Damon Runyon was a sportswriter who made good, but he could just as easily have started out working the police or political beats, any hunting ground that promised a steady supply of vivid characters ripe for the capturing by such a quick-sketch artist. From the evidence of the quirky and lively accounts in this new collection of his baseball writings (Carroll & Graf, 416 pages, $16.95), the game itself did not seem to interest Runyon as much as the characters of which it was composed: the hot-tempered Ty Cobb, who leaped into the stands to stamp out an offending fan; “Turkey Mike” Donlin, “one of the greatest baseball players that ever wore a cleated shoe and one of the most picturesque characters ever produced by the old game”; “Judge Kenesay Mountain Landis, the snowy-haired pooh-bah of baseball”; Arnold Rothstein, the gregarious master gambler accused of fixing the 1919 World Series; and Babe Ruth, “the breath of life in baseball,” who belted two home runs in the 1932 World Series despite the lemons that rained down from the Chicago crowd. (Runyon has no comment on Ruth’s murkily “called” shot in that series.)

Runyon cut his teeth at a time when sportswriters did a lot of exuberant scene-setting, giving readers a game’s sights, sounds, and smells along with the score. While others had a wider range, he was at the forefront of those sportswriters of the 1920s Golden Age who personalized team contests between largely anonymous “sides” into splashy meetings of demi-gods (Babe, “the Beezark of Kerblam” vs. Ty, “the Georgia Jabber”), shaping the gray terrain of the games themselves into the vibrant sporting landscape (Kobe vs. Iverson) in which we still live.

Runyon would not be so well-known had he not moved on; the sports-column format did not fully accommodate his talents the way it did Grantland Rice’s or Ring Lardner’s. Years before he gave the world “Guys” like Nathan Detroit, he was fundamentally a collector of characters and colorful speech. His later, lingo-steeped portraits tend toward the stylized and sentimental and, like the title of one of his several syndicated columns, feature the ‘The Brighter Side’ of riffraff. There are few unredeeming thugs in Runyon, but there are plenty of archetypal toughs, sideways-talking racketeers, and petty crooks like “Light-Finger Moe” or “Sorrowful, the Bookmaker.”

“Broadway supports more low forms of life today than a primordial swamp,” another Broadway observer, Meyer Berger, wrote in 1942, “it swarms with types beside which the old-school goldbrick peddler, the cutpurse, and the square-rigged streetwalker seem like dimpled cherubim.” Many of Runyon’s Broadway figures were based on people he had entertained at table in ‘Lindy’s’ restaurant, a memorable place rendered as Mindy’s in Runyon’s fiction. The gangsters who weren’t entertaining drinking buddies presumably never sat down with Runyon for a portrait.

This chronicler of this Manhattan night world came a long way to his Lindy’s table. Born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1884, he was the son of a printer with a drinking problem; the son would inherit it and later battle it successfully, becoming well-known for drinking coffee into the night. He caught the eye of William Randolph Hearst while writing for the Colorado Pueblo, and Hearst imported the young journalist to cover baseball for his New York American in 1911, later elevating him to national columnist.

“Guys, Dolls, and Fastballs” begins with young Arthur Damon Runyon befriending the hard-drinking former pitcher “Bugs” Raymond and sees the sport through the rise and decline of the Babe, the quotable slugger who outdid himself with increasingly astonishing home run records of 29, 59, and 60 in a season. It covers the Black Sox Series (“Cicotte ‘had nothing’ as they put it in baseball language,” Runyon reported after one outing by Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte, which was later deemed suspect) and the scandal’s judicial aftermath, as well as the fatal beaning of Ray Chapman by Carl Mays in 1920 (“Twenty thousand people saw a man go drifting into the valley of the shadow of death”), Ruth’s Opening Day blast christening the newly opened Yankee Stadium before 74,000 “Bronxonians” in 1923 (“Blooie – and a vocal blast that seemed to rock the Bronx – that certainly shook up some of the rocks of the Bronx, rolled out of the towering stands, and boiled up from the broad bleachers, as the thing happened that everybody had come to see happen.”).

As with his contemporary, Ring Lardner, Runyon lost some of his boyish love for baseball after the Black Sox scandal, but he continued to cover the personalities that fascinated him. Once he was a national columnist, Runyon kept his hand in by covering spring training and the World Series. The spring-training pieces especially allowed him to wander physically and literarily about in search of characters and offbeat stories (he deplored players wasting their free time on useless activities like golf or fishing).

The 1925 Series between Washington and Pittsburgh saw the Broadway-minded writer making this comment: “I wish Flo Ziegfeld, or Sam Harris, or George White, or some other enterprising and resourceful showman would get into baseball and make the World Series something more than a perfunctory playing of a number of games to determine the major share of the receipts, and a large, cheap banner, usually not unfurled until the following Summer.”

Runyon wished to see the World Series “trimmed up and staged, and properly produced, and made into a real spectacle, something on the order of the Army and the Navy football game.” I wonder what he would make of the game today: The production values certainly outshine those of the Army-Navy game, but Runyon might find the characters lacking in color.

Mr. Ward last wrote in these pages on Irish gangsters.