TWIBB: Aug. 6, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Aug. 6.

Title	Rank
General
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	1
Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden	2
Chicago Cubs Cookbook: All-star Recipes from Your Favorite Players	3
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca	4
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	5
Essays and Writing
Moneyball	1
The Bullpen Gospels	2
The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville	3
Heads-Up Baseball : Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, by Tom Hanson	4
The Mental Keys to Hitting: A Handbook of Strategies for Performance Enhancement, by H.A. Dorfman	5
History
Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, by Edward Achorn	1
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	2
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	3
Of Mikes and Men: A Lifetime of Braves Baseball, by Pete Van Wieren	4
Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, by Dan Epstein	5
Statistics
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	1
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract	2
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, by Baseball Prospectus	3
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, by Tom Tango et al	4
Baseball Prospectus 2010	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: The only baseball titles in the top 20 Amazon’s sports bestseller list were Moneyball (11) and Steinbrenner (20), which also ranks 19th on the New York Times‘ list.

It’s news to me: Food for thought: Proceeds for The Cubs’ Cookbook go to the Dempster Family Foundation which seeks to help families of kids with DiGeorge Syndrome. There’s some interesting stuff in there and it’s a very worthy cause.

The Bullpen Gospels