Baseball best-sellers, Jan. 9, 2015

January 9, 2015

Happy New Year, everyone. Hope nothing but the best comes your way in 2015, including the best baseball books available.

Almost done with the non-baseball book and greatly looking forward to catching up on my regular reading, writing, and wrangling authors, filmmakers, and artists into discussing their work on new podcast segments.

In the meantime, here’s the drill:

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…

As you may have notice in recent weeks, the output on the Bookshelf has been sparse. Received a one-week extension on my new book, which means it will be that much longer until things return to “normal.”

So without further ado, 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. Baseball Prospectus 2015
  2. Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter
  3. 2015 Baseball Forecaster: An Encyclopedia of Fanalytics, by Ron Shandler
  4. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
  5. Baseball America 2015 Prospect Handbook: The 2015 Expert guide to Baseball Prospects and MLB Organization Rankings
  6. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
  7. Baseball America 2015 Almanac: A Comprehensive Review of the 2014 Season
  8. The Bill James Handbook 2015
  9. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, by Lawrence S. Ritter
  10. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, by Jules Tygiel

A couple of classics return to the list this week, including The Natural and TGOTT, perhaps the most famous of baseball oral histories.

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

If you have read it, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing a review for the Amazon page. There haven’t been any in awhile. Doesn’t have to be long (or even complimentary, if you didn’t like it), but anything would be appreciated. And thanks to those who have :).

 

 

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