Tommy Shea never hit a home run.

He came close once.

Donning an itchy Red Sox uniform – an irony of ironies for a boy who planned to replace Mickey Mantle as the New York Yankees centerfielder if his dream of being the first American pope didn’t work out – a 45-year-old Shea stared down the best and hardest throwing pitcher in his over-30 league.

He got a fastball, and boy was it a good one. He swung hard and connected. He hit it hard; he hit it long; he hit it foul.

Now confident in his suddenly newfound power, he stepped in again, looking for another fastball to crush. Instead, out of the pitcher’s hand came the slowest of slow curveballs. Gripping the bat tight and swinging as hard as he could, he was so far out in front of the pitch, he nearly ended up face first in the dirt.

“But that’s baseball, isn’t it?” Shea said with a smile.

It’s a story he tells with a grin on his face from the first word to the last, his voice occasionally trembling with the tension of the moment. His eyes make evident the excitement of every second from behind his round-framed glasses.

Tommy Shea isn’t a sports fan; he’s a baseball fan.

The intricacies and eccentricities of the beautiful game call to him, turning a boyhood love into a grown man’s monster passion.

“I daydream about baseball,” he admitted.

So when Longmeadow native Dr. Joshua Shifrin needed a partner to finish a project he embarked on to compile into one volume the game’s most memorable home runs, he couldn’t have found a better partner in the world.

The end result of their collective work is “Dingers: The 101 Most Memorable Home Runs in Baseball History.”

Shifrin, who now lives in New Jersey, is a psychologist, but writing has always been a secondary passion. In addition to a psychological thriller and a study guide, he’s published two other sports books, “101 Incredible Moments in Tennis” and “From the Links: Golf’s Most Memorable Moments” and in a conversation with his agent came up with the concept of “Dingers” for his third sports-related work.

“I love to write and I love baseball – and all sports – and I thought this would be a great idea for a book,” the former high school and college tennis star said.

With a publisher on board, he started compiling his list of the game’s most memorable round-trippers, but faced with the task of balancing his research and writing, raising two boys with his wife, teaching psychology full time at Essex County College and providing neuropsychological testing as a second part-time job, the book was shelved.

“I kept thinking that ‘Dingers’ really was a good idea, so after several months I approached the publisher and asked them if I could write the book with a co-author, and they agreed,” he said.

Enter Tommy Shea.

A mutual friend connected the two. Shifrin sent an email to Shea to gauge his interest; a phone conversation followed.

“I could immediately sense Tommy’s passion for the game and instantly knew that he was the right person and it worked out better than I could have possibly imagined,” Shifrin said.

Shifrin’s goal, Shea said, was to make the book a fun read, rather than a history lecture. With a subject like baseball, Shea said that part was easy.

“We put together something that a 10- or 11-year-old kid could read and his grandpa could also pick up and read,” Shea said. “That’s what baseball can do. It’s something you can talk about, debate about and laugh about.”

For a baseball junkie like Shea, it was a dream assignment.

“There was the stuff that I knew, there was the stuff that I once knew and had forgotten, and then there was loads of information that I just never knew,” he said. “There were these little details within the big moments of baseball history that I just didn’t know and that was the fun thing.”

The book allowed Shea to spend the better part of a year delving into two of his passions – baseball and reading.

“There’s a remarkable amount of great baseball books out there, and it’s not just the best sellers,” he said.

After a 40-year run with The Republican during which he covered everything from courts to sports to pedophile priests to human interest stories and a resume that includes published works in Sports Illustrated, New England Monthly, Baseball America, and the former New England Monthly, Shea knows a good story. But he and Shifrin admitted it was a challenge paring down the seemingly endless font of tales about baseball’s most sacred and recognizable feat.

What’s more, there was the ever-present question: What’s the difference between memorable and meaningful?

“Tommy and I went back and forth about several moments, but in the end we put in what we thought were truly the most deserving moments.  We knew all along that not everybody would agree with every moment we included – or didn’t include – but that’s OK,” Shifrin said. “We wanted this book to spark debate.  In my opinion that's part of what makes baseball, and sports in general, so much fun – debating the best teams, the greatest players, or in this case, the most memorable home runs in baseball history.”

As a Red Sox fan, Shifrin expressed his love the Carlton Fisk’s iconic blast off the foul pole in the 1975 World Series and it was one he lobbied for in the co-authors’ debates. It is No. 6 in the book.

“I tease people about that home run and say, ‘So what? It didn’t win them the World Series; they lost the next night,’” Shea said. “But I came to realize it was an enormous moment in baseball history, television sports history and culturally. People who weren’t even born can still do that move [gesturing the ball fair] and people whose parts that don’t move as well as they did in ’75 can.”

Shifrin also admitted he grew up a New York Mets fan and his personal memories of Lenny Dykstra’s walk-off home run in Game 3 of the 1986 National League Championship Series against the Astros prompted him to add that story. Bill Mazeroski’s dinger to win the 1960 World Series against the Yankees is also a favorite, a hat tip to his parents, who are originally from Pittsburgh.

“To be honest it’s like loving your children,” Shifrin said about picking his favorites. “You could never say which one you love best.”

Those that didn’t make the list include Josh Gibson’s reported 580-foot home run at Yankee Stadium in 1937; David Ortiz’s game-tying grand slam that sent the Detroit Tigers’ Torii Hunter flipping into the bullpen in Game 2 of the American League Championship Series; David Freese’s walkoff for the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 6 of 2011 World Series and Wade Boggs’ 3,000th hit for a home run with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1999. There were valid arguments for all, but simply stronger arguments for others, Shea said.

“I never asked Josh how he came up with the idea of 101 – not 100 – dingers, but we tried to use every single slot,” he said.

Shea will host a reading and signing of “Dingers” at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on May 3 and at Long Meddowe Days in Longmeadow on May 22.

For more info on “Dingers: The 101 Most Memorable Home Runs in Baseball History,” visit http://sportspubbooks.com/titles/837-9781613218310-dingers. To learn more about Shifrin and Shea, visit their respective websites and upcoming readings, http://shifrinbooks.com and www.tommysheastadium.com.