Well, at least there’s some good news in the book publishing world

Baseball may be fading as a spectator sport, but there doesn’t seem to be concomitant drop-off when it comes to books about the national (passed) pastime.

This piece by Bryant Curtis on Grantland includes dozens of titles, past and present, for your reading pleasure. It’s an insightful overview of the genre of baseball publishing, with its looks ahead — as in how to forecast what themes might sell — and behind — as in what topics never seem to fall out of favor.

A few select passages:

The baseball book is a happy anachronism, summoned into our world like the ghosts in Field of Dreams. The question is this: Are there any good baseball books left to write?

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A more interesting question is how baseball books will age. Someday, if we keep up our Obamacare, we’ll live long enough to become those nostalgia-hungry readers. Our childhood dynasties will fade from view, our favorite players will abdicate their chairs on MLB Tonight, and the networks will finally stop showing Jeter’s relay throw against the A’s. Which is to say, we’ll forget something that was once familiar, and we’ll want to draw back the curtain via a book. (Or a Kindle. Or Google Glass.)

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The ultimate test of the baseball book may be 10 years hence, when the ostensible subject will be the mid-’90s. Can the steroid era be turned into nostalgia?

“No doubt that in 20 years, baseball fans will wax nostalgic about the ’90s,”said HarperCollins senior vice-president David Hirshey, who published Leavy’s biographies. “Although with the exception of someone like Cal Ripken, there is no Mantle or Mays to get misty-eyed over … If down the road, McGwire or Sosa were ever to write a true come-clean memoir, I think readers would be drawn to those books.”

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The narrowcasting of the web has made the obscure piece of history more sellable than ever. See Ryan Swanson’s When Baseball Went White, a study of how Reconstruction changed the game. “I haven’t written a book and I’m not in publishing, so I don’t want to seem cynical,” said Craig Calcaterra, who blogs at HardballTalk. “But it seems clear to me that the platform or audience is identified first, and then let’s go find someone who can write the book.”