It doesn’t look as if the Yankees are going to win this year, but their fans can at least take solace that they once again lead the league in books. It’s amazing that after the virtual library of Yankee lit published in this decade alone, there are still so many good subjects out there to write about.

Sol Gittleman’s “Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat” (McFarland & Company, 230 pages, $29.95), for instance, is the first book — and none other will be needed — about the core of the only team in baseball history to win five consecutive World Series, the 1949–53 Yankees. It’s a great idea; so great that you wonder why no one thought of it sooner. Probably because none of the Big Three has ever been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Maybe they weren’t good enough individually, but Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and Ed Lopat won an incredible 255 games for the Yankees over that five-year period — and that doesn’t count their World Series victories. Perhaps they should be inducted together, on a single plaque.

In truth, Mr. Gittleman’s book should be called “Turner’s Boys” after Jim “Milkman” Turner, the man who practically invented the job of major league pitching coach. Given the task of forging a pitching staff by general manager George Weiss and manager Casey Stengel, Turner seemed to have material no more promising than the current Yankee staff. Preaching the virtues of good mechanics and aggressiveness to his grizzled veterans (all the Big Three were older than 30), Turner molded them into the most reliable unit in baseball. When Whitey Ford came along in 1950, Branch Rickey thought the Yankees had the best rotation he had ever seen.

Reynolds, who was part Creek Indian, Raschi, the son of Italian immigrants, and Lopat, of Polish extraction, were as multiethnic as a bomber crew in a World War II movie. All had limited success before coming to the Yankees. Allie “Big Chief” Reynolds was slurred by Cleveland sportswriters as the “Vanishing American” for his failure to complete games, but blossomed with Turner and their new battery mate, Yogi Berra, who had been made into a polished catcher by the great Bill Dickey, who, in Berra’s words, “learned me all of his experience.”

Mr. Gittleman, a history and literature professor at Tufts University, has the rare gift of mixing the precision of a historian with the enthusiasm of a fan. His heroes were “a band of generally ordinary baseball players who accomplished a feat unimaginable today … grateful to be working at the highest level of professional baseball and at a game they loved.” They weren’t superstars, but they were the backbone of a super team.

Curt Smith’s “The Voice” (The Lyons Press, 267 pages, $24.95) is the second biography of the man who called most of the Big Three’s games on radio, “The Voice of the Yankees” Mel Allen, and it isn’t clear a second book was needed. Stephen Borelli’s 2005 bio of Allen, “How About That!,” covers just about exactly the same territory in the same number of pages. Oddly, Mr. Smith, a radio/TV historian and author of “The Voices of the Game,” lists Mr. Borelli’s book in his bibliography but does not otherwise refer to it.

Born in 1913, Mel Allen (aka Mel Israel) was raised near Birmingham, Ala., in a small Jewish community, a circumstance that must have made for a fascinating upbringing. But Mr. Smith glides over Allen’s early years in about 10 pages, so the story, as told by Mr. Smith, lacks context. Like most of the great early baseball announcers (Red Barber and Ernie Harwell come quickly to mind), Allen spoke with a sharp distinguishable Southern drawl that continues to be parodied and imitated today. His signature lines, “How about that!” and “Going … Going … Gone!” are still used by youngsters who may not know where they originated.

Allen was an intelligent, genial man who made friends easily, but he was also something of a loner. He remained a bachelor and lived most of his life by himself. Mr. Smith never really gets at the man behind the voice and doesn’t seem interested in doing so. “The Voice” might have worked better with a life-and-times approach, but Mr. Smith gets too much of the times wrong. He serves up myths like Scott Proctor serves up walks: Wally Pipp was not replaced in the lineup by Lou Gehrig because of a headache (he was benched); Mel Allen did not give his old Alabama schoolmate Bear Bryant his famous houndstooth hat; Mickey Mantle did not hit a 565-foot home run, and so on. At times you wonder if Mr. Smith double checked anything in his book.

My real problem with “The Voice,” though, is Mr. Smith’s fractured, pseudo-hipster prose style .I haven’t a clue as to what he means when he says Mel Allen treated rhetoric “Like the buckle of life’s belt”; I don’t know why someone would describe a particular World Series as “antipodean,” and no one born north of Allen’s hometown has any business calling home runs “taters.” And it contributes to our appreciation of Mel Allen not at all to say that he “became baseball’s Zelig” — the character in Woody Allen’s movie was invisible precisely because he was a chameleon around famous people. No matter if he was in a photograph with Babe Ruth, President Kennedy, or President Regan, Allen’s infectious grin jumps out at you — just as his voice jumps at baseball fans when we hear it today in an old rebroadcast.

Speaking of jumping out, Bill Jenkinson’s delightful “The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs” (Carroll & Grad, 412 pages, $16.95) will soothe the soul of any Yankee fan who thinks that the conspiracy of Barry Bonds and the press are trying to eclipse their idol. Neither a biography nor even a life-andtimes book, this is an analysis of the Babe’s career set against the backdrop of the parks, pitchers, bats, and balls of his time, all contrasted with those of today. I don’t for a minute accept Mr. Jenkinson’s projections — most notably that playing under modern conditions Ruth would have hit 104 home runs in 1921 and 1,158 home runs in his career — but Mr. Jenkinson has so much fun with his argument and Mr. Bonds is such an imbecile that I’m not going to argue with him.

I only hope Mr. Jenkinson does a second volume in six or seven years when Alex Rodriguez passes up Barry Bonds.

Mr. Barra is the author of “Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Century,” soon to be reissued by the University of Nebraska Press.