Favorite Baseball Book

[Leo_The_Lip]

Originally Posted by ForeverRoyalKC

A good one I read twice was about baseball cards called "Mint Condition" by Dave Jamieson.
I recommend it.

And don't forget the Dan Gutman books, Honus and Me, Babe and me, and so forth. Kids love those, too.

[Déjà Bru]

Now, this forum moderator action garners my approval (not that it's needed, of course). Thread moved to Talk Sports where it belongs, and stickied.

[swoboda]

Like many of you I have read so many baseball books I could not name them all if I tried.
Just a few of my favorites:

"Summer of '49" and "October 1964" both by David Halberstam both great journeys thru memorable seasons and times

Ball Four by Jim Bouton, (I consider this a must read for any sports fan)

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn more of a sweet "where are they now"

"Baseball for Brain Surgeons" by Tim McCarver with Danny Peary a highly detailed breakdown of a major league game and another similar type of analysis
"Pure Baseball" by Keith Hernandez and Mike Bryan

Finally McMillan's "The Baseball Encyclopedia" 8th (and final?) edition published circa 1989. Yeah, I know Baseball Reference.com is far far superior, but I can easily spend an hour just leafing thru the old encyclopedia and losing myself in the history of the game on paper.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by Eric

I liked The Long Season by Jim Brosnan. Good account of a season from a player's point of view

I never read The Long Season but I have read Brosnan's follow-up, The Pennant Race, which is also excellent.

I think it would be interesting to read Brosnan and Bouton's Ball Four together. They both had a lot in common - intellectual relievers who were out-of-step with their teammates. But Bouton was kinda' the anti-Brosnan. Brosnan stayed mum about a lot of the less-savory aspects of life in the clubhouse that Bouton would later reveal. Which is probably why Ball Four is still in print and most people nowadays have never heard of Brosnan.

[Curve Ball Dave]

Originally Posted by swoboda

Finally McMillan's "The Baseball Encyclopedia" 8th (and final?) edition published circa 1989. Yeah, I know Baseball Reference.com is far far superior, but I can easily spend an hour just leafing thru the old encyclopedia and losing myself in the history of the game on paper.

I picked up my copy for like $10 several years ago at the bargain section of the book store. Like you, once I start I easily spend an hour just going through it. I get ideas for player and/or historical team imports for OOTP.

[Leo_The_Lip]

I've kept my copy of the Centennial Edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia for over 50 years now. It came out in 1969, so stats through 1968. This is a second printing edition. As you can see it is well-worn from heavy use.

Browsing through this is a great way to absorb the world of baseball. Looking at the seasons, seeing the players move between teams and grow old is glorious. Stats are the skeletal structure to the stories of the game.

See interesting numbers in a season? Well, find out more!

[JenLightly]

As someone who is not as knowledgeable of a fan as a lot of you, I really enjoyed "The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond." It provided a nice broad overview of the history of baseball in an entertaining format. If you have been an intense fan of baseball for a long time, you may not get as much out of it, but it was a good read for me : ).

[David Watts]

This thread got me to take a break from crime fiction. I just finished An October to Remember 1968 by Brendan Donley. Fun book to read if you're a Tiger fan. I was only 4 in 1968. What a great group of guys the Tigers had back then. Moving Mickey Stanley from CF to SS in order to get Al Kaline into the lineup was such a huge gamble.

Started Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic by Jason Turow today at lunch. It's about the Oakland A's and Charley Finley.

[Cod]

The Fireside Book of Baseball (all four volumes; multiple authors) and Baseball Before We Knew It by David Block are two baseball books I go through routinely. Neither helps with OOTP though.

[ThatSeventiesGuy]

Not so much one book as a series, but to this day I still miss the Zander Hollander Complete Handbook of Baseball that used to come out before every season. The last one was in 1997, but I still hope somebody will bring back the concept. Stupid, stupid interwebs, killing all the good baseball previews they used to have back in the day.

[MikeS369]

If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock.

Came across this work of fiction back in 1990 when it first came out. I have to read it every few years.

[mitchkenn]

Originally Posted by Leo_The_Lip

I've kept my copy of the Centennial Edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia for over 50 years now. It came out in 1969, so stats through 1968. This is a second printing edition. As you can see it is well-worn from heavy use. !

my copy of Baseball Encyclopedia is the 4th edition - it's about as worn as yours. i must have gleaned through that thing a couple of dozen or more times. i learned about so many old time players thru that book. i'd nearly forgotten about it (buried under a pile of notes these days) until i read your post. Blew off about 6 years of dust and looked over Hornsby's career just for the heck of it. (He was pretty good, wasn't he?) It was a must have book for baseball nuts like me.

[Danielg342]

Originally Posted by Raidergoo

The New Bill James Historical Abstract by Bill James

Seconded. It's amazing how many times I can re-read it and still enjoy it every time.

What gets me most about that book is that you'd expect it to be a dense, heady slog that bombards you with a lot of information all at once...and quite a bit of it is a dense, heady slog with a lot of information thrown at you all at once.

However, James makes up for it with the right amount of cynicism and wit, as well as some intriguingly astute observations. You won't always agree with him but he'll always make you think.

[Buster Cherry]

Nobody has mentioned Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof or Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn so I'll give them a plug.

Oops. Swoboda mentioned Boys of Summer above. My apologies.

[BaseballMan]

Here's my collection.

