Hardball : MAJOR LEAGUE LOSERS: The Real Cost of Sports and Who’s Paying for It.<i> By Mark S. Rosentraub</i> . <i> BasicBooks: 513 pp., $27.50</i>

Mark S. Rosentraub and some academic colleagues, mostly from the University of Indiana, bang the drums loudly in their polemic, “Major League Losers.” The tom-toms seem to be saying this: The hustlers who run big-time sports in the United States and Canada must be regulated immediately. If not, they will steal our tax money, seduce our daughters, burn our crops.

Well, no. Rosentraub doesn’t mention daughters or crops. But he is deadly serious about those characters sportswriters used to call magnates--the men who wheel and deal and run big-time sports.

Offering case studies from a variety of venues, Rosentraub argues against the use of any more tax money for big-dollar sport. Let club owners buy their own land like anybody else. Let them pay for their own buildings. Whatever owners tell us, Rosentraub says, big-time sports actually produce few jobs and have “a negligible positive impact even on their own immediate neighborhood.”

No one is going to read this work for its prose. But “Major League Losers” is not about prose or the poetry of sport, for that matter. It is about challenging the premises that the magnates peddle and that the media too frequently accept.

In the end this book guides readers toward a significant question. Are big-time sports a good thing? That is not a question raised by the editors of Sports Illustrated or by power television sportscasters. The editors at Sports Illustrated and the television sportscasters are part of big-time sports themselves.

“Major League Losers” inspires fresh and unconventional thinking. That is what makes it significant.

The late John R. Tunis’ classic study “The American Way in Sport” apparently is quite forgotten (Rosentraub doesn’t list it in his bibliography). The essence of Tunis’ message, circa 1960, was a lamentation for the way sports had been stolen away from fans.

As a boy, Tunis attended the final game of the first World Series in 1903. He bought his ticket from the famous pitcher, Cy Young. Since Young wasn’t starting that afternoon, he went to work in a ticket booth. Just imagine something like that today. (“No, you are not off this evening, Mr. Nomo. You sell tickets till game time. Then you hawk scorecards in Section 12.”)

The Boston Pilgrims won that first series, defeating the Pittsburgh team of Honus Wagner. After the final game, Boston fans rushed onto the field, lifted the players to their shoulders and bore them triumphantly down Huntington Avenue. “These days,” Tunis wrote, sadly, “any fan rushing on the field and hoisting a winning World Series player on to his shoulders will be arrested.”

By the time the New York Herald Tribune assigned me to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952, I had memorized “Lines on the Transpontine Madness” from Stanley Woodward’s brief, brilliant book “Sports Page”: “Baseball writers develop a great attachment for the Brooklyn club if long exposed. That was so in the days of Wilbert Robinson [1920] and it is so today. We found it advisable to shift Brooklyn writers frequently. If we hadn’t, we would have had on our hands a member of the Brooklyn baseball club, rather than a newspaper reporter. You must watch a Brooklyn writer for symptoms and, before they become virulent, shift him to the Yankees or to tennis or golf.”

I was being paid not to promote the Dodgers, but to report on them. When Red Smith grew gushy in a column about Joe DiMaggio, Woodward issued a directive. “Stop godding up athletes.” At Woodward’s Tribune--a golden land for sportswriting--we reported as honestly as we knew how on players and owners, emperors and clowns, limited only by the boundaries of taste.

Today, the influence of newspapers and independent newspaper sportswriters has shriveled, like a rhododendron in the frost. The major sports news source is television, and the superstars of communication are no longer newspaper columnists. Today’s stars are wealthy men who work broadcast booths.

The networks that employ them invest hundreds of millions of bucks to broadcast sports. Do you think network honchos warn sportscasters these days against “godding up” the athletes? Their counsel goes the other way: “Make everything and everyone just as great as you can, guys. We need the ratings.”

Watching big-time college football on the networks, we see halftime photo essays on happy days at Silo Tech. We do not get essays on how big-time sports distorts life on the campus.

“I once flunked two football players in the same semester,” Les Martin, a Notre Dame English professor, told me some time back. “I didn’t get another athlete in my class for years.

“It gives me a certain pleasure to announce when the season is over. Football has ended. It’s Chaucer time again.”

What about the impecunious youths who build worthwhile lives on the foundation of an athletic scholarship? For every Paul Robeson, you find a thousand melon heads playing big-time football who don’t belong in college in the first place.

What about those impecunious intelligent youngsters who don’t make it to college at all? Their scholarship money was handed to a linebacker. Their seat in the class on Chaucer went to the wide receiver who flunked. In sum, the term “athletic scholarship” may be the ultimate American oxymoron.

Rosentraub elaborates little on the mystique, but does look hard at the attempt by Indianapolis to build an image through the acquisition of major franchises: The Colts of the National Football League and the Pacers of the National Basketball Assn. The city built the Hoosier Dome and the Market Square Arena at a cost of about $65 million in tax dollars. The return? Good in terms of sports excitement, Rosentraub concedes; negligible in jobs. Image? To this day I’ve heard no one call Indianapolis the Athens of America.

Cleveland? In a city scorned as “the mistake on the lake”--despite, incidentally, a glorious symphony orchestra--politicians fought back with the so-called Gateway Project that rebuilt the shabby downtown. This included a new theater and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (talk about an oxymoron!), plus two big-ticket items--a new basketball arena and the splendid ball yard Jacobs Field. Cost to Cleveland taxpayers: $320 million. Rosentraub estimates that by 2024 the Indians and the Cavaliers will have paid back no more than $110 million in rent.

As we remember from freshman economics, money has “time utility.” That is why borrowers pay interest. Factor in the Cleveland numbers over almost 30 years--you’ll agree with Rosentraub that the Indians and the Cavaliers walked away with sweetheart deals. What did Cleveland get? Commitments that the Cavaliers and the Indians would stay in town. But, Rosentraub points out, “Cleveland bought a beautiful ‘pig in a poke.’ [The new sports arenas] are impressive and beautiful . . . but with no firm prices or contracts, the public sector was asked for a blank check that cost millions more than anyone ever wanted to spend.”

Rosentraub and colleagues move on to St. Louis, Montreal and Cincinnati. Patterns persist. Government officials go starry-eyed in the presence of sports promoters, then spend tons of tax dollars without ever finding out whether the taxpayers are being fairly served.

As Leon Trotsky asked in another context, what is to be done? Rosentraub wants the National Governors’ Assn. and the U.S. Conference on Mayors to prohibit the use of tax dollars to build sports “venues”--ball yards and arenas. All communities that can raise a franchise fee should be guaranteed expansion franchises. This would limit a Steinbrenner playing New York against New Jersey, an O’Malley playing Brooklyn against Los Angeles.

It is interesting to be sure but unlikely to happen until Newt Gingrich campaigns for honest campaign financing. To make that perfectly clear, I mean late or never.

I do wish Rosentraub had a surer sense of sports history and sports magic. What did Brooklyn lose when the Dodgers went west? Something I can’t define. The cliche “soul” overstates it, but not by much. After the Giants moved to San Francisco, what happened to that little kid in Harlem who used to play stickball with Willie Mays? I mean after he stopped crying. How terribly sad.

Flawed though it is, limited though it is, “Major League Losers” makes readers ask hard questions. It’s about time we all began to cross-examine the American big-time sports, big-time tax loophole business. We could do worse than start with the issues Mark Rosentraub raises.