Recommended Reading: 10 More Great Baseball Books

There are many reasons that baseball has inspired a lot of great books. It's a sport with a long history, full of bright, colorful characters both good and bad. It has a poetry and easy-going style that people don't relate with any other sport in quite the same way. In the article Recommended Reading: 10 Great Baseball Books, Mike D. listed ten of the best baseball books and while I couldn't argue with any of his choices, there are so many more great baseball books that it seems a shame to stop at ten. So here's ten more!

1. The Heart of the Order by Thomas Boswell. Every baseball fan should read something by Thomas Boswell. When I was a kid I checked this book out of the library week after week and I read it cover to cover every time. It's a collection of Boswell's columns from the Washington Post. Most are profiles of players whose style of play and attitude represent the idea of playing with heart. The collection also includes the essay "99 Reasons Baseball is Better Than Football" which was my favorite thing in the whole book.

2. This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers by Bill James. Bill James is considered by most to be the king of the sabermetrics movement in baseball, but this book deals very little with stats (hence the "without the numbers" part of the title). This is a collection of excerpts from James' past Baseball Abstracts and other articles. It's divided into four or five sections. The players and teams sections sometimes have very short excerpts, but I didn't mind that too much because it made the book easy to pick up, read for a few minutes, and put back down. The last section contained longer essays, my favorite being the one about what really goes on in salary arbitration hearings. (James used to represent players during arbitration so he knows what he's talking about.) The copyright on this book is 1989 so it deals mostly with older players and games, but for a numbers guy, James is a really good writer. There's a long section about the 1985 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals (James is from Kansas), and it's very involving and entertaining. This book is currently out-of-print, but it's almost always available from individual users on Amazon. You can also check your local library which is where I found the copy I read.

3. Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball by Howard Bryant. I know, I know - we're all tired of talking and hearing about steroids. This book is definitely worth reading however because it goes beyond the basic issue of steroids. It does go into some detail about what exactly players have used in the past and are probably using now. However, it also gives a detailed history of how baseball, mostly starting with the strike-shortened 1994 season, put itself in a position where it was beneficial for everyone - owners, coaches, and players - to ignore the growing drug problem. It does deal with some very factual, potentially dry subjects, but it's written so it reads like a narrative more than a text book.

4. 3 Nights in August by Buzz Bissinger. Tony LaRussa wanted to write a biography but didn't want to write the typical book, moving from childhood to current day. When Buzz Bissinger (author of the football classic Friday Night Lights) presented the idea of Bissinger following LaRussa through a season and writing about what he saw, LaRussa thought it seemed like a great idea. The book is definitely about Tony LaRussa in the end, and the reader gets plenty of his history and experience, his family life, and his feelings about some of the great players he's managed over the years. LaRussa comes across as a manager caught in between two time periods. He's not an old-fashioned baseball man - he pretty much created the modern day closer and focused on a running game when most people didn't - but he's not completely sold on the idea of just using statistics to judge a player's worth. He sees the value of some of the Moneyball focus on on-base percentage and walks, but he still believes there are some things - heart, dedication, work ethic - that can't be measured by stats. Because of LaRussa's honesty and Bissinger's amazing access to LaRussa, his staff, and his team, this book is a great look at the inner workings of Major League baseball.

5. The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream by Jim Collins
Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, elite college players gather in hopes of making it to the Majors. The hopes are justifiably high - the Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world. One out of every six major league players spent some time there, including Nomar Garciaparra, Frank Thomas, Barry Zito, and two of my personal favorites, Jason Varitek and Jeff Bagwell. The author chronicles one summer in the league, following the Chatham A's and some of the top prospects in the country. This book was really cool because you got to know a lot of the players, but you also got to know a little more about what separates a great college player from a potential professional star. You learn a little about everything - the physics of wooden bats vs. aluminum bats, the physiology of elbows, the psychology of slumps, and the lure of steroids. Some of the players realize the summer at the Cape is only the beginning of a new stage in their baseball careers, some learn that they've reached the very top of their talent. This book is a great look at a bunch of young men who are still in the process of chasing a dream.

