“Required” readings? Maybe, maybe not.

I don’t know about you, but being the curmudgeon that I am, I have trouble with the folks who jump on the baseball bandwagon once the regular season is over. This ain’t the NBA or NHL, bud, where everyone gets into the playoffs so you don’t have to pay attention until there are just a few weeks left.

Media and just plain folk who don’t know and on-deck circle from a deck chair are all of a sudden experts on the national pastime, having boned up through a few websites and blogs. And don’t get me started on the celebrities at the games or the networks that promote their own TV stars…

You know it’s going to be even worse if Washington (for whom I’m rooting as a descendent of the Montreal Expos), gets into the World Series; all of a sudden you’ll have politicians acting is if they learned the game at their grandpappy’s knee chiming in.

So it’s with some amusement (and bemusement) that I pass along this “required reading” piece on baseball titles from the Baltimore Sun. Included are Chard Harbach’s The Art of Fielding: A Novel and Mark Kurlansky’s Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One.” Just two? Guess there’s not a lot of time to bone up in the post-season, especially when the paperback version of TAOF is 544 pages (the Greenberg bio is a comparatively quick read at 192 pages).

But wait. Dave Rosenthal, says he was “disappointed” with Kurlansky’s effort.

The book is part of the Jewish Lives series, so it’s understandable that it would focus on Greenberg’s relationship to his faith and his decision to sit out a key late season game that fell on Yom Kippur. That was well-told. But there was so little baseball action — so little feel for the game — that I came away feeling a bit empty.

Then what’s the point of making Kurlanky’s book “required”? If Rosenthal feels that way about it, couldn’t he have suggested something that was worthwhile out of the hundreds of baseball titles that have been published over the past couple of years (especially since the High Holiday Season is over, making Greenger’s legendary story less relevant? How about something like John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game or even The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game?

Rosenthal concludes his piece, “Read Kurlansky’s book to learn about Greenberg. Read Harbach’s to learn about baseball.” I totally disagree; you’re not going to learn much, if anything, about baseball from TAOF. When hues and cries from hardcore baseball fans went up, most critics who loved the book (which was pretty much all of them; this cheese stands almost alone), have said the book is not so much about baseball as about relationships. Sorry, Mr. Rosenthal, but you can’t have it both ways.