken. You don't say?"

Both men, it's clear, thrived because they wanted to be in the tough situations.

Jackson: 'I didn't get nervous, I got intense."

Gibson: "Pressure sort of felt right to me."

Gibson again: "There are two separate areas in all of this. There's the spirit of the game and there's the integrity of the game. If you sit on the back porch of the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, shooting the bull with Hall of Famers, you'll hear some guys who are concerned about one and some guys who are concerned about the other ...."

Jackson: "Put me down for both."

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