TWIBB: Aug. 27, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Aug. 27.

Title	Rank
General
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	1
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	2
The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville	3
Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden	4
Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back, by Josh Hamilton	5
Essays and Writing
Moneyball	1
The Bullpen Gospels	2
The Game from Where I Stand	3
Sports Illustrated: The Baseball Book	4
A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, by A. Bartlett Giamatti	5
History
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	1
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	2
Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, by Edward Achorn	3
The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds (Hardcover), by Joe Posnanski	4
The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn	5
Statistics
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, by Baseball Prospectus	1
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	2
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, by Tom Tango et al	3
It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book	4
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract	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 (17). There are no baseball titles on the NY Times list.

It’s news to me: As the season winds down, Baseball Prospectus’ It Ain’t Over makes the list. As I mentioned yesterday, Bloomsbury is re-issuing Giamatti’s take Time for Paradise, so it’s interesting to see A Grand and Glorious Game here as well. Josh Hamilton is having another monster season, which might explain the bump in his book. Kahn’s classic also reappears (and though this is cheating a bit, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four — now 40 years old– ranks sixth in the “essay” category).