Baseball best-sellers, Aug. 29

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.

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
Derek Jeter: Born to be a Yankee, NY Post
The Closer, by Mariano Rivera with Wayne Coffey. (Bookreporter.com review)
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
The Mental Game of Baseball, by H.A. Dorfman
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
Where Nobody Knows Your Name, by John Feinstein (Bookreporter.com review and Bookshelf Conversation)
Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, by Ken Ravizza and Tom Hanson
Pete Rose: An American Dilemma, by Kostya Kennedy (Bookshelf Conversation)
A Nice Little Place on the North Side, by George F. Will

Not to be too cynical, but you realize why the NY Post is releasing their Jeter paean now, don’t you? So they can publish a revised issue down the road and include the material from his final month, knowing that real fans will pony up for the extra copy. As mentioned in previous entries, I have mixed feelings with newspapers “reselling”previously published material in book form. Just seems like money grab to me. On the other hand, I suppose it’s nice to have it all collected for you in one volume. You can read a sample here.

Although there’s no baseball book, per se, on the NY Times‘ best-seller list, it’s worth mentioning that Charles Krauthammer’s Things That Matter (#25) includes several essays regarding his love for the national pastime in general and the Washington Nationals in particular.

Not on this list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. In fact, I was horribly shocked to see it fell under (over?) the one million mark in the rankings (although it’s 575,000+ on the Canadian Amazon site and even in the top 100 in three categories; thank you, my friends to the north). I have to go lie down for awhile. So ya’ll are gonna do something about that, right? Only 11 copies left on Amazon.

And if you have read it, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing a review for the Amazon page. Doesn’t have to be long (or even complimentary, if you didn’t like it), but anything would be appreciated.