For a major league game, a family of four plunks down more than $100 to witness millionaires playing for billionaire owners. The cost for a minor league game runs about $70.

In his eloquent apologia for baseball, Bart Giamatti urges us to Take Time for Paradise. It's a fine notion. But for a major league game, a family of four plunks down more than $100 to witness — from bad seats — the spectacle of disgruntled millionaires playing ball for under-regulated billionaires. And, with more irony than Shoeless Joe Jackson stepping out of a cornfield, we ask: Is this heaven?

The resurgence of the minor league game suggests it's not. Minor league attendance is now higher than it has been since the 1940s. Where fans go, writers follow. Neil J. Sullivan, David Lamb and Paul Hemphill give us three perspectives on baseball's more intimate paradise.

Neil J. Sullivan's The Minors: The Struggles and Triumph of Baseball's Poor Relation from 1876 to the Present is a compact history of minor league ball. His mission is to explain what makes (and has made) the leagues minor. It wasn't always the caliber of play.

"The minor leagues are minor because the major leagues have wanted them so," says Sullivan. "The majors have continually made decisions about personnel policies, franchise relocation, expansion and broadcasting that were indifferent or damaging to the minors." Sullivan gives readers a less-than-adequate taste of the on-the-field flavor of the bush leagues. But, as an associate professor of public administration at Baruch College, the City University of New York, he is in his element when he details the political and financial relationship between the majors and the minor league organizations that have risen to challenge them.

The history of the Pacific Coast League typifies the protectionist thinking of the major league establishment. Before World War II, the PCL had developed, among others, Lefty Gomez, Fred Hutchinson, and the DiMaggio and Waner brothers. Owners had built (and filled) stadiums that — eventually — served as temporary homes for major league clubs. After the war, the entire West Coast poised itself for a population influx. At that time, no major league ball existed west of the Rockies.

The PCL maintained — rightly — that if the major leagues would refrain from exercising their right to draft PCL players for six years all PCL teams would be competitive with the American and National league clubs. Under the working agreement, the majors could raid players (some worth at least $100,000) from the minors by paying the minor league club $10,000.

PCL President "Pants" Rowland petitioned that the eight teams of his league be granted major league status in 1945. The request was denied. The petition was made in 1946, and again denied. The response from the majors was to bide their time, flood the West Coast markets with major league radio and television broadcasts and, by 1957, move the Dodgers and the Giants into the PCL's two principal markets. There was no more effective way to break the PCL.

After reading Sullivan's book, fans might well brace themselves for the
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majors' response to any future rise of Latin or Japanese baseball.

In the 1980s David Lamb covered the Middle East for the Los Angeles Times. From the rubble and the danger of a bombed-out Beirut, Lamb vowed that if he survived he would find something more worthwhile to write about. Stolen Season: A Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues is the result. Lamb quit his job, borrowed heavily, bought a mobile home and turned the summer of '89 into an odyssey that took him to nearly every minor league park in the country.

Lamb makes no apologies for the romanticism of his trek. His book documents the journey of a war-weary traveler searching for his past. In the small-town stadiums he consciously tries to rediscover whatever it is that defines him as an American and a baseball fan.

As a teenager in 1955, Lamb served as a special Boston-based correspondent for the Milwaukee Journal. The Braves had left Boston two years earlier and Lamb wrote weekly columns describing the season from the point of view of one of the loyalists left behind. The Journal twice paid for Lamb to meet the '55 Braves. He made such an impression that during his stolen season many of the Braves, by then farm system officials, gave him unprecedented access to the club.

Lamb watches minor leaguer David Justice take batting instruction from Eddie Mathews. He visits umpires during the pregame rubdown of a case of baseballs with a secret concoction of river bottom mud and tobacco spit. He shares the booth with El Paso PA man Paul Strelzin. In the clutch Strelzin booms, "What team scores more runs with two outs than any other team in baseball?" The crowd responds as he has conditioned them: "The El Paso Diablos!" Lamb calls Strelzin on this statistic, and the announcer admits, without blush, that he's just made it up.

If the heart of the game rests in its individual players, it may be time to seek a smaller park, get a better view and watch the minors.

The irresistible charm of this book lies in Lamb's ability to meld his Boys of Summer-style Braves reunions with his chronicle of those who truly are boys taking a shot at their dream.

Paul Hemphill, meanwhile, sees the minors through 21-year-old Marty Malloy's eyes. For the 1994 season, Malloy, a 5-foot-10-inch, 160-pound, second baseman, is assigned to the Durham Bulls. In The Heart of the Game: The Education of a Minor-League Ballplayer, we see Malloy perfect his bunt and double-play pivot, deal with the release and promotion of teammates, budget his $1,100-a-month salary and come to grips with the first major batting slump of his life. It's during the 1994 season that Malloy recognizes that attitude and hard work aren't always enough to overcome a league of left-handed breaking ballers.

The glory of this book is that it shows Malloy's quest to become — not a major leaguer (though that may come in time) — but a professional. After spending a season with Malloy and seeing him earn his promotion to Greenville, you will scour Baseball America for progress reports.

If Hemphill is right and the heart of the game resides in its Marty Malloys, then it's time to seek a smaller park, get a better view, save a few bucks and watch the minors.

Maybe that's a paradise worth taking time for.

Rodd Whelpley is associate editor of the publication unit in the Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

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