BookFinder.com Journal

On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds played his final game as a San Francisco Giant. Coincidentally, that was also the day we finalized the list of books to be included in our upcoming baseball-themed press release. My job, as the office baseball fan, was to come up with the perfect list.

Compiling a list of books about baseball has only two inherent difficulties: where to begin, and where to end. In the final press release we would only be able to mention ten titles. Imagine my despair as I looked over my admittedly idiosyncratic list of a couple dozen essential baseball books, knowing that I was inevitably missing many great books, but also that I would have to further distill my list down to the required maximum ten titles.

In the end, there was only one thing for me to do: this. I am not a blogger by nature, but this seemed to be the best way for me to get the word out about some of my favorite baseball books that did not, as they say in the dugout, make the cut.

First, though, a few of the books that are on the list: Philip Roth’s wild baseball romp The Great American Novel (1973), the PBS series companion volume Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (1996), 100 Years of the World Series: 1903-2004 by Eric Enders (2007), and the 2007 Official Rules of Major League Baseball. We include one of Jim Bouton’s memoirs, Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (1970), as well as The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It ed. by Lawrence S. Ritter (1966). Also on the list is a particularly important book to those of us here in the Bay Area, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis (2004).

Roger Angell is one of my favorite authors, and he has written many books about baseball. In the press release we mention only one, Late Innings: A Baseball Companion (1982). We omit The Summer Game (1972), Five Seasons (1977), Season Ticket (1988), Once More Around the Park, (1991), A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone (2001) and Game Time (2003).

Thomas Boswell from the Washington Post writes about baseball, but none of his books made it into our press release. I recommend Why Time Begins on Opening Day (1984). Ring Lardner wrote for the Chicago Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post, and his comic novel You Know Me Al (1916), omitted from our list, is just one of his books on baseball.

I am very fond of all four of the Henry Wiggen novels by Mark Harris, but in the press release we only mention the second one, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956). The other three are: The Southpaw (1953), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) and It Looked Like Forever (1979).

Bang the Drum Slowly was made into a movie in 1973, with Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggen and Robert De Niro as Bruce Pearson. We mention one other baseball book which became a movie, W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (1982) which became Field of Dreams in 1989. Kinsella has written or contributed to many books on baseball, both fiction and nonfiction. Fans of his short stories may want to read Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (1980), The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (1988), or The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories (1993).

Two books-made-into-movies that did not make it into the list were Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952) (you can pick up a lovely first edition on BookFinder.com for $12,500.00, by the way), and Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof (1963).

There is nothing in our press release by Daniel Okrent. We omit both the Ultimate Baseball Book, which he edited (the most recent edition came out in 2000) as well as Nine Innings (1985). Both highly recommended.

Ever wanted to try pitching to a bunch of major league hitters? George Plimpton wrote about doing just this in the first of his “fantasy” sports books, Out of My League (1960). Wonderful book. Not on our list.

The last book I’ll mention I can’t actually recommend, because I have not read it. I include it on the merits of the title alone: Why Not Us?: The 86-Year Journey of the Boston Red Sox Fans from Unparalleled Suffering to the Promised Land of the 2004 World Series by Leigh Montville (2007).

For even more books about baseball, here are a couple of good places to look:

• The science of baseball, plus a lot more
• Elysian Fields Quarterly

Please feel free to write in with your own baseball book recommendations.

[Now Reading: books about baseball]