Just as often, if not more often, they have a shameful undercurrent.

Major League Baseball’s color line and the vicious and stupid bigotry of lots of the most powerful men in so-called “organized baseball” from Cap Anson to Kenesaw Mountain Landis prevented Paige and many other great black ballplayers from starring alongside Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson.

But as Timothy Gay demonstrates in his new book, Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson, showmanship, flexibility, and the profit motive trumped ignorance and racism to some extent when the Major League Baseball season was over. Barnstorming tours often featured black and white players, sometimes as teammates. Under Commissioner Landis, Major League Baseball tried to prevent Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, and the teammates they recruited from sharing ball fields with Negro Leaguers. Happily, Landis’s authority was not as absolute as he always said it was. It did not extend to cornfields in Nebraska or wherever everybody used to repair to in order to watch a ballgame in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Paige was certainly the most energetic of all the barnstormers, and probably the most successful, though statistics can be misleading when the pitcher to whom they refer has thrown two innings for each of three different teams in three different states on the same Sunday.

Dean was as sneaky smart as Feller was fast, and both of them deserve credit for recognizing not only that the black players who were part of their traveling shows would draw a crowd, but that they were fine athletes and desirable partners in a segment of the baseball business always more egalitarian and sometimes more entertaining than what was going in the Big Leagues.

Of Ronald Reagan, Elias says that the former president’s work recreating baseball games in a radio studio was good training for “mastering the art of impromptu fabrication that later served him so well in Washington.”

Elias recalls Oliver North’s witless contention that the appearance of baseball fields in aerial photographs of Nicaragua “proved Cuban influence because, as everyone knows, ‘The Nicaraguans play soccer, not baseball.’” “Of course,” writes Elias, “North was ignorant or lying, or both.”

This is refreshing stuff, as is Elias’s thoughtful and thorough demonstration of the ways in which professional baseball has served the interests of the empire. From the 1888 world tour with which Albert Spalding attempted to plant baseball and create customers for his equipment business all over the world to the various ways in which Major League Baseball is attempting to control the current market in players and baseball-related products, the masters of the game have served the masters of the nation.

None of this is to suggest that baseball is unique in its aims. In fact, at the end of The Empire Strikes Out, Robert Elias suggests that football may be baseball’s best hope for becoming a game rather than just another strategy for promoting the politics of the homeland. Of baseball he writes, “It might do better by letting football beat the war drums while baseball instead pushes the nation to live up to its ideals.”

The title of the book refers to the style of play Richardson developed: a relentlessly persistent, pressuring defense that required of his players excellent conditioning and consistent commitment. The idea was to make the lives of the players on the opposing team hell.

It often worked. Richardson’s teams at the University of Arkansas (and at Tulsa before that) won much more often than they lost. In 1994, his Arkansas team won a national championship, and throughout Richardson’s tenure (1985-2002) they were no strangers to the NCAA tournament.

As Bradburd tells the story, in a perverse way that success worked against Richardson. As admiration for Richardson’s coaching achievements grew, the man who’d hired him, Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles, became less and less comfortable. Eventually, in part perhaps because Arkansas was not big enough to contain two men with egos as large as those bulging out of Broyles and Richardson, Richardson was fired.

As Bradburd maintains in his subtitle, Richardson’s life has been “extraordinary,” and not only for the success of his teams, but because of Richardson’s own determined climb from hard times in the Segundo Barrio section of El Paso to the top of the college basketball heap. When he was coaching, Richardson was inclined to present himself as an underdog, a man who not only didn’t get the respect he deserved, but who was often coaching players who didn’t get the respect THEY deserved. His case was perhaps less convincing during the years when he was signing contracts worth millions of dollars and reaping the considerable benefits of shoe contracts and media opportunities customarily enjoyed by the most successful D-1 basketball coaches…years when his Arkansas team was ranked in the top ten and was featured on national television.

