BASEBALL The Lives Behind the Seams <i> by Maury Allen (Macmillan: $18.95; 308 pp.) </i>

Behind the baseball stars who make the headlines there is a legion of people who make the sport happen, says Maury Allen. He refers not to the fans but to the people in the background of the business, the “good soldiers of baseball,” who “get little glory and their names are often forgotten as the stars of the game become icons on bubblegum cards.” In “Baseball: The Lives Behind the Seams,” Allen profiles scouts, coaches, announcers, groundskeepers--people from vastly different backgrounds whose common ground is the major-league ballpark.

Many of these players have been around much longer than any of the big names. In Allen’s piece on a 35-year Chicago Cubs veteran, equipment manager Yosh Kawano, club manager Don Zimmer says: “Yosh is as much of an institution around here as any person in the organization. He probably knows where more bodies are buried than anybody. He just won’t tell.” Kawano may go unsung in the pages of the daily press, but in a ceremony similar to the ones in which great players’ numbers are retired, the Cubs’ clubhouse was named for him.

Many of these stories concern the difficult emotional transition from player in the limelight to staff on the sidelines, but only one woman appears in these pages: Phyllis Merhige, who remembers throwing confetti in the 1969 Mets victory parade from a window at the Singer Sewing Machine Co., and is today public-relations director of the American League. Not all the tales are equally gripping, but each adds to the fabric and provides that color and texture baseball fans so love.