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H.O.F.

Tennis balls to the wall. That describes Jimmy Connors, who could be electrifying, crass, exhilarating, sarcastic, gutsy, childish, confrontational and funny — in the same match.

Fans were never cheated when Connors played a match. “This is boxing at 90 feet,” he writes in “The Outsider: A Memoir” (HarperCollins; hardback, $28.99, 401 pages). Connors, now 60, certainly doesn’t pull any punches as he reflects on a career that included eight Grand Slam singles titles and a No. 1 ranking

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The current movie “42” celebrates, quite rightly, the courage of Jackie Robinson and the vision of Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey as they collaborated to break the color line in major-league baseball in 1947.

It’s a shame Neil Churchill never received his due.

Who?

Churchill owned an automobile dealership in Bismarck, N.D., and 14 years before baseball’s “great experiment,” he was managing an integrated baseball team on the dusty plains

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f you are a baseball fan, a trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is a must. The rolling hills that surround Cooperstown, N.Y., provide a soothing, pastoral look to the town, and the baseball museum is a majestic building filled with baseball treasures. More than 300,000 fans visit the shrine each year.

Of course, it might be difficult for some fans to get to the Hall of Fame. Time, distance, money — those kinds of issues. When Boardwalk and Baseball opened on Feb.

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This was not your grandfather’s Ty Cobb.

Kindly. Benevolent. Generous.

What? The Georgia Peach? Cobb was the greatest baseball player of the dead ball era — and some might argue, of all time — admired by many, but also the game’s most despised athlete. The Detroit Tigers center fielder was portrayed as racist, mean-spirited, a ballplayer that slid into bases with his spikes flashing. An unparalleled hitter, he retired with 12 American League batting titles, a .367 lifetime

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For one magical summer, The Bird was the word on the lips of major-league baseball fans.

In 1976, major-league baseball seemed drab and boring. The NFL had pulled ahead in popularity, and even a riveting World Series the previous year could not lift the game out of its lethargy. Mark Fidrych changed that — in a big way. He was a curly haired rookie pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, wide-eyed with childlike innocence and enthusiasm. When he pitched, he smoothed the mound and appeared

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