My Ten All-Time Favorite Baseball Books

I always like to read a baseball book around this time of year. So I just ordered Ron Darling’s new one, The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound. Here in upstate New York, we’re in the mud stage, where the fields are not quite ready, but hope is in the air. We can feel it coming, outside, playing that game we love.

To make any kind of all-time “Top Ten” list of books is ridiculous, because I keep coming across potentially great books that I haven’t read (yet!). Or read so long ago that my memory is unreliable. Ball Four? It’s been more than 30 years. It was funny, right? But why let that stop the fun? So those caveats aside, here’s a list of ten favorite baseball books, in no particular order.

THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES: THE STORY OF BASEBALL TOLD BY THE MEN WHO PLAYED IT

by Lawrence S. Ritter

A no-brainer, my all-time favorite. No other book touches closer to the heart of the game. From an Amazon review: “An oral history of the game in the first two decades of the century, Glory sends out its impressive roster of players to tell their own stories, and what stories they tell–the story of their times as well as of their game; the scorecard includes Rube Marquard, Babe Herman, Stan Coveleski, Smoky Joe Wood, and Wahoo Sam Crawford. A delight from cover to cover, Glory is the next best thing to having been there in the days when the ball may have been dead, but the personalities were anything but.”

A DAY IN THE BLEACHERS

by Arnold Hano

A few years ago, I took a men’s team down to Texas for a hardball tournament for ages 38 and up. I was GM, manager, and player. One of the players gave me this book as a gift. Hano captures one glorious day, September 28, 1954, when he attended the first game of the 1954 World Series. At age 84, Hano recently recalled: “When I subwayed home six hours later in a state of delicious languor, I decided to write about my day. The book I wrote, A Day in the Bleachers, does not deal just with the game. Oh, it does that too — the famous catch by Willie Mays takes up nine pages — but mainly it is about my day. I banter with a Brooklyn Dodger fan nearby (she carried a flag proclaiming her allegiance). I mutter incantations of hope during the not-quite 10 innings of strife. I wince at Cleveland pitcher Bob Feller’s valiant attempt to get himself in shape by doing push-ups in centerfield during batting practice, his backside too high. I marvel as Alvin Dark of the Giants intercepts a ground ball with his bare hand in the eighth inning. And I recall one final picture that day, umpire Larry Napp running down the right field foul line, indicating that a ball struck by New York’s Dusty Rhodes was indeed a game-winning home run. Immediately, all I had seen began to percolate in my brain. I had a book to write.”

THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC.

by Robert Coover

I like this line from a July 7, 1968 review in The New York Times: “Conversely, not to read it because you don’t like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don’t like boarding houses. Baseball provides as good a frame for dramatic encounter as any. The bat and ball are excuses.” Coover was an experimental writer, an innovator, and this is possibly the most creative, imaginative of all the baseball books I’ve read. In brief, with pen and paper and three dice, a man, Henry Waugh, creates his own world, peopled with vivid characters — in this case, the Universal Baseball Association, Inc. Genius. The book had added appeal to me, personally, because as a boy I filled notebooks with imaginary games I played by rolling dice — very much like Henry Waugh did in the novel.

THE BOYS OF SUMMER

by Roger Kahn

A classic. I read this one as a teenager and it was one of the first books — of any kind — that blew me away. Even moreso, I suppose, because the Dodgers were my mother’s favorite team before they broke her heart and moved to Los Angeles. Kahn, too, rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers as a child. He later covered them in the 1950s as a beat writer. According to a review in the blog, Curled Up with a Good Book, “In The Boys of Summer, Kahn reflects on the Dodgers and his own boyhood following the team. He visits with the Dodger greats to find out about their life after baseball and their own reflections on the team. What makes this arguably the seminal sports book, the book against which all other books in this genre should be judged, is Kahn’s ability to both paint a lyrical, moving account of his heroes and allow us to share intimate times on and off the field with icons such as Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, and Duke Snyder . . . This is a book that belongs on every sports lover’s bookshelf. It is a literary masterpiece that masquerades as a sports memoir.”

