Favorite Baseball Book

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by 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

The Glory of Their Times audiobook is lowkey kind of fantastic. The actual book is great, too, of course, but the audio version contains the actual interviews with the old-timers that the book is based on.

[Syd Thrift]

A couple books I don’t know I’ve seen yet:

Dollar Sign On The Muscle: A look at “old school”, pre-Moneyball scouting. I feel like reading this will a. make you want the scouting system in OOTP tweaked a lot and b. make you want to not listen to scouts so much (although it’s by no means an anti-scouting book).

Crazy 08: A really fun book about the 1908 pennant race, which is the one with the Merkle Boner.

The Old Ball Game: Frank Deford’s book about Marty and McGraw and the early 1900s Giants.

Only The Ball Was White: A history of Black ball players and all-Black baseball teams.

Lords of the Realm: Kind of, for me, the Lies My Teacher Told Me of baseball: the book that opened my eyes to the real history of baseball and especially the strife between the players and owners.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

A couple books I don’t know I’ve seen yet:

Only The Ball Was White: A history of Black ball players and all-Black baseball teams.

Lords of the Realm: Kind of, for me, the Lies My Teacher Told Me of baseball: the book that opened my eyes to the real history of baseball and especially the strife between the players and owners.

Both among the best I've come across... Lords of the Realm is obviously dated in some ways but really any serious baseball fan with interest in how the game is organized or run will learn ALL kinds of interesting things and stories. You'll never think about the cartel in the same way again!

[Leo_The_Lip]

Originally Posted by progen

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.

Great to see! I lost the dust jacket many, many years ago, so I'm happy see you still have yours.

[BaseballMan]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

A couple books I don’t know I’ve seen yet:

Dollar Sign On The Muscle: A look at “old school”, pre-Moneyball scouting. I feel like reading this will a. make you want the scouting system in OOTP tweaked a lot and b. make you want to not listen to scouts so much (although it’s by no means an anti-scouting book).

Crazy 08: A really fun book about the 1908 pennant race, which is the one with the Merkle Boner.

The Old Ball Game: Frank Deford’s book about Marty and McGraw and the early 1900s Giants.

Only The Ball Was White: A history of Black ball players and all-Black baseball teams.

Lords of the Realm: Kind of, for me, the Lies My Teacher Told Me of baseball: the book that opened my eyes to the real history of baseball and especially the strife between the players and owners.

Crazy 08 was on my list for my next audible book.
I'll look into "The old ball Game"

[swoboda]

Just finished reading " Dynastic Bombastic Fantastic " by Jason Turbow, it's about the Oakland A's during the three straight WS championships. I like it, very entertaining.

Charlie O comes across as the @#%$&# that he was.

[Syd Thrift]

I haven’t read it because it just came out but Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast did an interview with the writer of the book Our Team, which is about the second Black player to make it into the major leagues (Larry Doby of course) and his position as the anchor of the lineup of the World Series champion 1948 Cleveland Indians.

[pauwoo]

I'm seeing a ton of books that I'll need to reserve at the local library here...

Here's my list of baseball books that I've enjoyed...

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ‘76
Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
The Best Team Money Can Buy
Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game
The Grind: Inside Baseball's Endless Season
90% of the Game Is Half Mental: And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom

[Kobeck]

Originally Posted by La La La Linoleum

What is your favorite book about baseball? Has it ever helped you with your ootp leagues?

The National Association Of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870 by Marshall D. Wright


I read the book and reedited the game tabulation errors Mr. Wright made. I should send them to him - LOL


But a great read about the formation of baseball as we know it.






and a shoutout to



Baseball and Cricket: The Formation of American Team Sports, 1836-72 by George B. Kirsch


covers the same ground as the Wright book but more literary than numbers based

[Kobeck]

Originally Posted by pauwoo

I'm seeing a ton of books that I'll need to reserve at the local library here...

Here's my list of baseball books that I've enjoyed...

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ‘76
Big Data Baseball: Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak
The Best Team Money Can Buy
Power Ball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game
The Grind: Inside Baseball's Endless Season
90% of the Game Is Half Mental: And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom

excellent list and that avatar - LOL

[Kobeck]

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

I've read Harold Seymour's two-volume history of early professional baseball at least twice. It's about fifty-years old now, but it's still a solid work of scholarship as well as the foundational text for all subsequent baseball histories. I'd also add Bill James's historical baseball abstracts. I don't always agree with James, but it's hard to argue with the depth of his research and his unique insights, which are endlessly fascinating.

excellent summation






David Q. Voight wrote a 3 volume history a few years after Syemours.

[hqbaseball]

I highly recommend Calico Joe by John Grisham. A gripping fictional tale that feels like real life.

[Stanley Kuppchaser]

Phiillip Roth's bawdy, raucous love story about the Patriot League's Port Ruppert Mundys, forced to play all their games on the road because their owners rented out the ballpark to the War Department. Roth weaves in many actual baseball stories in fictionalized form. A bit raw, but a delight.


