Rookies of the Year : THE PROSPECT by Bill Littlefield (A Richard Todd Book / (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 227 pp.; 0-395-49168-1) : JOY IN MUDVILLE : A Novel by Gordon McAlpine (E. P. Dutton: $17.95; 210 pp.; 0-525-24748-3)

By Jim Langford

May 14, 1989 12 AM PT

Red Smith was right: 90 feet between bases is the closest humankind has come to perfection. The beauty of baseball has survived domed stadiums, artificial grass, proprietary greed, players who move from one city to another like hired guns in the Old West, designated hitters and even Bowie Kuhn.

Whether or not understanding the game is a code-breaking key to the mind and heart of America, the symbolic richness of baseball has, of late, proven a popular if not instructive guide to how Americans dream and act and have their being.

The box-office success of “The Natural” and “Bull Durham” and the critical acclaim accorded novels by W. P. Kinsella (“Shoeless Joe”), Robert Coover (“The Universal Baseball Assn., Inc.”), Eric Greenberg (“The Celebrant”) and Harry Stein (“Hoopla”) have encouraged major trade book publishers to take a chance on new talent.

Bill Littlefield’s first novel, “Prospect,” employs the tension between tradition and modernity in baseball as backdrop for a perceptive and engaging story of aging and regeneration.

Pete Estey, a retired baseball scout, spends his days in the Fair Haven rest home listening to ball games on the radio, remembering the seasons of his life and observing the foibles and fears of his fellow residents. He is simply passing time until death comes to claim him. But Louise Rucker, a worker at Fair Haven, has other ideas. She knows that Pete’s special talent is to spot talent on the diamond and to help young players become better. Louise knows that even though a streamlined, computerized scouting system has replaced the instincts of an old bush-beater like Pete, she knows that conning him into using his talent again will not only rejuvenate Pete, it will also confirm her own estimate--as an Old Brooklyn Dodger fan--that her grand nephew, Jack Brown, is a real prospect.

Littlefield unfolds the story in alternating first-person accounts by Pete and Louise, and he is masterful at seeing through their eyes. When smoke and water damage temporarily forces Pete from his room at Fair Haven, Louise persuades him to take the spare room in her house. They are an unlikely couple; she is a widowed black woman; he is a twice-divorced white man. But their romance is not with each other, it is with baseball. It is only a matter of time before she cajoles him into taking a look at the prospect in action. Pete hopes that he won’t be good enough to make him call people who don’t know or care whether he is still alive. Then he can just tell the kid to pursue a different dream.

It turns out that Jack Brown is a good pitcher. But semi-pro teams and the low minors are full of good pitchers; those who make it to the big leagues are much better than good. Undaunted by Pete’s verdict, Louise persuades him to watch a whole game and not just a workout, and when he sees Jack hit, he knows that this may be the best prospect he has ever scouted. Revivified and armed with a cause, Pete comes back from over the hill and brings his prospect with him. What ensues is a realistic blend of success and failure, of old and new, of life and death. The book is wise, warm and well worth reading.

Baseball is more a springboard than a backdrop in another first novel, “Joy in Mudville” by Gordon McAlpine. Building his surreal adventure around the myth of Babe Ruth’s “called shot” in the 1932 World Series at Wrigley Field, McAlpine offers an imaginative mix of history, humor and fantasy.

Of course, as every Cub fan knows, had Ruth really pointed to the bleachers, Charlie Root would have dusted him with a fastball. In McAlpine’s version, Babe’s homer hooks over the city of Chicago and heads into an orbit that will take it to the California coast on the fly.

Buddy Easter, a lonesome, 14-year-old Yankee fan, watched the ball from a rooftop across the street from Wrigley Field and knew it would come down somewhere. He was quite willing to run away from the orphanage to be there when it did. He is rescued from a gang of youthful Cub fans by a lovely woman named Alice who, it turns out, is fleeing an unrequited and vengeful Al Capone. Alice is at the ballpark trying to get a note to Babe Ruth, written on an envelope she grabbed in haste as she fled Capone’s bedroom. She is unaware that the envelope contains incriminating evidence against Capone. She does know it’s time to flee.

Buddy and Alice meet up again on a freight train headed for Denver, sharing a boxcar with a crazed scientist who is following the sphere West because he thinks it is a Martian spaceship, and with musician Woody Guthrie who is simply movin’ on. Chased into Kansas by Capone’s goons, it takes a cameo appearance by Superman and several other incredible interventions to let them continue their quest to the coast and to the very spot where the ball finally descends. The ending is as fanciful and surprising as the rest of this fast- moving and entertaining romp across country and through time.

Spring is the season for rookies to make their mark. Littlefield and McAlpine are names to remember.