There is no question that Nolan Richardson broke down barriers within the world of college basketball, and Bradburd argues successfully that the coach’s positive influence extended far beyond that arena. He taught numbers of people ignorant and prejudiced enough to believe that a black coach couldn’t succeed in the circumstances Richardson was given that they were wrong.

As a former D-1 assistant coach, Rus Bradburd is well qualified to bring his readers into the complex and often murky world of big time college basketball. The movers and shakers in that world take it for granted that winning is essential, and in many cases the fact that the teams happen to be associated with institutions of higher learning gets forgotten by everyone involved, including the presidents and chancellors of the institutions. Though during one especially well-publicized four year period the graduation rate among Richardson’s players was 0%, the coach points out in his own defense that lots of his players returned to school after their basketball careers in Europe or elsewhere ended.

In Forty Minutes of Hell, Rus Bradburd does a fine job of chronicling the career and contributions of a complex man. He didn’t take advantage of his own status as a former D-1 college basketball insider to explore fully the complexities of the context in which Richardson thrived for a time and then fell, but perhaps he’ll do that in another book.

But Yost includes specific material to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the NCAA, which he calls a cartel and compares to the mafia. He demonstrates that when colleges and universities have invited boosters to pay the salaries of coaches, they have made athletic directors and college presidents junior partners at best in running the sports enterprises at their own schools. He convincingly maintains that “the real winners” are the men who draw enormous salaries for serving on football’s bowl committees, while the real losers, much more often than not, are the athletes who’ve been seduced into believing that signing on as “the entertainment product” at a division one school will necessarily lead to lucrative employment in the NFL or the NBA.

Mark Yost’s book is unlikely to change anything about the way the major college football and basketball programs operate. The NCAA, the television networks that broadcast the bowl games and the basketball tournaments, the shoe companies, the boosters, and college sports fans are too happy with the status quo. The same can be said of officials at lots of the colleges and universities involved in the sports industry, since successful teams do sometimes increase alumni giving and applications. But Varsity Green explains that the entertainment and the benefits come at the cost of integrity, just in case anybody still thinks that’s a viable concern in big time college sports.

“He’ll be watching a game and the announcer will pose some baseball trivia question,” Hirsch writes. “’Me’! Mays will answer. And then he’ll rest his eyes.”

It is no small claim to contend that James Hirsch has done Willie Mays justice in this book. Mays combined his extraordinary talents with an infectious enthusiasm for the game, thereby giving several decades worth of baseball fans a player to cherish. Beyond that, his career began early enough so that he was the only black player on the first minor league team that employed him. His story, like the stories of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and Satchel Paige, transcends the game and reflects the prejudice and daily tension black players faced and the grace with which they handled their challenges. Though he has been criticized for not being a more vocal champion of equal rights when he was a celebrated athlete, Hirsch argues that Mays did what he could within the limits of his experience and capacities, and he makes a convincing case that simply by being so good at what he did, Mays altered attitudes wherever he went.

My bias in favor of this book stems in part from my unshakable conviction that nobody has ever played baseball more brilliantly and more entertainingly than Willie Mays. Beyond that, I grew up a New York Giants fan, and the team took my loyalties west when the Giants moved to San Francisco. I watched, read about, and fantasized over the Giants as only a small boy – and then a larger boy – could. James Hirsch reports on page 231 of his book that on one Halloween, I dressed as Willie Mays, corked face and all. The story is true, and I am proud and happy to be mentioned in the book, which I would have enjoyed thoroughly even if that little kid in the Giants uniform half a century ago had been left out.

But the Cup also needs a custodian because despite their alleged reverence for it, players have been known to toss hockey’s symbol of excellence into swimming pools and roadside ditches. They’ve been known to fill it with chicken wings and cereal. They’ve been known to feed horses from it, and to set it up on stage during rock and roll shows.

