Can we get a list going? As for me, Ima come back and edit this. I have a ton more to add. Add stuff and then we'll put it all together. Seacrest says you get $3 off monthly dues here for each relevant book you add.
FictionShoeless Joe, by WP Kinsella. So different from the film, which I also loved.
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by WP Kinsella. I didn't like this. Never finished it; tried to but didn't like the narrator.
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud. At the very least, read the last page.
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. What a book!
Bang the Drum Slowly, obviously. Middle-schoolish, but hard to be an American without having read this one.
You Know Me, Al, by Ring Lardner. Hilarious letters home from a minor leaguer-turned White Sox pitcher.
"Alibi Ike," a funny story by Lardner you can read online.
One Day in the Afternoon of the World, by William Saroyan. A depressed writer tries to sell his work and makes huge bets on the Brooklyn Dodgers, who continually lost in the World Series. Written just after the Dodgers left for San Francisco, Saroyan dedicates the book to them. If I were to give this book a grade, it would be a C.
Non-FictionOne Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard. WOW! One of my favorite experiences reading a book EVER!! A small-town Illinois team with barely enough players and not enough uniforms gets a new coach who shakes up the classrooms with his hippie ideas and leads the team to the brink of the state championship. Kind of like
Hoosiers for baseball. Reading this was like having a three-way (with the other two being women, I mean).
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. I love love love this book! First-hand accounts from many of the greats of the deadball era. You can also listen to the original live recordings! I bought the app from Apple. What an amazing book.
Summer of '49, by David Halberstam.
One Post writes that he "read this as a teenager and remember it fondly as Ted Williams closest shot at a WS." I agree that this is a great read. I think the Red Sox started 41-9 that year. The season was decided on the last weekend.
Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues, by John B. Holway. Holway is a baseball researcher who has written extensively about the Negro Leagues. In the 1960s and 70s, Holway interviewed a number of Negro League stars to collect their stories, and this book does not disappoint. I haven't even finished it, but it's the kind of book you can peruse at your leisure, since each chapter deals with a different player. Holway summarizes the player's achievements before letting them speak, which means you really get a sense of who these guys (and Mrs. Effa Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles) are--and what their game was like. They talk about playing all the great white (or non-black) MLB players in exhibitions and mention other Negro League stars (Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, etc.) who died before the book was compiled. Everyone's here, and it's fun hearing the stories--some are tall tales--from the actual players. Just a fun book to wind your way through. No Satchel Paige, though. Great stuff.
Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, by Jonathan Eig. If
FrankDrebin says it's good enough, it's good enough.
The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn.
Curious Hair recommends; I'd have to agree.
The Baseball Catalogue, by Dan Schlossberg. A fun, awesome, cool book. Probably the most underrated book in the world. I learned how to use dashes--and many other things--from this book. I also learned enough to win a baseball trivia contest when I was about thirteen. I beat all these big fat guys with Chicago cop mustaches. Schlossberg updated it a little, but he should have continued to update it. It's an easy read, too; much of the information comes in small tidbits, and the longer pieces are rarely more than one thousand words. But this book would definitely be in my top ten--not just of baseball books, but all books.
The Boys Who Would Be Cubs: A Year in the Heart of Baseball's Minor Leagues, by Joseph Bosco. Decent.
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle. Really enjoyed this thick bio.
Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams, by Robert Peterson. Great book about the Negro Leagues.
FrankDrebin read it, too, I think. In fact, I think I read it after he read it and suggested it.
Total Baseball. Like the
Baseball Encyclopedia, but with better articles. It's fun to buy one for $7 used and just page through them. I guess we don't need these anymore with baseball-reference.com and the SABR BioProject, but still fun. Bought my first copy with proceeds from umping in Champaign (I left the job because I was psycho), and left that copy at a girlfriend's apartment (she was psycho).
October, 1964, by David Halberstam. The end of the Yankees dynasty, and a decent historical record of the time, too. The main story is the World Series that year between the Yankees and the Cardinals.
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. I think we've all read this one. Lewis is a great storyteller.
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America's Game, by Edward Achorn. A look at the 19th century St. Louis Cardinals and their unique German owner, a brewer who brought beer to the game! Worth the read.
