TWIBB: Dec. 17, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com, as of Friday, Dec. 17 at 1 p.m.

Title	Rank
General
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by Jane Leavy	1
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	2
Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back, by Josh Hamilton with Tom Keown	3
Do You Know the New York Yankees?: Test your expertise with these fastball questions (and a few curves) about your favorite team’s hurlers, sluggers, stats and most memorable moments (Do You Know?), by Guy Robinson	4
Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden	5
Essays and Writing
Moneyball, by	1
The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond, by Jeff Silverman	2
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	3
Sports Illustrated: The Baseball Book	4
101 Reasons to Love the Red Sox (Revised), by David Green	5
History
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	1
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	2
Sports Illustrated Baseball Book	3
Baseball: An Illustrated History, including The Tenth Inning, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns	4
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), by Lawrence S. Ritter	5
Statistics
The Bill James Handbook 2011	1
Baseball Forecaster 2011, by Ron Shandler	2
The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011	3
Great Baseball Feats, Facts & Firsts (2010 Edition), by David Nemec	4
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	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 Last Boy ranks No. 37 overall on Amazon’s bestseller list and the top sports title. It’s also No. 14 on the New York Times non-fiction list.

As we wind down to Christmas, coffee table books such as SI’s Baseball Book and the Ward/Burns Baseball re-issue seem to be popular, as Do You Know, which is a nice little stocking-stuffer.

It’s news to me: I always thought the revisions of books like 101 Reasons was a money-grab. I did a comparison of each “reason” for one of the editions (there are also Yankees and Mets versions) and found so little difference between the original and revised that it was practically a shame to try to get fans to pony up for the new book.