Hardcover/Paperback
1. Total Baseball (8th Edition)
2. The Espn Baseball Encyclopedia (5th Edition)
3. Historic Ballparks: A Panoramic Vision
4.The Sports Encyclopedia of Baseball (2007 Edition)
5. Baseball Extra: A Newspaper History of Baseball
6. Ken Burns Baseball
7. The World Series: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Fall Classic
8. Baseball Archaeology: Artifacts from the Great American Pastime.
9. Ty Cobb
10. Eight Men Out
11. Baseball in the Garden of Eden
12. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstarct
13. Green Cathedrals
14. The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball
15. The Baseball Timeline
16. Ballparks Yesterday and Today

Kindle
1. Kiss "Em Goodbye: An Early Treasury of Failed, Forgotten, and Dropped Teams
2. Baseball The Early Days
3. The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers
4. The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball
5. Baseball Prospectus: Extra Innings
6. Eight Men Out
7. Shoeless Joe
8. The Betrayal:The 1919 World Series And The Birth Of Modern Baseball
9. Forty Nine In 84
10. The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

Audible Books.
1. The Called Shot
2. How Baseball Happened
3. October 1964
4. Moneyball
5. Stan Musial
6. The Boys of Summer
7. The Big Fella
8. The Big Bam
9. The Betrayal:The 1919 World Series And The Birth Of Modern Baseball
10. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning
11. Willie Mays
12. Walter Johnson
13. Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty
14. The Kid:The Imortal Life Of Ted Williams
15. the Last Boy:Mickey Mantle And The End Of America's Childhood
16. Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish And Charley Finley's Swingin' A's
17. Shoeless Joe
18. The Summer of Beer and Whiskey
19. Sandy Koufax
20. Playing For Keeps
21. Pinstripe Empire
22. Playball!: The Rise of Baseball as America's Pastime
23. The Hall: A Celebration of Baseball"s Greats
24. Our Game
25. Honus Wagner
26. The Glory of Their Times
27. Forty Nine In 84
28. Fall From Grace: The Truth and Tragedy of "Shoeless Joe" Jackson
29. Casey Stengel
30. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
31. Baseball: The companion book to the Ken Burns pbs tv series

FILM

4K
1. Field of Dreams

Blu_Ray
1. Field of Dreams
2. A League of their Own
3. For Love of the Game
4. 61*
5. 42
6. Bull Durham
7. The Natural

DVD
1. Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns
2. The World Series: History of the Fall Classic

Digital Only
1. Babe Ruth
2. Pride of The Yankees
3. Eight Men Out

[BMW]

One of my favorite books period, let alone baseball, hasn't been mentioned here yet.

A Game of Inches by Peter Morris.

If you're like me people you know will buy you baseball trivia books that claim to have knowledge of firsts and facts, and when you're a big fan of historical baseball, there may be 2-3 things you didn't know. The other 70 chapters are items that you've read before. Moses Fleetwood Walker, the 1899 Spiders, Jim Creighton, home run champions before the Babe like Lip Pike, Roger Connor, etc.

A Game of Inches just blew me away. Morris takes just about everything in the history of baseball, even things you think so basic (tagging players, foul ground, pitchers trying to get batters out, running the bases counterclockwise) and presents scholarly, annotated research on everything.

I was astounded when I first read it and I'm still astounded at the work and care that went into this. This is a book where baseball-know-it-alls can read it and genuinely learn new and non-trivial things about the game they love and every page.

Go to Amazon and look it up. Check out the table of contents and you can see all the topics he researched. As I intimated before he doesn't just make guesses or suppose things. He must have combed thousands of newspapers and books to research the two books (which were combined into one edition in 2010).

Other ones that I love that have (or may have) been mentioned before:

The Bill James Historical Abstract and New Historical Abstract
Bill James Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?
Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers
(all collections of essays by James - nearly all of James essays are worth reading if you can get his other works like the yearly Abstracts he published)

Green Cathedrals

Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz (a history of baseball statistics)

Strat-O-Matic Fanatics by Glenn Guzzo (a history of Strat-O-Matic baseball)

[Irrelevant Dude]

Originally Posted by Eric

I liked The Long Season by Jim Brosnan. Good account of a season from a player's point of view

I just ordered this last week. Looking forward to reading it!

[Leo_The_Lip]

I want to mention a more modern bit of fiction that I greatly enjoyed.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-i...ldson_harbach/

The book follows the career of a college SS who is looking to set the NCAA record for consecutive errorless games. His favorite book is the Art of Fielding by his hero Aparicio Rodriquez. There is lots of baseball and enough odd people to make you laugh and root for the players.

[BaseballMan]

Starting Baseball in 41 on audible.
Its included in my membership but i would like to buy the book.
Not sure if i can.

[progen]

Originally Posted by Leo_The_Lip

I've kept my copy of the Centennial Edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia for over 50 years now. It came out in 1969, so stats through 1968. This is a second printing edition. As you can see it is well-worn from heavy use.

Browsing through this is a great way to absorb the world of baseball. Looking at the seasons, seeing the players move between teams and grow old is glorious. Stats are the skeletal structure to the stories of the game.

See interesting numbers in a season? Well, find out more!

Yeah LeotheLip I have the same book, same year. Spent a lot of time looking through it. Not sure if you have the "jacket" it slides into, but check out the pics. Pretty awesome how they did this. Sorry for the sideways pics.