Recommended Resources – Baseball Books
Each of the last three years we polled our subscribers asking for their favorite baseball books. For yourself or as gifts, here are their recommendations:
The Summer Game
Roger Angell
Eight Men Out.
Eliot Asinof
The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife
Brad Balukjian
Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with
something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of
impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a
truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun as hell premise:
he took a sinhle pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it,
chewed the nearly thirty-year old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all
the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015,
spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days.
Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager
Buzz Bissinger
Three Nights in August captures the strategic and emotional complexities of baseball’s
quintessential form, the three-game series. As the St. Louis Cardinals battle their archrival
Chicago Cubs, we watch from the dugout through the eyes of legendary manager Tony La
Russa, considered by many to be the shrewdest mind in the game today. In his twenty-seven
years of managing, La Russa has been named Manager of the Year a record-making five times
and now stands as the third-winningest baseball manager of all time. A great leader, he’s built
his success on the conviction that ball games are won not only by the numbers but also by the
hearts and minds of those who play.
Ball Four
Jim Bouton
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?
Jimmy Breslin
When the Game was Black and White: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Negro Leagues
Bruce Chadwick.
The Catcher Was a Spy (the mysterious life of Moe Berg)
Nicholas Dawidoff
Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick
by Paul Dickson, Dan John Miller, et al.
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching
Harvey Dorfman
The Mental Keys to Hitting
Harvey Dorfman
The Mental Game of Baseball
Harvey Dorfman
Nice Guys Finish Last
Leo Durocher
Wait ‘til Next Year
Doris Kearns Goodwin
I taught my daughter how to keep score at a ball game before this came out, but it proved I’d
done the right thing.
So Many Ways to Lose
Devin Gordon
Traces the many misfortunes that Mets fans have had to endure since 1962. It does so in a
laugh-out-loud funny manner and is unlike any book I’ve read about the Mets.
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship
David Halberstam
The Art of Fielding.
Chad Harbach.
More than a baseball book, but if you ever played in the infield this guy was inside your head.
The essence of experiential truth.
The Bullpen Gospels: A Non-Prospect’s Pursuit of the Major Leagues and the Meaning of Life.
Dirk Hayuhurst
Hilarious and moving.
The Lords of the Realm
John Helyar
Pure Baseball
Keith Hernandez
A book that Keith wrote in 1995 that takes a ridiculous deep dive into 2 games from the 1993
season. It describes the intricate details of a baseball game that reminds me why I love the
sport more than any other. (And neither of the 2 games are Mets games!)
I’m Keith Hernandez
Keith Hernandez
Less for the general audience and more specific to fans of Keith. He spends a lot of time talking
about his time in St. Louis, so it’s not just a Mets book.
The Cooperstown Casebook—Who should be in the Hall of Fame and who should Pack their
Plaques
Jay Jaffe
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
Bill James
The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers
Bill James and Rob Neyer
The Boys of Summer: The Classic Look Back at the Glorious Dodgers of the 1950’s
Roger Kahn
Season of ’42: Joe D, Teddy Ballgame, and Baseball’s Fight to Survive a Turbulent First Year of
War
Jack Kavanaugh
56: Joe DiMaggio and the last magic number in sports
Kostya Kennedy
K-A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches
Tyler Kepner
A senior seminar on what pitching is all about.
Shoeless Joe
W.P. Kinsella
Pinstriped Summers: Memories of Yankee Seasons Past
Dick Lally
Smart Baseball
Keith Law
Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy
Jan Leavy
“Sandy Koufax pitched twelve seasons in the major leagues: six of them indifferent, six of
belated brilliance. Five consecutive years, from 1962 through 1966, he led the National League
in earned run average. (He is the only pitcher ever to do that). Four times he led the National
League in strikeouts. Three times, he won at least twenty-five games. Ninety-seven times, he
struck out ten or more batters. He is one of five pitchers in major league history who pitched at
least one thousand innings with more career strikeouts than innings pitched. Hi last year,
pitching with a crippled, arthritic arm, he won twenty-seven games and completed as many.
And he never missed a start. Then, Abruptly he was gone. “He was a meteor streaking across
the heavens,” his friend and former roommate, Dick Tracewski, said.”
Moneyball
Michael Lewis
A Whole Different Ball Game
Marvin Miller
The Only Rule is It Has to Work
Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh
Baseball Anecdotes
Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulf
Nine Innings
Daniel Okrent
The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty
Buster Olney
Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever
LeRoy (Satchel) Paige
Only the Ball Was White.
Robert W. Peterson.
Groundbreaking.
The Baseball 100
Joe Posnanski
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It
Lawrence S Ritter
Baseball: The Early Years
Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills
Red Smith on Baseball
Red Smith
The Hidden Game of Baseball
John Thorn and Pete Palmer
Veeck As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
Bill Veeck
Men at Work
by George Will
The Science of Hitting
Ted Williams
Prophets of the Sandlots
Mark Winegardner
The Diamond Appraised
Craig R. Wright and Tom House
Juicing The Game
Howard Bryant
Winning Fixes Everything
Evan Drellich
The Lords of The Realm
John Helyar
The Best Team Money Can Buy
Molly Knight
The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty
Buster Olney
Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever
LeRoy (Satchel) Paige
The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson
Jeff Pearlman.
This came out last fall. Jackson’s feats in baseball and football are legendary, but this is no hagiography. Pearlman’s biography uncovers previously unreported details on Jackson’s fascinating career.
Only the Ball Was White.
Robert W. Peterson.
Groundbreaking.
The Baseball 100
Joe Posnanski
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It
Lawrence S Ritter
Baseball: The Early Years
Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills
Red Smith on Baseball
Red Smith
The Hidden Game of Baseball
John Thorn and Pete Palmer
Veeck As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
Bill Veeck
Men at Work
by George Will
The Science of Hitting
Ted Williams
Prophets of the Sandlots
Mark Winegardner
The Diamond Appraised
Craig R. Wright and Tom House
Others
If you can find them, The Fireside Book of Baseball, Book 1 (1956), Book 2 (1958). There’s a Book 3 (1968) I haven’t read. Charles Einstein ed. A fabulous collection of classic baseball writing and my boyhood companion.
Anything on baseball (or anything else) by Red Smith. For exampleThe Red Smith Reader section on baseball or To Absent Friends (Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Connie Mack, etc.). A Pulitzer Prize winner for a reason.
About the SABR Digital Library
For more than 40 years, SABR and its members have led the way in publishing the best baseball historical and statistical research. Our publications program is shifting to take advantage of new methods of publishing. Not only will we continue to publish new books like Can He Play? A Look At Baseball Scouts and Their Profession (2011); Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century(2013); Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox(2015); Au jeu/Play Ball: The 50 Greatest Games in the History of the Montreal Expos (2016); The Pride of Smoketown: The 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords (2020); and Jackie Robinson: Perspectives on 42 (2021), which showcase the best efforts of SABR’s members, chapters and committees, but new technology makes it possible for us to bring out-of-print titles like The Fenway Project(2013); Go-Go to Glory: The 1959 Chicago White Sox (2019); and Green Cathedrals(2020) back again.
Visit SABR.org/ebooks to find all past titles and download your favorites. Books will be available in digital formats as well as paperbacks produced by “print on demand” (POD).
SABR members can download all Digital Library e-book editions for free and save 50% on purchase of the paperback editions. If you’re not a member, click here to join SABR.