In his famous essay listing 99 reasons why baseball is better than football, Thomas Boswell extols the virtue of baseball books over football's literary offerings.

Each spring, bookstores display the year's best baseball prospects. In the fall, knowing that winter is coming, the same stores might move a couple of football almanacs up near the academic guides and books like How to Winterproof Your Garage, but here's what they should do instead: Put up another baseball display.

The Rockies stink this year, but baseball has a million great stories. And one of them is chronicled in Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates, a new memoir which isn't literary enough to be ranked in the major leagues - and needs a serious parental warning - but is a raucous and fun addition to any baseball book collection.

In this memoir, first-time writer John Albert tells the story of assembling an amateur baseball team in Los Angeles. Albert, a recovering heroin addict and former alcoholic punk rock drummer trying to make it as a screenwriter in L.A., is one of the most stable guys on the team. Somehow Albert and a friend find an unemployed Japanese actor who likes rough sex, a cross-dressing but athletic catcher, an advertising executive who clumsily falls in love with prostitutes and strippers, a murderer who got off with an insanity plea and a few others who seem to have as a common thread their love for their high school baseball teams before they were kicked out of high school for various - and valid - reasons.

The book recounts how team members find each other through good luck, something most of them had little of previously. The players who drift away from the team have horrible endings, always with drugs involved. But those who stick with it experience the joys of contributing to a team effort, and of winning. The game in which they beat a group of deputy sheriffs may be the sweetest of all.

It's a baseball book, but it's also uniquely an L.A. book, filled with aspiring actors, struggling musicians, dirt-poor screenwriters. All of them make up a depraved, ignored and yet somehow noble and truly American collection of dreamers.

The baseball-related stories keep the plot moving, though don't look for too much in the way of uplift. For instance, in one game the team is down by 10 runs when the opposing pitcher loses his control and walks in a bunch of runs before a couple of other pitchers do the same thing, allowing the Pirates to win in the bottom of the ninth without swinging the bat.

The team is happy with this hapless win. Writes Albert: "It wasn't the most satisfying victory, but it was better than losing, and we celebrated nonetheless. Bad drugs are still better than no drugs . . . unless, of course, you're off drugs, in which case you might as well be playing and winning a baseball game."

Many of the stories actually have nothing to do with baseball. There's no connection whatsoever between the game and Albert's alcoholic and usually pantsless neighbor with an exploding toe. And it probably wasn't that important to the story to describe the toe in such graphic detail, or the nature of liver damage that comes with hepatitis, or the extent of the damage to one of the players' arms. And one relationship with a hooker gets pages and pages of detailed exposition - again, with no link to baseball.

Oh well. The stories are funny, or moving, or lurid, or disgusting.

Albert's bio says that he's written for Hustler. This book is more literary, but uses the same editorial standards, more or less. And there are no pictures.

Reading Wrecking Crew is a lot like hanging out with a great storyteller who's had a lot of "life experiences" and can make them mostly funny and engaging, but at the end of the book, you want to hug your spouse and vow that you'll never complain about being boring again because being interesting comes with an awfully high price.

The Rockies may stink, but baseball and life go on. If you aren't too offended by a book drenched in vulgarity, pick up the Wrecking Crew, buy a cheap seat at Coors Field and soak it all in. You certainly won't be bored.

Scott C. Yates is a freelance writer and entrepreneur living in Denver.