Off-season reading: the best baseball books

Numbers Game got me hooked on stats, after Moneyball caught my interest.
The Amazins is good if you want to relive past glories.

Jayson Stark
The Phillies in a positive light

If none of them are involved, I’d be very fine with it.

Some worthwhile baseball books:

- Moneyball
- Baseball Between The Numbers
- Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends
- The Bad Guys Won, as mentioned above, by ma boy Jeff Pearls
- May The Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy
- Heat (Doc’s book)
- Eight Men Out
- Feeding The Green Monster by Neyer – check out this post for a funny story about Neyer and anonymous Internet trolling

http://www.amazinavenue.com/2009/1/3/708425/winter-training-for-fans-r

great book. Also, highly recommend the Bill James Historical Abstract if you’re remotely interested in baseball history.

The Boys of Summer
Heat
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy
Praying for Gil Hodges
The Amazin’ Mets: 1962-1969
Brooklyn’s Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957
The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
The Few and Chosen: Mets
The Few and Chosen: Dodgers
The Bad Guys Won

Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw.

Anybody read this? I haven’t had a chance but my old man loved it. Maybe it will be first on my list.

George Plimpton, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch [a Buddhist with a 168-mph fastball joins the Mets, based on the SI hoax article.]
Jim Collins, The Last Best League [about the Cape Cod Summer League.]

here

Lots of great books.

The best, unfortunately, aren’t really Mets-related:

The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence Ritter
A False Spring by Pat Jordan
Game Time: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell (anything by Angell will do)
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James
Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? by Bill James
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
Lords of the Realm by John Helyar
Veeck as in Wreck by Bill Veeck
Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof
You Gotta Have Wa by Robert Whiting
Baseball between the Numbers by Baseball Prospectus
Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
The Soul of Baseball by Joe Posnanski
The Big Book of Baseball Legends by Rob Neyer
Bums by Peter Golenbock
Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn (overrated, but I’d feel funny not including it on the list)
The Numbers Game by Alan Schwartz
Baseball: A Literary Anthology by Various Authors
Nine Innings by Dan Okrent
Voices of the Game by Curt Smith (the book is a monstrosity in terms of its writing, but the stuff in here can’t be found anywhere else)
The Baseball Talmud by Howard Megdal (I might be biased here)

Mets-related stuff:

Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? by Jimmy Breslin – far and away the best Mets book written.

The Bad Guys Won by Jeff Pearlman – very entertaining

The Worst Team Money Can Buy by Bob Klapisch – ditto

Mets by the Numbers by Jon Springer – just finished; a nice light read that works best as a casual stroll down memory lane. Worth the price just for the index of Mets uniform numbers.

Amazin’ by Peter Golenbock – not a fan of the oral history style, but there is stuff here you won’t find elsewhere

Pure Baseball by Keith Hernandez – not a memoir, but a great look at baseball strategy

The Complete Game by Ron Darling – like the Hernandez book, it’s less about the memories and more about a pitcher’s mindset on the mound

Hello, Everybody, I’m Lindsey Nelson by Lindsey Nelson – tough to find these days, but it’s a great read by a guy who’s largely forgotten by today’s generation of fans.

its actually a pretty bad book but in an absurd and hilarious way.

true story: a friend in college tried for 4 years to donate this book to the campus library and only got them to accede to his demands after he had a pledge class start a mass letter writing campaign on the books behalf. those letters were pretty funny.

wow, what a great story.

that’s a category i forgot. a few i haven’t read and am intrigued by:

Bang the Drum Slowly
The Natural
The Great American Novel — by Phillip Roth
The brooklyn dodgers chapter of Don Delillo’s UNDERWORLD

one i have read and was delighted by:

Summerland — a young adult novel by Michael Chabon

I’ll be writing that book after the WS ends. It will be a short story. Maybe 3 or 4 pages.

to mark my progress so far:

The Book — ordered from Amazon
The Worst Team Money Could Buy — coming from paperbackswap
“The Babe” by Robert Creamer — paperbackswap
Bang the Drum Slowly — paperbackswap
The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw — asking my dad to send

and a half-dozen more marked “to read” on goodreads.

sweet.

Just trolling, but it is actually a good read. Though I think they overplay the race card a bit.

but I particularly liked the Iowa Baseball Confederacy (for your fiction list).

Soul of Baseball by Posnanski. A little sappy but I like Posnanski and it was pretty touching. The Bad Guys Won by Poz is also a relatively entertaining book that you can plow through in a couple days.

Greg Prince, of course.