* Now we're talkin'

May 1, 2008

I came across these posts from The Bronx Banter portion of The Baseball Toaster and The Hardball Times that cut to the chase of what The Bookshelf is all about.

Alex Belth, who writes Bronx Banter, got the ball rolling, in response to a query he received from Phillyburbs.com regarding his suggestions for “ten essential baseball books.”

As he writes on the blog, these are “Not the ten best books or even the ten most essential books just ten essential ones.” (emphasis in the original)

Thank you.

In turn, Belth asked 55 of his closest friends — historians, biographers, columnists, beat writers, screenwriters, novelists — for their considered opinions. He did yeoman’s work tabulating the results, some of which are reported here. (In these two posts, he reports on the ballots and comments of the participants, A-R and S-W.)

The top 15 choices, each of which received seven or more votes, yield no real surprise or argument:

  1. Ball Four (35 votes)
  2. The Glory of Their Times (29)
  3. The Bill James Historical Abstract (27)
  4. The Boys of Summer (20)
  5. Moneyball (20)
  6. Veeck as in Wreck (16)
  7. Babe (Richard Creamer, 15)
  8. Lords of the Realm(15)
  9. The Summer Game (14)
  10. Eight Men Out (13)
  11. A False Spring (10)
  12. The Summer of ’49 (9)
  13. The Natural (9)
  14. Baseball’s Great Experiment ( 8 )
  15. Dollar Sign on the Muscle (7)

Among the top authors are Bill James (41 votes) Jim Bouton/ Leonard Schechter (35), Lawrence Ritter (30), Roger Angell (28), and Michael Lewis and Roger Kahn (20). One surprising ommission: Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell, author of Why Time Begins on Opening Day, which was always one of my favorties and perhaps the first book that made me long to be a sportswriter.

I’m curious about the age demographic of this survey. Most of the titles mentioned are classics (the most recent is Moneyball, which came out several years ago), and seemingly not of interest to today’s fantasy fanciers and staheads.

I’m not going to go all the other books on the list, but I’m culling and picking out a few that seem non-essential, in my humble opinion.

According to Merriam-Webster.com, “essential” is a noun dating from the 15h century meaning:

  1. something basic <the essentials of astronomy>
  2. something necessary, indispensable, or unavoidable

If my wife made me choose between her and a few books in my library, these are the ones considered indispensable by some of the voters that I would discard to keep the peace:

  • Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher and Ed Linn — especially since it seems that’s not the actual quote
  • The Bronx Zoo (Sparky Lyle) and Bo: Pitching and Wooing (Bo Belinsky) — Bouton, what hast thou wrought?
  • Seasons in Hell by Mike Shropshire, about the Texas Rangers in the early-mid 1970s. He just came out with The Last Real Season, a new book on the subject (like we really need two?)
  • Pride of the Bimbos — if I had to ditch titles, most of the novels would be among the first to go.
  • The Life You Imagine, by Derek Jeter (might be essential for 10-year-old Yankees fans)
  • The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney. Too many books of this type.
  • The White Rat by Whitey Herzog (see Jeter’s book, but apply it to whatever audience would find this essential)
  • Snap Me Perfect by Darrel Porter (see Herzog’s book)
  • Don Baylor: Nothing But the Truth by Baylor and Claire Smith (see above)
  • Hang Tough, Paul Mather by Alfred Slote and Baseball Palace of the Wold by Douglas Bukowski. Never heard of these, which automatically render them non-essential

The posts from THT can be read here and here.

visitor stats

0Shares

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post:

script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5496371-4']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();