Baseball Best-Sellers, June 20

Note: Just like Chuck Lorre’s “vanity cards” at the end of The Big Bang Theory, you should read these list stories to their conclusion; the end is always changing, even though the theme is basically the same, finishing up with a self-promotional message.

On with the show…

Here are the top ten baseball books as per Amazon.com, as of this posting.

Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); because I’m old school.

Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them. But it’ll be close enough for government work.

Caveat 3: Sometimes they’ll try to pull one over on you and include a book within a category that doesn’t belong. I’m using my discretion to eliminate such titles from my list. For example, for some reason a recent listing included Tarnished Heels: How Unethical Actions and Deliberate Deceit at the University of North Carolina Ended the “The Carolina Way”, which, far as I can tell, is not at all about baseball, at least not in the main. For the sake of brevity, I will be omitting the subtitles, which have become ridiculously long in in some cases in recent years, also at my discretion.

1. The Closer, by Mariano Rivera with Wayne Coffey. This remains at #3 on the NY Times’ hardcover non-fiction list dated June 15. The book has been on the list for five weeks. (Bookreporter.com review)
2. The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams. A surprise mover, up from the bottom of last week’s top 10.
3. Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
4. A Nice Little Place on the North Side, by George F. Will
5. Where Nobody Knows Your Name, by Michael Feinstein (Bookshelf review and Conversation)
6. Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, by Kostya Kennedy (Bookshelf Conversation)
7. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
8. Ted Williams, My Father, a Memoir, by Claudia Williams (Bookshelf/Bookreporter review)
9. 2014 Official Rules of Major League Baseball
10. 1954, by Bill Madden

Honorary mention: Bill Geist, author if the 1992 Little League Confidential: One Coach’s Completely Unauthorized Tale of Survival, rounds out the Times‘ on-line BSL with Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees…and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have, written with his son, Willie.

Kind of surprised, given the 25th anniversary of Field of Dreams that there hasn’t been an uptick in interest in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe.

Not on this list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. Ya’ll are gonna do something about that, right? Just sayin’.

Tagged as: baseball fiction, Bernard Malamud, Bill Madden, Chicago Cubs, George F. Will, Kostya Kennedy, Mariano Rivera, Michael Feinstein, minor leagues, Moneyball, New York Yankees, Oakland As, Pete Rose, Sports Illustrated, Ted Williams, The Natural, Willie Mays, Wrigley Field