OT: List of Baseball Books
If you are looking for a way to forget briefly about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I'm reposting a list of baseball books that the board help me put together a year ago.
This time I've included hyperlinks to Amazon.com in case you are interested in checking them out there.
Top Recommendations by MGoBlog Board (in no particular order)
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty
by Charles Leerhsen
Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams
by Robert Peterson
Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball In the Big Leagues
by Jim Bouton and Leonard Shecter
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball
by George Will
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It
by Lawrence S Ritter
You Gotta Have Wa
by Robert Whiting
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball
by John Feinstein
The Art of Fielding: A Novel
by Chad Harbach (Fiction)
Biography/Autobiography
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life
by Robert W. Creamer
Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero
by Leigh Montville
Hustle : The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose
by Michael Sokolove
Veeck--As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
by Bill Veeck & Ed Linn
The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
by Nicholas Dawidoff
It's What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts : The Autobiography of Earl Weaver
by Earl Weaver and Berry Stainback
Nice Guys Finish Last
by Leo Durocher
Fear Strikes Out
by Jim Piersall
The Truth Hurts
by Jimmy Piersall
The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life
by Rick Ankiel
Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir
by Bob Feller
Yaz: Baseball, The Wall And Me
by Carl Yazstrzamski
Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy: Baseball's Favorite Lunatic Goes in Search of His Peers
by Jay Johnstone
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend
by James S. Hirsch
Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod’s Heart to Zim’s Head--My 25 Years in Baseball
by Tim Kurkjian
I'm Fascinated by Sacrice Flies
by Tim Kurkjian
Seasons/Teams/History
So You Think You're a Die-Hard Tiger Fan
by Joe Falls
The Detroit Tigers: An Illustrated History
by Joe Falls
Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan
by Peter Morris
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America's Game (Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Brown 1883)
by Edward Achorn
Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History (Chicago Cubs)
by Cait N. Murphy and Robert W. Creamer
The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs, and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series in 1912
by Mike Vaccaro
The Pitch That Killed: Carl Mays, Ray Chapman and the Pennant Race of 1920 (Cleveland Indians)
by Mike Sowell
Summer of '49 (Yankees & Red Sox)
by David Halberstam
The Kid from Tomkinsville (Brooklyn Dodgers)
by John R. Tunis
Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year
by Jimmy Breslin
October 1964 (Yankees & Cardinals)
by David Halberstam
Dynasty: The New York Yankees, 1949-1964
by Peter Golenbock
The Summer Game
by Roger Angell
Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s
by Dan Epstein
The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds
by Joe Posnanski
Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1972-76)
by Roger Angell
3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager
(St. Louis Cardinals v. Chicago Cubs in 2003 through the eyes of Tony La Russa)
by Buzz Bissinger
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Oakland Athletics 2003)
by Michael Lewis
Dollar Sign on the Muscle (Scouting)
by Kevin Kerrane
The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse
by Rich Cohen
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship (Red Sox)
by David Halberstam
Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style
by Robert WhitingThe Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams
by Michael Tackett
Baseball: An Illustrated History
by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
Fiction
Bang the Drum Slowly
by Mark Harris
Shoeless Joe (the book that became the movie Field of Dreams)
by W. P. Kinsella
If I Never Get Back
by Daryl Brock
Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
by Eliot Asinof (reconstructed the story)
Sabermetrics
Baseball Prospectus 2019
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong
by Jonah Keri
Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers from the Team at Baseball Prospectus
by Steven Goldman
The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First First
by Jonah Keri
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin
Youth Adult/Children
The Kid Who Only Hit Homers
by Matt Christopher
Catcher with a Glass Arm
by Matt Christopher
Hang Tough, Paul Mather
by Alfred Slote
Tony and Me
by Alfred Slote
The Fox Steals Home
by Matt Christopher
The Berenstain Bears Go Out for the Team
by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain
Baseball for Dummies is dope.
A comment for a tip jar (To borrow from Fletch, it would take a big man to do all this work and not want imaginary MGoBlog points. I am not a big man.)
And may they help you procure all the pictures of beer and spirits the internet can afford.
+1
The Art of Fielding is a fantastic book.
The Last Innocents, by Michael Leahy is a great add to the team/season section. Covers the 1960s Dodgers through the lens of 7 players, including Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax and some lesser knowns.
If you have daughters and love baseball I highly recommend this:
https://www.amazon.com/Baseball-Back-Michael-Turner/dp/154240777X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
This is a good post
Should probably be a diary
I thought about that. Last time it was a diary but it hung around for longer than usual. I may repost it as a diary later, although with another question I have for the board. I'm always impressed with the knowledge that can be gain from crowdsourcing on this board (sincerely).
Wait till it falls off the front page then repost as a Diary.
This is quality work LLG. Should stay up for a bit as a Diary and for good reason. BTW - as much as baseball bores me to tears watching it....I LOVE reading about it. For me anyways the sport translates better in written form and definitely better listening to it on the radio than watching it on TV.
Balls Craig Nettles
The Bronx Zoo Sparky Lyle
Number 1 Billy Martin
Nobody's Perfect Denny McClain
I'll add Astroball: The New Way to Win It All. I haven't read it yet, but my father-in-law suggested it. It's by the author of the 2014 SI cover story on the Astros predicting that the Astros would win the world series in 2017 (the 'Stros had lost 100+ games in the prior 3 seasons). I've been in Houston for the last 4 years and, especially now that JV is here, the Astros have become my favorite team not named the Detroit Tigers. They're a fun team to root for.
https://www.amazon.com/Astroball-New-Way-Win-All/dp/0525576649
George Cantor wrote a book on the 1968 Tigers - "Baseball's Last Real Champions", in reference to that being the last year only 1 team from each League made the post-season. Cantor was a beat writer for the Detroit News that season.
