The baseball season is in full swing now with the Yankees threatening to break the major league record for most wins in a season and several other fabled marks, including Roger Maris' 61 home run season, also in jeopardy.

Not all big league baseball is full of such glory. Most young men who sign a professional contract, even in this age of runaway expansion, never make it to the major leagues. For 150 of the thousands of professional ballplayers, a big league career consisted of exactly one game. And now, East Hills resident Richard Tellis has published a book chronicling their unique careers.

Mr. Tellis is the author of Once Around the Bases: Bittersweet Memories of Only One Game in the Majors (Chicago: Triumph Books). When Mr. Tellis worked as a public relations executive, he often traveled the country. Whenever he was in a new town, he looked in the phone book to see if there were any other Tellises in that city. Thumbing through the Baseball Encyclopedia one day, Mr. Tellis wondered if there were ever any men with his same last name who played in the major leagues.

The closest he got was a player named Richard Teed, who played for the legendary 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers (the subject of Roger Kahn's bestseller, The Boys of Summer). As it turned out, Teed played in one game (as a backup catcher) for the Dodgers. He struck out in his only big league at bat.

In the meantime, Richard Tellis began researching other big leaguers who also only played in one game. Maybe this former newspaperman (as a young man, Mr. Tellis was a reporter for the long-defunct New York Herald American) could interview and write about them. It turned out that there are 150 such players in the history of the game. "I thought: that takes care of my retirement," Mr. Tellis recalls.

Indeed, it did. Mr. Tellis spent two years traveling the country, interviewing 54 of these players and corresponding with them through the mail. Nearly all of the former athletes were happy to talk and most had unique stories to tell about their one stint in the bigs.

In time, the author's friends wanted to read his reports and eventually, Mr. Tellis began writing publishers around the country. After enduring numerous rejections, Triumph Books of Chicago picked up the manuscript. The editors settled on publishing 40 of the 54 interviews.

"I had a ball writing the book," Mr. Tellis said. "Most of them [the ex-players] loved talking about their experience. When the book came out in print, they were all raving about it."

The volume has received an introduction by Hall of Fame sportswriter Jerome Holtzman and back jacket recommendations by former Brooklyn Dodger great Carl Erskine and ex-Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson. The book covers players from 1929 to 1989 and is divided into four sections: The Depression and Prewar Years, The World War II Years, The Postwar Games, and the Expansion Years.

Mr. Tellis notes that the game went through enormous changes through these decades, citing the Depression, the rebirth of the minor leagues following World War II, night baseball, integration, unionism, free agency, West Coast expansion, and the dissolution of the "major minor leagues" such as the Pacific Coast League.

"In the past, players got their training in the minor leagues," Mr. Tellis said. "Now, it's on the job training," he added, noting the explosion in the number of big league teams.

Another change is the lost preeminence of major league baseball. The bulk of these players came of age at a time when baseball truly was the national pastime, when both professional football and basketball had only a small following and certainly no huge television contracts.

As Mr. Tellis notes, from the early years of the century up to recent times, nearly every American boy would list being a "major league ballplayer" at the top of their boyhood desires. Following World War II, there were no less than 48 minor leagues in the country (as compared to 16 today), but only 16 big league teams. Just making it to the majors, even for a cup of coffee, was a real achievement.

The heart of the book is, of course, the stories of these (up until now) unknown players.

Even just one game, for many players, contained a lifetime of memories. For instance, William "Dutch" Fehring caught three innings in a game for the Chicago White Sox against the New York Yankees, but he remembers tagging out the great Lou Gehrig in a play at the plate.

Harley Parnell "Jim" Hisner of the Boston Red Sox pitched six innings in a 1951 game against the Yankees. Still, he struck out the young Mickey Mantle twice and gave up Joe DiMaggio's last regular season base hit.

Brooklyn Dodger Otis Davis scored a run that helped his team tie the St. Louis Cardinals for first place in the 1946 National League pennant race (the Dodgers would later lose the playoff game).

In the heat of the classic 1978 pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox, John Henry LaRose, a lefty, pitched out of a bases loaded, no out situation for the Sox against the Tigers. In the unforgettable playoff game between the two rivals, LaRose was nearly called in to pitch in the 7th inning against Yankee lefthanded slugger, Reggie Jackson. The score was 4-2 Yankees, but Don Zimmer stayed with righty Bob Stanley who promptly gave up a homer to Reggie. The Sox came back, but lost 5-4. "To this day, LaRose wonders what might have happened if he and not Stanley had faced Reggie Jackson that afternoon in Boston," Mr. Tellis writes.

Robert Lee Slagle played in only one game for the 1979 Yankees, but he has warm memories of such greats as Thurman Munson, Catfish Hunter, Sparky Lyle, Graig Nettles, Tommy John, and Luis Tiant.

Harry "Choz" Chozen hit safely in 49 games---the fifth longest streak in baseball history---for Mobile, a team in the Dodger farm system. Harry got involved in the sport after his father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, read that legendary New York Giant manager John J. McGraw was looking for a Jewish player to come to New York and play for the Giants.

These are just a few of the stories in Mr. Tellis' fascinating volume. "If you like baseball, you'll enjoy this book," the author modestly claims. That's an understatement. Once Around The Bases is an excellent way to spend summer evenings reading about humble American boys who for one fleeting moment achieved a place in the saga of our national pastime.