Also the "Kid from Thompkinsville," series, by John R. Tunis. Wonderful prose to help younger readers captured by terrific plots to improve their vocabulary without even knowing it. Roy Tucker, "the Kid," was used by Roth in "American Pastoral," and is thought to be a major influence on Bernard Malamud's Roy Hobbs in "The Natural," also a great read.

[pauwoo]

Originally Posted by Kobeck

excellent list and that avatar - LOL

From the greatest, and oft-overlooked, superhero movie of all time.

[progen]

Originally Posted by pauwoo

From the greatest, and oft-overlooked, superhero movie of all time.

I was 11 when I went with my buddies to see the first Batman movie. We were all so excited.

[progen]

Was in Barnes & Nobles and started to read "Smart Baseball" by Keith Law, so I went ahead and ordered it on Amazon(cheaper of course), and just got it today. I read over a good deal of it in the store, and it is an excellent read. And agree or not with him, he makes some excellent points, with the stats to back it up.

Law, was for four and a half years, the Special Assistant to the GM of Toronto. After that, he wrote for Baseball Prospectus, ESPN, and now The Athletic. He really puts into perspective how ridiculous some of the stats that we as fans, broadcasters, and even Managers and GM's cherish. A great perspective on the whole "Moneyball" wave, and I just started perusing the book, and came across this paragraph. This is after he addresses the "pitcher win", "RBI", and right before "fielding percentage."

"The save just isn't necessary." It tells us nothing we couldn't already glean from the box score, and gives people the illusion of meaning by its mere existence, which has contributed to overspecialized relief usage and a perverse system where teams often reserve their best relievers for the 9th inning even if those aren't the toughest outs to get. It deserves its own plot in the stat graveyard, along with the pitcher win, the RBI, and one of the most useless stats baseball has ever seen, fielding percentage."

I can attest to the last one by just looking at the Phillies and watching them play. They are ranked 8th in MLB, and have one of the worst defenses on the planet.

[Cod]

Tonight I ordered Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player by Jeremy Beer from an independent book store. Very excited to read this as I've spent the past year learning more and more about the Negro Leagues and the players that took part.

[dsvitak]

My favorite book?

796.357

My dad was in the Air Force for a career, and then so was I. Every base had a library, and every library had the same Dewey Decimal location for baseball. It was always the first place I went.

My wife and I (she was active duty as well) were assigned to a small RAF base in East Anglia, about 90 miles NE of London. The base library at RAF Bentwaters was small, and we got to be such excellent customers that the librarian just wrote our names down on a piece of paper. "Dennis and Paula - 6. Or eight, or 12, or however many books we checked out that day. If you knew English television in the '70's, you would appreciate this.

Essentially, I read every book on baseball (and Dewey Decimal #940.53) in several different libraries, including the one just two miles away.

[dsvitak]

Well..My wife and I have given away a couple of thousand books, and our walkout basement has several thousand more.

Military history is the biggest share of books, but baseball is well represented.

Let me get a pen and paper, and wander downstairs. BRB.

...okay. Not in any particular order, these are some of the baseball books in my library.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. - Robert Coover

Bang the Drum Slowly. (the movie is even better) - Mark Harris

Bill James - pretty much everything ever written. I have his Annual Abstracts back to the point where they were 40 pages, and STAPLED.

You Know Me Al - Ring Lardner. The first of the great base ball writers...I based my Robert J. (Bubba) Jones OOTP dynasty partially on his style. Go look for it...30 thousand views, and worth the read, If I say so myself.

Jim Bouton's books. I was 13 when I read Ball Four. That ended my innocence years. I have read this book more times than any book, anywhere, not named Red Storm Rising. I met the man in a Costco, many years ago, and blew his mind when I told him the name of his chapter when he got sent to Hawaii, and talked about Mai Tai's.

Somehow, I managed to pick up a copy of a book, "Jimmy Makes the Varsity." Not sure when it was written, but it's a HOOT.

So MANY others. Several different compilations and encyclopedias. Bill James' historical abstracts, of course.

Even the history of Strat-O-Matic, written by the man who started the company.

Now...If you want a discussion, we could discuss board and dice baseball games we have owned. My list would be stupid long.

[Irrelevant Dude]

Originally Posted by dsvitak

Now...If you want a discussion, we could discuss board and dice baseball games we have owned. My list would be stupid long.

Off topic for this thread, but since you mentioned it...

My brother and I had a simple dice baseball game that we played all the time when we were kids. We kept stats over entire seasons and played multiple seasons with the same teams.

I have been trying to figure out what that game was, but I have never been able to find it anywhere. We always called it "Dice Roll Baseball", but I don't know whether that was an official name or if that's just how we referred to it.

All it was was a single cardboard stand with 2 sides. I remember one side being gray and the other being maybe a light peach-ish color. I think one side was for players with 20+ home runs, and the other side was the for players with less than 20 home runs. On each side there was a table of dice results (2-12 based on a 2d6 roll) for the rows and then the columns broken out by batting average ranges. So if you rolled a 7, you would find the corresponding value in the table based on what that player's batting average was.

I recall the 10's or 11's typically being home runs, 12's being triples, with some exceptions again depending on the batting average range. Does this sound familiar at all???