The best that can be said of “7: The Mickey Mantle Novel” (Lyons Press, 284 pages, $24.95) is that, unlike Judith Regan’s other going-away present to publishing, it is not the fruit of a crime.

For those who missed the publishing history of Peter Golenbock’s sorry tale, “7”was a casualty of the controversy over O.J. Simpson’s latest effort to capitalize on the murder of his wife, “How I Did It,” which Ms. Regan orchestrated. While Rupert Murdoch, Ms. Regan’s boss, was deciding whether the Simpson book was still up to his standards, it turned out that Ms. Regan’s exquisite taste had also resulted in the signing of Mr. Golenbock to write a “novel” about New York Yankee great Mickey Mantle, narrated in the first person, and focusing on Mantle’s sexual, rather than baseball, exploits. The Mantle family picked up where Nicole Brown Simpson’s family left off, and “7” was canceled not long after “How I Did It.”

Enter the Lyons Press, an outfit apparently happy to have readers know that their standards are lower than Mr. Murdoch’s, and “7” has now made its way to stores. It should stay there until remainders can be shipped back to Lyons.

This is a book that frankly aspires to pornography. Dirty jokes, of the sort told by politically incorrect teenagers or late at night in bars — about 20 of them — are sprinkled randomly throughout the text. The book’s jacket features a wonderful, powerful photograph of Mantle in full swing, his number 7 emblazoned on his rippling back. Here is the Mantle who remains a boyhood hero of countless men like myself, now aged between roughly 50 and 70, who recall his glory years with the Yankees, between 1952 and 1964. But in the lower right-hand corner of the jacket, like a Surgeon General’s cigarette notice, can be found a box containing this: “WARNING: Mickey Says: If y’all don’t want to read about sex, don’t buy this book.”

If you do want to read about baseball, don’t buy this book. While Mr. Golenbock has written nonfiction titles with or about Yankee stars Billy Martin, Ron Guidry, Sparky Lyle, Graig Nettles, and Johnny Damon (although, in Mr. Damon’s case, before he joined the Yanks), as well as about the Yankee dynasty of which Mantle was the centerpiece, there is surprisingly little about baseball here, and none of it is novel (in the sense of new). The portrait of Yankee manager Casey Stengel is well-turned, but interesting only if you have never before read anything about Stengel. The description of Billy Martin is pathetic and entirely conventional.

What we have here is not pornography (the literally dozens of sex scenes are all relatively brief and not at all titillating), but something very close to obscenity — at least according to Justice William Brennan’s old standard of being “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Indeed, in the first 100 pages after the narrative starts rolling, I counted tales of sexual encounters with 14 different women (one of them Mantle’s wife, another Marilyn Monroe, most of them nameless), and only 14 pages about baseball. By the second half of the book, the sex is largely exhausted, and so is the reader. As Mantle loses a son and dies of liver cancer, the book descends into bathos.

It is not news that Mickey Mantle drank to excess and (as they would have said in the 1950s) “fooled around.” Mantle acknowledged as much at the end of his life. His surviving family wrote about it in the book “A Hero All His Life” more than 10 years ago. Bob Costas’s eulogy of Mantle acknowledged these facts repeatedly, and not terribly obliquely. Mr. Costas called Mantle “a fragile hero.” He declared (at the man’s funeral!) that Mantle illustrated the distinction “between a role model and a hero. The first he often was not, the second he always will be.” “We knew,” Mr. Costas said, “that there was something poignant about Mickey Mantle before we knew what poignant meant.”

So there is a story to be told. And it is a story that could find its voice in a novel. Think of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” Gore Vidal’s “Lincoln” or “Primary Colors” — novels that will surely always rank with the best biographies of their subjects.

But that is not this book.

Instead “7” is a crude attempt to write a fictional companion piece to former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton’s nonfictional “Ball Four,” which first brought Mantle’s off-field exploits to wide notice in 1970. Mr. Golenbock even employs the ghost of the late sportswriter Leonard Shecter, Mr. Bouton’s co-author on “Ball Four,” as the fictional Mantle’s interlocutor. “Ball Four” was certainly irreverent and (for its time) scandalous, but Mr. Golenbock’s effort to compare his book with Mr. Bouton’s evokes nothing so much as Dan Quayle invoking President Kennedy. I read “Ball Four.” “Ball Four” was an important, enlightening, enjoyable, and funny book. “7” is no “Ball Four.”

Mr. Tofel is the author of “A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939.” He wrote about Mickey Mantle for the official program of the 2005 World Series.