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

by Phillip Roth

Published in 1973, this satiric book involves another fictional baseball league, the Patriot League, and could be the funniest take on baseball. If you haven’t read it, you must. The set up for the story takes Roth about 40 pages before he gets on firm ground, and then the story rolls and the laughter ripples. From a review in The New York Times: “The ballplayers of Roth’s fable, though they bear the names of deities, are anything but images of perfection. The Mundys consist of 50-year-old veterans who have tottered out of retirement, a French-Canadian refugee from the Japanese League, adolescent boys, an alcoholic ex-con (“the Babe Ruth of the Big House” when he played for Sing Sing), a peg-legged catcher, a one-armed outfielder, a midget relief pitcher and so on. Named for their founder, the legendary Glorious Mundy, they are the sacrifices implicit in his credo (“baseball is this country’s religion”), and their season of shame, relieved only by an 11-game winning streak powered by a secret diet of synthetic Wheaties concocted by a teen-age genius, culminated in a 31-0 loss to the pennant- winning Tri-City Tycoons on the final day of the season.”

THE SOUL OF BASEBALL: A ROAD TRIP THROUGH BUCK O’NEIL’S AMERICA

by Joe Posnanski

Buck O’Neil, a former star from the Negro Leagues, teams up with the great Joe Posnanski — one of my favorite bloggers and sports writers working today — and together they tour the country for various public relations events and ballgames. While Posnanski documents the journey, recounting Buck’s baseball memories along the way, it is the spirit of Buck O’Neil that shines through: his hopefulness, his zest for life, his grace, his humility, his soul. I found this book poignant and uplifting. A joy. For a nice interview with Joe Posnanski, click here. Said Leigh Montville: “This book is flat-out terrific. If Gandhi had played baseball, he would have been Buck O’Neill.”

SHOELESS JOE

by W.P. Kinsella

I haven’t read this book in a long time, my memory of it is vague, and it may not be a fashionable pick due to the Hollywoodization of the film adaptation. But I remember being struck by Kinsella’s magic realism, his richly imaginative take on the baseball novel — Kinsella, for me, took the typical baseball story and brought it to a whole new place; and in doing so, opened up my own thinking about baseball and books and the realm of what was possible. Of course, even non-readers know the movie, The Field of Dreams, the at-times smarmy film starring Kevin Costner. At his best, Kinsella is lyrical and deep, writing not only about baseball but also love and memory, fathers and sons, dreams and truth. Many writers tend to go a overboard when talking about baseball  — the prose too purple, too much religion in it — and Kinsella shares those faults. But there are other times when he absolutely nails it. An important book for me, since it came out in 1982, right around the time in my life when I first dreamed of becoming a writer.

MONEYBALL

by Michael Lewis

Absolutely the right book at the right time. Lewis is a great nonfiction writer. His research (thanks to incredible access to Oakland A’s GM, Billy Beane) is thorough, he organizes his information beautifully, and much like Malcolm Gladwell, Lewis has a knack for conveying complicated ideas in a clear, accessible, entertaining manner. That is, he’s a hell of a writer — but not in a way that you’d necessarily notice at first, since it’s not so much about style as it is about substance. Here’s what Tom Wolfe had to say: “What does it take to turn a subject like baseball statistics into a true-life thriller not even a baseball-loathing bibliophobe could put down? Answer: saturation reporting, conceptual thinking of a high order, a rich sense of humor, and talent to burn. In short, Michael Lewis. Moneyball is his grandest tour de force yet.” Word is that they are going to make a movie based on Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt. Really. Fun fact: Lewis is married to Tabitha Soren, former MTV reporter.

JOHN McGRAW

by Charles Alexander

McGraw is one of the game’s great originals, a mercurial character whose career spanned the early decades of baseball, as it grew from its rough-neck, pugnatious roots into the national pasttime. Here’s a review from Amazon, written by Jeff Silverman: “Alexander’s marvelous biography of McGraw does what McGraw’s own My Thirty Years in Baseball couldn’t: it lets the volcano that was the man erupt in all its raw glory. A true baseball original, McGraw, as Alexander describes, ‘ate gunpowder every morning and washed it down with raw blood.’ He loved to win, but he hated losing more, and as manager of both the old Baltimore Orioles and New York Giants, he’s the only skipper in the game’s history to win almost 1,000 games more than he lost. McGraw was so outsized, flamboyant, fiery, and, at times, sentimental, that it would be easy to caricature him; Alexander’s remarkable achievement here is that he doesn’t (nor does he succumb to hero worship or bubble bursting). His triumph is letting McGraw stand on his own two spikes; the man — and the legend — have no problem standing up for themselves.”