Not a great book, but I had to get it for my library, being a baseball fan from Detroit who doesn't have any direct memories of 1968.
Add in A Pitcher’s Story — David Cone w Roger Angell
Read anything Roger Angell ever wrote, his books, articles in the New Yorker, his grocery list, whatever
Also, for kids, the Chip Hilton series by Clair Bee — innocent times, gentle and heroic stories, no blatant period social violations that I know of, but probably inevitable
”My Turn at Bat”, Ted Williams — as told to froth, but one of my favorites
“The Science of Hitting”, also Teddy Ballgame
It's out of print but Lords of the Realm is probably one of the best baseball books I've read. Discusses the history of baseball, particularly from the viewpoint of owner-player relations, and the last half of the book is devoted to the player unions and how that evolved the game. For a Tigers fan, the collusion among owners in the mid to late 80s is really interesting (Tigers didn't want to pay Lance Parrish big bucks so he explored free agency to find no suitors, except a lowball Philly offer, which he ended up taking). The book covered through the 94 strike, but it's still really interesting.
Looks like you can get for around $20-25 on amazon.
For the sabermetrics group, I would add: "The Shift: The Next Evolution In Baseball Thinking" by Russell Carleton. It goes beyond the standard Moneyball stuff and talks about some even better ways to evaluate player performance, written in an easily understood and engaging way.
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran - by Dirk Hayhurst
it was a really fun read and rather than being about the big leagues is a pretty unflinching portrait of what its like to be living at the margins of your dreams
You are right -- I just read the first few pages. Good stuff:
"When we won the division in the first half of 05, I had nothing to do with it. Hell, I was lucky to be employed. I was deadweight on a team full of prospects—a dud, a smudge on an otherwise crystal squad. We may have been guaranteed a spot in the postseason, but I didn’t know if I’d be around when we got there.
"I was the team’s long relief man. A nonglorious pitching role designed to protect priority pitchers. If the starting pitcher broke down or the game got out of control, I came in to clean up so the bullpen wasn’t exhausted. Despite feel-good semantics supplied by the organization, my main job was mopping up lost causes. Why waste a talented pitcher when there was a perfectly useless guy for the job? I could pitch five innings in a blowout or face one batter in the seventeenth inning. Put it this way: if I could have done any other role successfully, I wouldn’t have been the long man.
"I had been struggling all year, inadvertently serving as the league’s batting practice thrower. I floundered as a starter and was demoted. Then I brought the kind of relief that made starters moan, “Jesus, I could have given up my own runs—no need to bring in this guy!” The way the season was shaping up, it would take a witch doctor to resurrect my career...."
I highly recommend The Physics of Baseball.
It really gives you a better understanding of how baseball moves through the air and how pitches like curve/slider/fastball works. To me, you cannot get into real details of analytics without this understanding.
I also used it to build a baseball simulator in the 90's.
The Cubs Way
Astroball
I read a LOT of Matt Christopher back in the day.
Smart Baseball by Keith Law
Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster 2019
The Long Season by Jim Brosnan
Up, up and Away [Montreal Expos and its demise] by Jonah Keri
Another good one is "Bottom of the Ninth" by Michael Shapiro. I found it in a used book store for next to nothing and enjoyed the hell out of it. It covers Branch Rickey's effort to create a new major league in the late 50s because the owners of the day did not want to add more teams, even though a lot of cities wanted their own teams.
You missed The Bad Guys Won - full of great tales about the wild times of the 1986 World Series champion New York Mets.
Also - Wait Til Next Year by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, a love letter to the golden age of New York baseball.
Ball Four is the shitfuck, AND the fuckshit!
My personal favorite:
Losing Is A Disease
by some Two Bit Carney Hypnotist
Here is the recording of the reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN-aCYVVtyo
Three Nights in August is a really interesting and accessible book that really helped me understand baseball strategy.
Also, another amusing book is this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Banana-Bats-Ding-dong-Balls-Inventions/dp/0020140053
that contains descriptions and history of a large number of baseball inventions from those still used today to the completely absurd.
The Captain
Derek Jeter book is interesting from several angles................
Catcher in the Rye sucked.
Great list and I'm glad you resurrected it.
I've read 7 of the books on that list of links but it's been awhile since I've even thought of tackling another. Going to go online and get another one ordered tonight.
At a quick glance, "Big Hair and Plastic Grass..." looks very interesting. There's GOT TO be some Oscar Gamble in there somewhere!
Jake by Ann Arbor native Alfred Slote is also great. If you search Jake short film on espn it is great. Grantland had a story about Alfred. And someone made a short about “Jake” very good.
Al Slote lived near Burns Park. He enjoyed meeting area kids who liked reading. When he signed it for me, he wrote that Jake was his favorite of all the books.
I'd add...
fiction, for strat-o-fans:
Poor Damon Rutherford
https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Baseball-Association-Henry-Waugh/dp/0452260302/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=The+Universal+Baseball+Association%2C+Inc.%2C+J.+Henry+Waugh%2C+Prop.&qid=1557962182&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull
the best baseball biography I've ever read, by a former UM professor who went on to become poet laureate:
https://www.amazon.com/Dock-Ellis-Country-Baseball-Donald/dp/067165988X/ref=sr_1_19?keywords=donald+hall&qid=1557962442&s=gateway&sr=8-19
Fiction:
The Celebrant- Eric Rolfe Greenberg
Kind of baseball adjacent...with some nice old time Black Sox nostalgia.