My Baseball Diary, by James T. Farrell from Mount Carmel. He saw many of the greats as they rolled through Comiskey Park.
The Soul of Baseball, by Joe Posnanski.
Chet Coppock's Fur Coat informs us that this "is about the legendary Buck O'Neil." The man with the Ph.D. also opines, "I maintain that if Wrigley wasn't a racist and had put Buck (who had been one of the College of Coaches but wasn't allowed on the field during games) in charge of the 66 Cubs instead of Durocher, they would have won in 69 and the entire narrative would have changed."
The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, by Frank Deford. This was a great book. Deford tells a good story, and he did a good job with the research.
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen. What an amazing book; this is what biography should be. Too much to summarize, but it is a revealing look at Cobb, baseball, and America. Leerhsen also wrote a book about Dan Patch, the racing horse, which was excellent.
Eight Men Out: Highly fictionalized, as we now know.
Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, by George Will.
Warren Newson vouches for this one.
Regular Reader says he "ain't read the book, but I vouch for Will's politics."
The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, by Bill James.
Warren Newson recommends;
Jawbreaker also recommends the yearly abstracts James puts out.
The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball, by Jeff Pearlman.
One Post says that this book is "a bit more in my wheelhouse with the Houston connection, but nonetheless a good read about the 1986 Mets."
Memoir/Autobiography/Autobiographical Tales of a SeasonOnce Around the Bases: Bittersweet Memories of Only One Game in the Majors, by Richard Tellis. The stories of forty players (from 1929-1989) who played only one game in the bigs. Some are at peace with this, some are bitter, and some are grateful. One player, John Perkovich, a Chicago native who started a game (lasting five innings) for the White Sox, reveals that he pitched with a torn rotator cuff. Another chapter discusses John Paciorek, brother of Wimpy, who left the big leagues with a 1.000 average. These are not first-person accounts, but the author interviewed everyone personally and lets the players speak quite a bit. I really enjoyed this book.
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton. Good book, though he's really cynical.
A False Spring, by Pat Jordan. One of my favorite memoirs ever. An introspective look at toiling in the lower-level minor leagues, learning to become an independent adult, and dealing with the everyday tortures of watching your talent slip away from you. After reading, I was so disappointed because I could never read this again for the first time.
Veeck as in Wreck, by Bill Veeck. I've never read this entire thing! That's next.
Well, it ain't coming now, so this:
Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick, by Paul Dickson. Read the first three chapters last night. So far, this book is pretty great. Extremely readable. It also spends time on Veeck's dad, who was a maverick and progressive himself and was responsible for lots of baseball history. He seems to have moved the Cubs into the favored position over the Sox in the city in the 20s, and extended them (via radio) to the entire Middle West. Bill Veeck grew up with
this. Fun to read about Bill Veeck as a kid; he was fearless and nutty. Update: Really good book. I enjoyed it. It will be interesting to get Veeck's own take in
Veeck as in Wreck.
I Had A Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story, by Hank Aaron and Lonnie Wheeler.
One Post "also read this as a teenager, wanted to read a baseball book, it is that, but it is also a stark look at real racism in the mid century."
#755The Umpire Strikes Back, by Ron Luciano. What a nut! This is a hysterical book about Luciano leaving football and making his way through the minors to the big leagues. Not as serious-minded as other books, but a good way to spend your time.
Fear Strikes Out: The Jim Piersall Story, by Jimmy Piersall It was decent, though Piersall never really tells us what made him "crazy," and he seems to use his identification of being "crazy" to gain fame, which is a little weird. He brags a lot as well; there's a surprising lack of depth here, except when he talks about his financial problems as a young player with a family. But given that mental illness is exceptionally ugly and destructive, I expected more, especially if the guy is using this as his calling card.
The Truth Hurts, by Jimmy Piersall. Richard Wittingham helped him write this, and it deals with the end of his career and much of his time as a White Sox broadcaster. He and Harry didn't always get along, apparently (though they seemed to do so on air), and he gives brutally honest takes on everyone in the game. I think this is better than
Fear Strikes Out, which seems to me like a missed opportunity.
Full Count: The Education of a Pitcher, by David Cone.
Warren Newson says, "It had some pretty solid 80's Mets and 90's Yankees stories."
Balls, by Graig Nettles.
