Baseball best-sellers, April 24, 2015

NEW STUFF: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So…

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.

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.

Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, by Bill Pennington
If These Walls Could Talk: New York Yankees: Stories from the New York Yankees Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box, by Jim Kaat
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter. (Bookshelf review here).
The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, by H.A. Dorfman
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
Championship Blood: The 2014 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, by Brian Murphy
Baseball Prospectus 2015
100 Things Orioles Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Dan Connolly
The Real McCoy: My Half Century with the Cincinnati Reds, by Hal McCoy

Here’s the April list of New York Times sports best-seller list (10 plus 10 more). Jeter Unfiltered comes in at number six, while John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball is 12.

A couple of titles from Triumph Publishing — If These Walls Could Talk and 100 Things — make it to the list this week. Triumph specializes in sports books and these are parts of two of their many series. I’m not a huge fan of these anecdotal/listical styles, but I do see how tailoring them for regional audiences makes sense.

By the Way, Jim Kaat will be at an author event at the Begino Baseball Clubhouse on Friday, May 8.

Not on either list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. As of this post, the ranking is 541,098, down from 242,810 last week. Ya’ll are gonna do something about that, right? Just one or two purchases can move a book up several thousand spots. 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.