Heywood Broun was at his best when he wrote about the things he spent his life reporting. Baseball was one of those subjects, and "The Sun Field" was a sparkling novel of the lives of the baseball players he knew so well. But Milton Lazarus' dramatization of the novel only serves to show how much of its original success was due to the salty vigor with which Broun plunged into a topic he knew and understood.

As a play, "The Sun Field" is talky and long-winded. Where Broun was witty, the drama is smart-alecky and cheap; where Broun was inquisitive and thoughtful, Lazarus' work lapses into a poor imitation of an Ibsen problem play. Only in some of the conversations among baseball players does Broun shipe through, and even then much of the dialogue is dated and thoroughly unfunny.

In case you're not that much of a baseball fan, "The Sun Field" is that part of a baseball park where the players have the sun in their eyes. Most of them wear sun-glasses, but Tiny Tyler, Broun's hero, trusts to luck to pick fly balls out of the air when he's playing there. His luck runs out, though, when he falls for a brainy blonde sportswriter, and talks her into marrying him. Judith--the blonde--wants Tiny to stay a tobacco-chewing ball player; Tiny wants to read Schopenhauer so he can keep up with Judith. Result: everybody suffers until each of them learns that there's plenty to be learned from the other's point of view.

A lot of spice and vigor might have pulled so trite a story out of the doldrums, but the author has failed to do anything more than produce a pale imitation of what Broun was driving at. And the leisurely pace of the direction doesn't help much either.

Joel Ashley takes a good bite out of the juiciest part, that of Tiny, the cheerful extrovert. Claudia Morgan is somewhat less at home as Judith, though she snaps to life in the last act. Broun would probably get the biggest kick, though. out of the wise-cracking ball players portrayed by Karl Malden, Lewis Charles, and Fred Sherman. They talk his language, and it's the language the audience would have liked to hear more of.