THE BASEBALL ISSUE : Ted Williams, Out of His League : NONFICTION : TED WILLIAMS’ HIT LIST: The Ultimate Ranking of Baseball’s Greatest Hitters,<i> By Ted Williams and Jim Prime (Master’s Press: $19.95; 242 pp.)</i>

When I came across “Ted Williams’ Hit List: The Ultimate Ranking of Baseball’s Greatest Hitters,” I felt the way some parents might feel if they’d just been given free lifetime passes to Disneyland for their kids.

My 6-year-old son, Lucas, is a baseball fanatic, a Ted Williams fan and a lover of numbers and rankings, whether they’re identifying the biggest dinosaur or the best home run hitter of all time.

I took the book home and, when Lucas’ bedtime approached, I asked if he’d like to look at it together, instead of having his mother or me read him a bedtime story.

“Yes!”

In fact, he couldn’t wait to open--and challenge--the Williams book (written with sports journalist Jim Prime).

Lucas had heard me speak several times about Williams’ exploits as the outspoken home run-hitting slugger of the Boston Red Sox and the game’s foremost practical scholar of the art of hitting. When we visited the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., last fall, the only souvenir Lucas bought for himself was a baseball autographed by Williams.

But Lucas, like most 6-year-olds, has a mind of his own, and he wasn’t about to accept Williams’ word automatically, not even on the subject of hitting and hitters.

To Williams, for example, Babe Ruth was “the greatest hitter . . . ever.” Not to Lucas.

“Ty Cobb was better,” he insisted, as we sat side by side on his bed. “He had a lot more hits, a higher batting average and he struck out a lot less.”

I pointed out that Williams--himself a power hitter (521 career home runs)--gave priority in his rankings to other power hitters. Cobb, I reminded Lucas, hit only 118 career home runs; Ruth hit 714.

Lucas nodded, unpersuaded, then skimmed the rest of Williams’ list.

“Honus Wagner isn’t in the top 25? That’s crazy. He was the best shortstop of all time. His lifetime average was over .320. That’s better than more than half the guys on the list.”

As Lucas and I read together, we found much to talk about in the relatively slender book. Ever provocative--as a player, Williams was fined for both spitting toward the stands and making an obscene gesture toward the press box--he digresses near the end of the book to discuss “Some [hitters] who should have been better.”

Of Carl Yastrzemski, his Hall of Fame successor as the Red Sox left fielder, Williams says, “Yaz wasn’t as smart as he should have been.” Of George Brett, the former Kansas City Royals’ star and a future Hall of Famer who came closer than any other hitter in the past half century to matching Williams’ remarkable .406 average in 1941, he says, “In his mental approach to the game, he always lacked something. . . . I certainly don’t consider him an outstanding hitter.”

In evaluating Pete Rose, who had more hits than any player in history but who hit few home runs, Williams’ pro-slugger bias emerges yet again. He quotes Mickey Mantle, the late, great ex-Yankee, as saying, “If I hit like that, I’d wear a skirt.”

Lucas thought that was funny. But he wanted to go back to the top 25.

“OK,” he said, grabbing a pencil and Williams’ list. “Cobb is No. 1. Then Ruth. Then [Rogers] Hornsby.”

He rearranged the rest of Williams’ top dozen or so hitters, but before he could finish all 25, I said it was time for lights out.

“Wait a minute, dad,” he said. “What about Williams himself? You told me that when he was just starting out, he said that when he retired, he wanted people to say he was the greatest hitter who ever lived. Where does he rank himself?”

I told Lucas that Williams said he didn’t feel comfortable actually ranking himself in the book but that in a section where he discusses what he describes as “some close calls”--who was better, Cobb or Hornsby? Lou Gehrig or Jimmie Foxx? Henry Aaron or Willie Mays?--he briefly compares Ruth and himself.

“While comparisons with Babe Ruth are always flattering,” I read to Lucas, “there is certainly no doubt in my mind that Ruth was the ultimate player.”

But, as I showed Lucas, Williams does list his own statistics conveniently close to those for the top 25.

“Let me see,” he said.

He took a look and rendered his judgment: “Williams should be No. 4, right after Cobb, Ruth and Hornsby.”

I turned out the lights and went upstairs to finish looking at the book myself. It’s not just a collection of statistics but a compendium of Williams’ thoughts on great hitters through the ages--and on the art and science of hitting a baseball, which he has often described as the single most difficult feat in all of sports.

Why?

Well, he recounts in the book an exchange he once had with golfer Sam Snead, who had argued that it was harder to hit a golf ball than a baseball because a golfer often had to hit a ball that was “foul” (in the rough).

Williams points out that a golfer is hitting “a stationary ball . . . while playing to galleries which remain silent during each swing.” In baseball, he notes, the hitter must try to hit a ball coming toward him at almost 100 mph, often curving left, right, up or down at the last minute and sometimes following a path that resembles “the flight patterns of nearsighted moths. All this, while 50,000 fans are questioning his ancestry and screaming for him to fail.”

In baseball, the line of demarcation between a good hitter and a not-as-good hitter is a .300 batting average--which means, as Williams says, that hitting a baseball is the only athletic feat in which you are deemed successful even if you fail 70% of the time.

The next night, Lucas wanted to finish the Williams book with me. He quickly rearranged Williams’ No. 13 through No. 25 hitters just as he had rearranged the first 12 the night before. He also made one change in his previous night’s rankings.

“I think Ted should be third-best, before Hornsby,” he said. “He was a much better power hitter.”