FIVE SEASONS

Roger Angell

Hands-down, my favorite baseball writer ever, but that claim places Mr. Angell in too small a box. Sentence for sentence, Roger Angell is one of the great American writers of the past 50 years, period. And I’ll punch anyone in the nose who doesn’t think so. I love the shape of his sentences, his language, insight, and humanity. But because his form is most often the essay, Angell really hasn’t written a great (great, great) full-length book. Don’t get me wrong, his collections are wonderful and I own them all. When I was writing Six Innings, it was all I could do to limit the amount that I stole from Angell, the master. I’ve written one fan letter in my life — and it went to Roger Angell. Still, I had to pick something from his work, so I went with Five Seasons, probably because it focuses on baseball in the middle 70’s — perhaps the last truly great era of the game. From The New York Times Book Review on Five Seasons: “A book for people who miss good writing, who miss clarity, lucidity, style and passion. It’s a book for all seasons.” Since 1956, Angell has worked as an editor for The New Yorker, where most of his eloquent writing has first appeared. His stepfather was E.B. White, not a bad writer himself.

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AND THE LIFETIME AWARD GOES TO . . .

Bill James

I’ve had a love/hate/love relationship with Bill James, but he may be the most influential baseball writer to ever put pencil to scorecard, purely in terms of changing the way we’ve come to know the game. His annual “Abstracts” — which often exposed the foggy thinking behind baseball’s most cherished “conventional wisdoms” — were must-buys for me throughout the 80’s. Over the years, James seemed to grow increasingly bitter and his writing got snarkier, more unpleasant. Despite his growing legion of fans, the baseball establishment appeared to reject and ignore his ideas. A rebel and provocateur, James loved the role of gadfly, of misunderstood outsider, yet at the same time seemed to pine for the game’s warm embrace. After years of writing in the wilderness, James finally gained full acceptance in 2003, when he was invited inside, hired into the progressive, sabermetrically-inclined front office of the Boston Red Sox. Smart club, those Sox. A wonderful baseball blogger named Rich Lederer did an outstanding series of articles called, “Abstracts from the Abstracts,” where he brilliantly details the importance of each book. Fantastic stuff. And for a quick sample of James, here’s a famous extract taken his 1988 Baseball Abstract. The brief piece is now widely known as “The Bill James Primer.

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AND FINALLY, A LITTLE BIT ABOUT . . .

SIX INNINGS

One of the early influences for the format for Six Innings was a landmark book, titled Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game by Daniel Okrent — a man largely credited with inventing Fantasy Baseball. The format is essentially one game, a nothing game, June 10, 1982, Brewers vs. Orioles, including everything that happens on the field and, more importantly, inside the head of Mr. Okrent. Some folks consider this to be one of the most significant baseball books ever, in part because of Okrent’s analytical, Jamesian approach. It used to be out of print, and I’m glad to see that it’s made a comeback, hopefully with more success than Oil Can Boyd. Many other baseball books have taken that “one game” structure, including For the Love of the Game by Michael Shaara , The Last Nine Innings by Charles Euchner, and as I mentioned above, A Day in the Bleachers by Arnold Hano. With all those books in mind, and more, I knew that I was very much writing Six Innings within that tradition, and for that tradition, and that knowledge gave me the confidence to proceed.

I was tempted to make a long list of Honorable Mentions . . . but figured maybe you’d like to help. So, come on, which books did I forget to mention?

11 comments

  1. Bonnie Nelson says:

    Okay, here’s one, a local jewel. Remember this…..? Destiny’s Darlings: A World Championship Little League Team Twenty Years After, by Martin Ralbovsky (1974). It’s about the Schenectady, NY Little League team that won the 1954 World Series. My father was really good friends with most of the guys on that team. I was only 9 years old when dad brought home a copy of the book, hot off the presses. But we were a big baseball family and these kids were like celebrities to us. We’d been told about them all our lives. There was still such a huge pride in that town about that series, even 20 years later. To us, this book was so cool. We all read it and listened to dad’s stories…stories..and more stories, “yeah, in those days…boy I’ll tell ya..”

  2. Nan Hoekstra says:

    Well JP I just finished one yesterday — it was fine and strong and yes, I wrote the author a letter. It was a sweet character study and a memorable story. I don’t know enough about the all of baseball books to have a seat at this table but I’ll be recommending this one to my young patrons. The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane

  3. jimmy says:

    Well, children’s books are another story entirely, and probably worth their own post — though I’m just not well read in that category.

    One book that I’ve been determined to read, from back in the day, is called HANG TOUGH, PAUL MATHER by Alfred Slote. I’ve heard good things about it, plus, well, yes, it’s about a baseball-loving boy who has leukemia, published in 1985, so it obviously connects to my own experiences.

