Baseball Books That Bat a Thousand

After the final out of the World Series has been recorded, some fans put baseball on the shelf until the following spring. Others (I am one such) like to use the offseason as an opportunity for baseball reading. There are books about car- or horse-racing or cycling; about golf; about the stars, coaches, and dynasties of the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL; about soccer and swimming and tennis and more. But the sport that has generated the most extensive bibliography (in the U.S., at any rate) is Major League Baseball. That remains true even today, when baseball can no longer credibly claim to be the national pastime. The profusion of baseball books is so great as to demand grudging acknowledgment even from readers who have never heard of Eppa Rixey or Cool Papa Bell.

I’ve compiled a list of eight books and one poem — that’s nine in all, baseball’s magic number. I am emphatically not offering the best baseball books (however “best” is to be defined). My highly subjective list includes books that some other baseball readers may dismiss as forgettable, second-rate, unworthy of attention, and so on. Two of them, the last two, have just recently been published, but most of them are “old.” All of them have given me a lot of pleasure, and I hope that will be true for some of you as well.

About the Author

John Wilson

John Wilson is a senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.

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After the final out of the World Series has been recorded, some fans put baseball on the shelf until the following spring. Others (I am one such) like to use the offseason as an opportunity for baseball reading. There are books about car- or horse-racing or cycling; about golf; about the stars, coaches, and dynasties of the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL; about soccer and swimming and tennis and more. But the sport that has generated the most extensive bibliography (in the U.S., at any rate) is Major League Baseball. That remains true even today, when baseball can no longer credibly claim to be the national pastime. The profusion of baseball books is so great as to demand grudging acknowledgment even from readers who have never heard of Eppa Rixey or Cool Papa Bell.

I’ve compiled a list of eight books and one poem — that’s nine in all, baseball’s magic number. I am emphatically not offering the best baseball books (however “best” is to be defined). My highly subjective list includes books that some other baseball readers may dismiss as forgettable, second-rate, unworthy of attention, and so on. Two of them, the last two, have just recently been published, but most of them are “old.” All of them have given me a lot of pleasure, and I hope that will be true for some of you as well.