baseball books

My sister pointed me to this blog post: "Ten Essential Baseball Books." I decided I'd list ten of my own, which I came up with mostly off the top of my head and thus it's a candy-ass list. But here goes:

Ball Four by Jim Bouton finished atop the poll in the link above, and I think that's appropriate.

Roger Angell's first collection, The Summer Game, made the top ten, and it makes mine, although I think there's an anthology of all his books that might be even better.

Whatever book about Jackie Robinson that you think is best, put it on the list. I don't remember which one I prefer ... the poll has Baseball's Great Experiment by Jules Tygiel.

Continuing down the poll's list ... Jim Brosnan's gotta get props. I'll go with The Long Season since it was first.

Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. would be near the top of my list, maybe even second.

Curt Flood's early-70s autobiography, The Way It Is, is remarkably angry. I'd include it. (A young Vida Blue writes the introduction ... he's pissed, too.)

Weaver on Managing, or whatever it's called, they may have changed the title at some point, but the greatest manager in my lifetime explains in this early-80s book pretty much how baseball is played 25 years later: pitching, defense, and three-run homers.

I'd go with the first mainstream edition of the Bill James Abstract, which was 1982, although the Historical Abstract is more appropriate, I suppose.

It's cheating, but it stands in for so many of the stat-filled books on the poll's list: baseball-reference.com.

And I can't think of a better final choice than Walter R. Brooks' Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars. Team manager Freddy the Pig comes up with a Gaedel-esque strategy for his Martian players that, like Earl Weaver, hints at 21st century baseball. You see, Martians have six appendages instead of four: two arms, two legs, and two whatevers. In the rules of baseball as played in the Brooks novel, the strike zone that is decided upon for the Martian hitters lies between two of the sets of "arms." This makes for a very tiny strike zone, so Freddy tells the Martians that they should never swing the bat, no matter what. Of course, they get a base on balls for every at-bat ... there are some non-Martians on the team (Freddy, for instance), including Hercules the circus strongman, who often comes to bat with plenty of Martians on base. Highly recommended.

Comments

[Phil Dellio]

I'd include two by Robert Creamer: Stengel: His Life and Times and Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, both among my favorite biographies of any kind. If I had to pick only one by James, it'd be Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?. (And if I didn't, he'd have six or seven of my top 10.) Ball Four, automatic. Phil Pepe put together an oral history of baseball in the '70s that I liked a lot, but that probably has more to do with my love for the decade than the book itself. Card Sharks, about Upper Deck's effect on the card industry, was really good. I'm not sure if I've read any baseball fiction at all--it just doesn't appeal to me (I'm not big on baseball movies, either). I have lots of nostalgia for what were probably the first three baseball books I read, dime-store paperbacks from the late '60s and early '70s: biographies of Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver, and another one that canonized the 50 greatest players (circa Carlton Fisk's rookie year...). I still have them.

[Steven]

I loved that Babe Ruth bio, too.

The Coover novel isn't really "baseball fiction," although it's fair to include it here. The title character plays a tabletop baseball game he has invented. The parts of the book dealing with that game and its history are told from the perspective of the "players." For anyone who has gotten lost in the intracacies of these kinds of games (role playing games of any type, really, but specifically ones you can play alone), it is a frightening novel. Everyone else probably finds it funny :-).

[Steven]

I should add that if you have the Neyer/James book on pitchers (and if you don't, why not?), there's a tip of the cap to the Coover book, between Babe Ruth and Dick Ruthven. (And it includes a huge spoiler for the novel, so don't read Neyer/James if you're thinking of reading Coover.)

[Patrick Ellis]

Ball Four and The Universal Baseball Association are definitely essential, imo, along with The Fireside Book of Baseball, Volume 1, and the first Historical Baseball Abstract (standing in for all Bill James). But at the very top of my list would be A Day in the Bleachers, because the essence of the game for the vast majority of us (i.e.; fans rather than players) is a day in the stands, which it captures so well.

Al Stump's Cobb: A Biography is a fabulously rich telling of a truly bizarre and flawed man's life, and through him a great portrait of the early game (and contains one of the all-time great yarns: old man Cobb's trip to Tahoe). Branch Rickey: A Biography (Polner) is not so entertaining reading, but certainly essential for Rickey's huge impact on the game. In that same vein, I'd add Money Ball, which also portrays another forever course-altering revolution in the business of the game.

Roger Angell makes my list for being for so many decades the essence of that certain erudite worship of the game, and I'll pick A Baseball Companion for him, mostly because of the memory of how it pleased him so much when I had him autograph it that I'd beat it up so badly by carrying it everywhere with me.

Shoeless Joe has to get in, despite that awful movie, or maybe in fact because it deserved so much better, still does, and should be known for the book itself, not that awful movie.

And of course, arching over them all, that great old tome, The Baseball Encyclopedia. While the baseball-reference.com's and the post-James stats books industry provide infinitely richer application of baseball stats, the Encyclopedia was the bible in its day, and when my kids were growing up it settled innumerable questions and arguments, not to mention flattening out a lot of stuff.

Finally, an honorable mention: Diamonds are Forever, the catalog for possibly the best American art retrospective I've ever seen, so good it seemed almost coincidental that baseball was the unifying theme, and yet, perfect...but from left field, as it were.

[Steven]

Some great ones there!

I suppose I could mention a couple of crappy books I read over and over as a kid. Joe Garagiola's Baseball Is a Funny Game, which was sanitized but gave me a feel for the Ball-Four stuff before there was a Ball Four (although Brosnan really is the place to go for that), and a Ralph Houk + ghostwriter book about the 1961 Yankee season ... I suspect if I read it today, it would seem dreadful, but I read it many times when I was nine.

Next topic: baseball games (J. Henry Waugh has me thinking about them).

[Patrick Ellis]

Crappy books?

ok, Dimaggio:The Hero's Life for the author sitting so obtrusively on my shoulder through the whole read doing bad imitations of blue collar and immigrant dialects (but a page turner nonetheless, because DiMaggio's life was fascinating); and Underworld, again in part for the irritating narrator, but also for meandering all over the map for at least the first two hundred pages (I tried twice and never got further). Now Pafko at the Wall, which is just the first chapter of Underworld, that's brilliant and well worth reading (by picking up either volume; just don't pay for or break your bookshelf with Underworld).

[Phil Dellio]

Two I overlooked from the Bronx Banter list: Leo Durocher's Nice Guys Finish Last and The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubblegum Book by Brendan Boyd and Fred Harris. Durocher's autobiography is basically a history of baseball itself from Ruth to Cesar Cedeno--if something happened, he was there. There's a part where he expresses his admiration for Jackie Robinson that's as profane as it is moving. The Boyd/Harris book, even though the authors make their disdain for Bouton clear, probably would never have happened without Ball Four. I can't say that it turned me into a wiseass--I think I first read it in the late '70s, so I was already there--but it sure got me to dig my heels in a little deeper.

[Steve]

I'm still and ever partial to Mark Harris's Henry Wiggen novels (including the last one, published a couple of decades after the first three), which skirt the sentimentality that infects most baseball fiction through the infusion of a hearty dollop of Twainesque cynicism. And he gets the feel of baseball on the field better than most, too.

I forget which computer baseball game it was, but there was one that allowed you to change names and performance parameters of the players. So I tweaked it to play a couple of seasons with Wiggen's New York Mammoths.