These stories are all in Then Wayne Said to Mario, and there are other stories as well, such as the one about how Toronto Maple Leaves Coach Punch Imlach motivated his 1967 team to win the Cup by bringing a lot of cash into the locker room and piling it on a table and reminding everybody that that was why they were playing…which sort of undermines all the business about the Cup, eh?

Cejudo’s mother has spent much of her life worrying that the amnesty she earned from the immigration authorities in the U.S. might be snatched away from her at any time.

His alcoholic father has been largely absent from Henry’s life, sometimes because he’s been in jail.

Though he demonstrated early his aptitude for wrestling, Cejudo’s climb to Olympic competition and an eventual gold medal in Beijing was not without missteps.

Certainly he’s faced what could have been crippling disadvantages, but he also did some damage to his own prospects. American Victory devotes relatively little time to his ill-considered decision to leave the Olympic Training Center without permission, an incident in which he manhandled a former girlfriend just prior to the 2008 Games, and a couple of bar fights that happened when he returned home after the Beijing Olympics. (Cejudo essentially dismisses the fights by saying “I didn’t start either one,” and “It was self-defense and the cops knew it.”)

Given Henry Cejudo’s background and the deep suspicion his mother has had of the U.S. government and its immigration policies, Cejudo’s constant and enthusiastic celebration of the U.S. might seem surprising. But he has in mind a future beyond wrestling, a future in which, he says, his story would make a great movie. The last sentence of American Victory is “Sweet land of liberty, of thee I will sing,” though in Henry’s case, the performance won’t literally be singing. Though he hasn’t completely rejected the idea of wrestling in the Olympics again, he’d like to make a career of motivational speaking.

Were you aware that the first edition of basketball in the Olympics took place outdoors? If that hadn’t been the case, and if rain hadn’t turned the first gold medal game into a contest to see which team could best handle the mud, would the final score have been U.S. 19, Canada 8?

Probably not. Probably more like 37-17.

That game occurred in Berlin in 1936. Since then, men’s basketball in the Olympics has provided a stage for brilliant athletic achievements, laughable romps, and at least one final in which the rules were so thoroughly twisted that they became unrecognizable. Men’s basketball in the Olympics has provided the biggest and most energetic marketers of sneakers and other basketball baggage with the world’s most spectacular bazaar in which to display their wares. It has also given countries the chance to promote themselves and their ideologies, and players the opportunity to polish their previously tarnished images.

American Hoops provides a thorough history of the development of the men’s game from the days when it was played in the dirt before a few confused fans to its current stature as a centerpiece of The Games.

Each chapter discusses in loving detail an Alabama football team that won a national championship.

Fans of Alabama football will enjoy it no little and quite some, especially if they are descendants of one or more of the uniformed demigods responsible for the gridiron glory.

Fans of overwrought sports writing will also get a kick out of at least one paragraph of this book. A Nashville newspaperman named Blinky Horn was somewhat inclined to gush over Alabama after the Crimson Tide drowned Vanderbilt in 1930. According to Mr. Horn, his guys were “pulverized by power, struck down by strength, swept aside by speed and crushed by cohesion.”

“Crushed by cohesion” is especially dandy, don’t you think?  A lesser scribe might have stumbled into “smashed into submission by stickiness.”

“These Redmen are roguish people,” Mr. Horn went on to say. “They strike with venom.” (Which would suggest that they are, in fact, roguish snakes.)

Anyway, Alabama has won a lot of football games, though at one point in this book, there is a quiet admission that some of their seasons have been disappointing. Several of those came when the team was coached by J.B. “Ears” Whitworth.

I wonder if “Ears” ever encountered Blinky?

Montville seems to lean toward the quirky, but fans of the writers who’ve been present in earlier volumes won’t be disappointed. Gary Smith is here again, as are Michael Lewis, Ian Thomsen, and L. Jon Wertheim.

I welcome this book each year, because invariably it features stories that I’ve missed over the course of the year. Beyond that, it’s encouraging to be reminded annually that lots of thoughtful and energetic writers are engaged in discovering what’s worthy of comment in our games.