The 20 Best Baseball Books Ever

I gave up reading nonfiction books a few years ago. Almost every one I've read would have been better suited as a magazine article. But I have read a few of these, from before that:

1. Five Seasons
6. Moneyball
10. The Bronx Zoo
11. Baseball's Great Experiment
14. Ball Four
20. Boys of Summer

I dislike that the top two choices are compilations of features, essays and columns. Yes, they fall more in line with my taste. But it just seems unreasonable, like putting a greatest hits collection on top of a list of the greatest albums ever.

Of the five actual books I've read from that list, Ball Four is my favorite by a mile.

 

Leaving off Pat Jordan's "A False Spring" makes this "A False List."

 

A book list compiled by a single person is inherently flawed. There are way too many well-received nonfiction books about baseball for one person to read.

 

Dollar sign on the muscle. Under the radar but the ultimate on baseball scouting. "did you get the mileage" story.

 

Two well worn books in my library:

"The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball" by Leonard Koppett (1967, revised 2004)

"The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" by Bill James (2001).

I've read 7 on the list.

 

As much as I enjoyed Ball Four, I thought Bouton's second book (written with Leonard Shecter), I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally was even better. It's basically all about the reaction directed at him by the baseball community for writing Ball Four.

Missing from the list is Robert Whiting's Yo Got to Have Wa. It's an excellent book from 1989 about Japanese baseball and the cultural clashes American players go through playing there.

The best recent baseball book is The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century by Jim Kaplan. It's about the July 2, 1963 Giants/Braves game at Candlestick Park that ended in the bottom of the 16 inning when Willie Mays won it with a walk off HR. Both starting pitchers went the distance. A 42-year old Warren Spahn took the loss on his 201st pitch of the day. A 25-year old Juan Marichal threw 227 pitches in his complete game win.

Boxscore & P-B-P of the game: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1963/B07020SFN1963.htm

 

Yeah, I've always thought of those two books as a matched set. Recently picked up a copy of I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally from Amazon, so it's good to have them both again. Plenty more laughs and great stories in the second book, including tales from Bouton's stint as a sports anchor in New York City.

Bang the Drum Slowly was a fine baseball novel, by the way.

 

Moneyball altered two industries.
These rankings are ridiculous.

 

Some fun stats in that game, including Spahn only striking out two in 15+ innings and the game taking just 4 hours and 10 minutes, which is a typical Yankee-Red Sox game today.

 

Here's my list -- nonfiction only.

1. The Glory of Their Times/ Baseball When The Grass Was Real/Baseball Between The Lines *
2. Veeck, As In Wreck/ The Hustler's Handbook *
3. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, First Edition, 1985/Second Edition, 2003.* The first edition is more readable and less dense than the 2003 revision and should be sought out separately.
4. Baseball's Great Experiment
5. The Summer Game/Five Seasons *
6. The Boys of Summer
7. Ball Four
8. Only the Ball Was White
9. Moneyball
10. The Long Season
11. Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?
12. A Ball Player's Career, A.C. "Cap" Anson, 1900. Actually surprisingly candid and funny (and in some spots, bitter) for its time, although it certainly dispels any doubt whatsoever that Anson was a world-champion racist. Also provides a first-person account of how the playing conditions of the game changed from the 1860s when teen Anson started making his name in frontier Iowa, until 1898, when the game actually resembled something like what we know today.
11. The Pitch That Killed
12. Maybe I'll Pitch Forever, Satchel Paige
13. A Day in the Bleachers
14. Pitching In A Pinch, Christy Mathewson, 1912. Less rough-edged than Anson's book, but still pretty entertaining.
15. Eight Men Out
16. Crazy '08. Includes BOTH wild pennant races, not just the National League.
17. Babe: The Legend Comes To Life
18. A False Spring
19. Cobb (Al Stump). How much of it is true is open to debate, but holy hell.
20. Nice Guys Finish Last, Leo Durocher

*-denotes multiple books in a series which really can be considered a single work. The two Donald Honig followups to "The Glory of Their Times" so closely follow the model in style and presentation they can be considered consecutive volumes in a single series.

 

Does anyone here recall "So You Think You Know Baseball?". There are at least two books by two different authors out there (2013, 2001), but I thought the original material came out in smaller books back in the 1950s or 1960s.

 

Great call, fantastic book.