* TWIBB — April 2

This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, April 2.

Title	Rank
General
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	1
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca	2
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	3
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	4
Baseball Prospectus 2010	5
Essays and Writing
The Bullpen Chronicles	1
Moneyball	2
Giants Past & Present, by Dan Fost	3
Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Power, Precision, and Long-Term Performance	4
Minnesota Twins: The Complete Illustrated History, by Dennis Brackin	5
History
Willie Mays	1
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, by H.A. Dorfman	2
Giants Past & Present	3
Minnesota Twins	4
Few and Chosen: Defining Tigers Greatness Across the Eras, by Lance Parrish	5
Statistics
Baseball Prospectus 2010	1
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	2
Baseball America 2010 Prospect Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide to Rising Stars from the Definitive Source on Prospects	3
Baseball America 2010 Directory: Your Definitive Guide to the Game	4
The Bill James Gold Mine	5

(Note: The list includes print editions/baseball titles only, allowing for non-baseball titles and kindle editions that affected the rankings. Also, the rankings change hourly, so the result you get when you visit Amazon.com might not be the same.)

Analysis: No baseball titles made the current New York Times non-fiction hardcover best-seller list. Bullpen Gospels was the top sports biography (Mays was No. 6), but within the baseball category, Hayhurst’s book didn’t even make the top 10. The Top 5 include Mays; Peary and Clavin’s Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero; Satchel, by Larry Tye; Fifty-Nine in ’84, the Hoss Radbourn bio by Edward Achorn; and Joe Torre’s Yankee Years.

Making their debut on Amazon: Few and Chosen: Defining Tigers Greatness Through the Years, ostensibly by former catcher Lance Parrish, and Baseball America’s very useful Directory.

Welcome back: The Baseball Codes; The Mental ABC’s of Pitching (although I don’t know what criteria was used to include it in the history category); and Nolan Ryan’s Pitchers Bible (same for essays).

FYI: Barnes and Noble also has a “best-seller list.” Just for fun I compared it with Amazon. They handle their lists a bit differently. While you can search under “baseball,” they don’t divide them into separate categories.

So the top ten BN baseball titles for this date (again, counting different versions of the book as one entity):

The Bullpen Chronicles
Willie Mays: The Life the Legend
Baseball Prospectus
Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero
Kiss It Goodbye: The Mystery, The Mormon and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates
Baseball America Prospect Handbook
The Baseball Codes
Twenty-Seven: The Official Yankees World Series Championship Commemorative
Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide, 2010
The Machine: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds

I wonder what the demographic is for customers of each of these sites? Each probably has a few things going for it that the other lacks. For one thing, you can pre-order Blockade Billy, the new Stephen King baseball novella on BN for $13.50 if your a B&N member ($15 otherwise); at Amazon, you’ll actually pay full price.