  4. Bill says:

    I love Paul Mather and used to read it to my classes in the spring. I thought it had a lot in common with Six Innings. Some new stuff that I like for kids. The Big Field by Mike Lupica and Keeping Score by Linda Sue Park.

  5. Mark Meyers says:

    Jim – I thought Six Innings was a really great book. For all those in the Capital District Men’s League – read it – you might find yourself in there in some form of one of the two teams players.

    Thanks for managing us in Texas.

  6. Cannon says:

    I remember playing first base and you pitched the last few innings of a whiz kids game. even though you haven’t pitched in many moons I remember you striking out the side .it was like you were posessed. what really got me was for a guy that hasn’t pitched,you knew how to be smart. your change up was perfect mixed in beautifully with your strategic fastballs. when you came off the mound I walked up to you and was psyched about what I just seen. you told me “I never pitch” .that day at sattelite field you had magic. hey’I should write a book about that one game.I can call it “the excorcist”.
    Cannon

  7. I like the book 8 Men Out by Eliot Asinof. I am also a fan of Derek Jeter A Life You Imagine.

    I have heard that The Shoeless Joe Jackson book was great and I look forward to picking it up soon.

  8. jimmy says:

    Nice to hear from some friends from the “Senior Men’s Baseball League,”thanks for stopping by.

    Quentin, I’ve always meant to read “Eight Men Out” by Asinof, but never got there. I did like the movie adaptation by John Sayles, a favorite director.

    For various reason, I can relate to baseball in the olden days, whereas the modern game is something foreign, beautiful, amazing, but I just can’t place myself there in quite the same way.

    As for Jeter, as much as I respect him, he’s a Yankee and it’s hard for me to get past that. I’m shallow that way. I have the DiMaggio book on my shelf, still unread. Even so, I read and loved Robert Creamer’s great book, BASEBALL (and other matters) IN 1941, which prominently featured the Yankees; I also loved David Halberstam’s SUMMER OF ’49, another case of a great, gifted writer taking on a Yankee-centric season.

  9. Autumn says:

    my boss made me research this topic, i wasnt too happy, figured i would be bored to death (not my cup of tea) but your blogs allright mate 😉

  10. Terry Lass says:

    Jim,

    All the whole, your choices are sound. However, you list a couple of clunkers & miss some true winners. I limit myself to fiction only.

    I’d delete both Roth & Kinsella; Roth because baseball is a mere pretext for his “profound” social commentary, Kinsella because he’s way too sweet on bogus “poetic” metaphors of the game. The movie is actually better; an ordinary effort, with
    4-5 seconds of real magic.

    Enough of the negative. Consider now the best of all baseball novels.

    Eric Rolfe GREENBERG. The Celebrant. This magnificent novel explores fame and its consequences, told from the point of view of an enraptured early fan of Christy Mathewson.

    Mark HARRIS, lifetime achievement award for his four baseball novels, all narrated by Henry Wiggen, one of the few worthy successors of Huck Finn as a superlative vernacular voice. The novels are The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Ticket for a Seamstitch and It Looked Like Forever. Any one of these puts everybody but GREENBERG in the shade.

    I could go on, but nuf ced for now.

    Thanks for all your good work.

    Yrs,

    (Mr.) Terry Lass

  11. jimmy says:

    Terry,

    Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. I am a huge Christy Mathewson fan, so THE CELEBRANT has long been on my list; in fact, I own 2 copies of the book! And the Harris thing is just weird, because as much as I know I have to read them, I simply haven’t got around to them. You know the drill: so many books, such bad eyesight.

    In truth, unlike you, I lean more heavily to nonfiction when it comes to my baseball reading. I recently started a Mets blog with a friend, and I spent quite a lot of time putting together what I listed as THE ESSENTIAL BASEBALL LIBRARY. It’s pretty massive and can be found at this link: http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/?page_id=1328

    If that fails, the blog is called, “2 Guys Talking Mets Baseball.” Obviously, in any list, there will be holes and swings & misses. But at least I took my cuts! Please take a look at it when you get the chance, you might enjoy it.

    I read Kinsella long ago and liked those books very much, thrilled by the Magic Realism. Though I do believe there’s a difference in perception depending upon what age you come across a book. We are more forgiving of poetic excess at a younger age, generally; it’s the best time to read ON THE ROAD, for example, and maybe the entire work of Thomas Wolf. I recall hating most of the movie, which got too sickly sentimental. Anyway, I will defend Roth’s book, which I found inventive and hilarious. To me, it was just funny as hell. Even silly, really.

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