6. Why Is the Foul Pole Fair? (Or, Answers to the Baseball Questions Your Dad Hoped You Wouldn't Ask) by Vince Staten. This book is pretty much what the title implies - a book full of answers to baseball related questions. It covers everything - the rules of the game and how they evolved, stadiums, equipment, players, concessions… you name it, it's here. I really enjoyed the way the author tied the questions into the story of him and his son at a ballgame. It gave the book more of a narrative than these kinds of books usually have. The title of chapter 13, "The Tools of Ignorance by Any Other Name Would Still Weigh Eight Pounds on a Muggy August Afternoon" may be one of the best chapter titles ever. This is just a fun, informative little book.

7. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: The Classic Completely Revised by Bill James. After reading This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones I got kind of curious about James' Historical Baseball Abstracts. I assumed that they were just big books of stats, but the excerpts in This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones made it seem like more than that. So out of curiosity I borrowed this from the library. James quit doing the abstracts annually years ago but released this updated version in 2001. It is, in a word, wonderful. Part I is entitled "The Game" and has short essays on every decade from the 1870s to the 1990s. Each essay examines baseball during that decade, how it was played, where it was played, rule changes, strategy developments, and pretty much everything else you could think of. Each decade also gets a breakdown that includes all kinds of cool stats including who led the majors in just about every category for each single season in that decade and for the decade as a whole. Part II is "Player Ratings and Comments" in which James gives his top 100 Players of All-Time and then lists his top 100 at each position. And while James talks about stats, for a guy who gets criticized for being all about numbers, he talks about a lot about "the little things" and "intangibles" too. Part III is "Reference" and that's where he gets a little more into stats, but it's a very small section of the whole book. The book is huge - almost 1000 pages - so I returned the library's copy and bought my own from Amazon ($6.15 including shipping for a used copy!) and it's one of my best book purchases ever. It's engaging, it's interesting, it's funny, and because James thinks a little differently than most other sports journalists, he often values different players which make for some really cool surprises on his lists. Please don't let the idea of a lot of dry stats keep you from checking out some of Bill James's stuff. He's much more than numbers.

8. Game Time by Roger Angell. Roger Angell is one of the classic baseball writers that every fan should read. Angell has been writing about baseball for forty plus years and Game Time is a collection of his work along with a few never-before-published pieces. The book is divided into the three seasons of baseball - spring, summer, and fall - and the pieces are placed in their respective season rather than appearing in chronological order. Occasionally that makes things feel a little jumbled, particularly if the reader comes across a piece that was written before his time as a fan, but more often than not, the quality of the writing overcomes any problems.

9. Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top by Seth Mnookin. There's been a plethora of books written about that magical season when the Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series and many of them are not very good. They were obviously thrown together in a few weeks to capitalize on the team's victory. Feeding the Monster is a head above most of those books. Mnookin goes back a few seasons and examines how events led all the important figures to Boston - the new ownership, the young GM, and all the various players - and he makes it much more interesting than some of it probably should be. There seems to be a fair amount of inside information - Mnookin has more detail about the breakdown in the relationship between the Red Sox and Nomar Garciaparra than anything else I've read - and it's one of the few books that really captures the magnitude and excitement of the Boston Red Sox finally winning the big one. Even if you're not a Red Sox fan, you should check out this book.

10. Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. I doubt there's a baseball fan in the world who hasn't seen Field of Dreams - and if you haven't, get on it immediately - and this is the book that the movie is based on. Don't avoid the book just because you've seen the movie though. There's a lot of stuff here that was taken out for the movie, and it's every bit as fun, sweet, and magical as what made it into the movie. Kinsella's writing about baseball is absolutely beautiful.