TWIBB: Sept. 2

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Sept. 2.

Title	Rank
General
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	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
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud	3
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	4
Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball, by Will Leitch	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
The Mental Keys to Hitting: A Handbook of Strategies for Performance Enhancement , by H.A. Dorfman	4
Heads-Up Baseball : Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, by Ken Ravizza	5
History
Are We Winning?	1
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	2
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	3
The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball, by Aaron Skirboll	4
The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, by Joe Posnanski	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 Tom Tango et al	2
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, by Baseball Prospectus	3
Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball, by Vince Genarro	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 (16). There are no baseball titles on the NY Times list.

It’s news to me: Welcome back to a classic: the print version of The Natural (not the movie version which changed the entire ending). This is the one of the few fiction titles I’ve seen since I started doing this list. A couple of instructionals return to the list, perhaps in preparation for teenagers’ fall baseball. And in recognition of Roger Clemens’ return to the hallowed halls of Congress, we have The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven, which harkens back to a “kinder, gentler” form of drugs.

The Bullpen Gospels