Hatchetman says that
Balls "was an entertaining read when I was in sixth grade." It's the story of the '83 Yankees, who didn't do much that year. If Hatchetman read this in sixth grade, and it is about the '83 Yanks . . . well, there's another poster who is younger than me. Damn.
Imperfect: An Improbable Life: The Jim Abbott Story, by Jim Abbott.
Seacrest recommends this one. The two-time White Sox lefty had some good years with the Angels and was, among kids who collected baseball cards at the time, the most popular player in the league for a year or two.
OtherPark Life. Excellent, gritty photos of Comiskey Park--and its hardscrabble fans--in 1977.
1990 So Long Old Comiskey Park, by James Klekowski. A think book of photos that is no longer in print. Like Park Life, I kept looking for myself. That was my favorite team.
Baseball Anecdotes, by Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulff.
Douchebag pointed to a link that says: "A banquet for baseball fans, Baseball Anecdotes offers a colorful and highly entertaining anecdotal history of America's National Pastime, from the founding of the first professional baseball team, Cincinnati's Red Stockings, by George Wright (the son of a famous English cricketer) and the forming of the first league (in a New York bar on St. Patrick's Day), to the miraculous comeback of the Mets in the Sixth Game of the 1986 World Series. Here you will meet the game's great innovators (from John Montgomery Ward, who invented the pitching mound--and also pitched the second perfect game in history--to Bill Veeck, who introduced the exploding scoreboard in Comiskey Park); the colorful eccentrics (such as King Kelly, who was accompanied off the field by a black monkey and a Japanese valet) and the self-effacing stars (such as Harmon Killebrew, who, when asked what his hobbies were, said, "Well, I like to wash dishes"); the penny-pinching owners (when Babe Ruth requested tickets for the Yankee's 1936 season opener at The House That Ruth Built, the team management said sure, just send in a check); and, most of all, the legendary players: Ruth, Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Lefty Gomez, Sandy Koufax, Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, and countless others."
Voices of Baseball: Quotations of the Summer Game, by Bob Chieger. Hilarious collection of quotes from the beginning until the early 80s. One of my favorite is this one from Billy Martin, just before he slugged a reporter: "I don't want to fight you. Little kids fight. Men don't fight."
Baseball Books PodcastLooks cool!Thanks,
HawaiiYou!!
White Sox BooksStuck on the Sox, by Richard Lindberg. Published in 1978, this is a funny look at the Sox and Sox players from the 50s to the 70s. I read it about twenty times as a kid. Lindberg writes as a biased Sox fan, and it's pretty funny. For example, he opens one chapter by saying, "One insurmountable problem the White Sox and their fans have in Chicago is that the media is pro-Cubs." Another chapter begins with the author's fears that the Sox will move to Moosejaw. The book is full of funny lists (best concessions at Comiskey) and stories about the memorably good and memorably bad players and games, and so if you're a Sox fan, it's worth getting.
Who's on 3rd? The Chicago White Sox Story, by Richard Lindberg. A relatively quick history of the White Sox. The best chapter is the one on the 1960s, which Lindberg calls the "fall from grace" after seventeen seasons in the first division, including some agonizingly close near-misses. Also has the recaps and box scores of some interesting Sox games (World Series, Horlen's no-hitter, Wood's pitching in two games in '72, etc.). I have one of those old, gross paperbacks with tiny font that is impossible to read, but this was still a fun book if you're a Sox fan.
The Exciting Story of the White Sox, by The Chicago White Sox. I guess the Sox wrote their own book to celebrate their second-place finish of 1964. (One damn game behind the pennant-winning Yankees!) There are player profiles and chapters on how coaches give signs, how to grip a fastball, curve, slider, and knuckleball, how to play third base, and what transpired at the 1964 White Sox Boys Camp ("Fun in the Wisconsin Woods!"). That sure sounds creepy, don't it?
Strength Down the Middle: The Story of the 1959 Chicago White Sox, by Larry Kalas. Not a bad book, but more of a fan's memories of the season. It gives a good look at the South Side in 1959. I read this in two afternoons while on jury duty a long time ago, so I need to read this again.
The Go-Go Chicago White Sox, by Dave Condon. Written in 1960, half covers the '59 team, while the other breezes through Sox history.
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