TWIBB: May 21, 2010

This top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, May 21.

Title	Rank
General
Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden	1
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow with Michael Duca	2
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, by Howard Bryant	3
The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville	4
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	5
Essays and Writing
The Game From Where I stand	1
Moneyball	2
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	3
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton	4
Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, by George F. Will	5
History
Shattered: Struck Down, But Not Destroyed, by Frank Pastore	1
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	2
Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball, by Will Leitch	3
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	4
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, by H.A. Dorfman	5
Statistics
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	1
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, by Tango et al	2
Baseball Prospectus 2010	3
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract	4
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, by Baseball Prospectus	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 on The New York Times paperback non-fiction Bestsellers List.

It’s news to me: Amazon changes its rankings hourly, so it might well be inaccurate to make a statement at any given time concerning the debut of a book on the list, so I’m changing things around a bit. This week, however, there are no new titles.

Welcome back: Bill James’ Historical Abstract makes its return. I wish they’d hurry up and update this one.