Baseball best-sellers, May 1, 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…

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.

Pedro, by Pedro Martinez and Michael Silverman.
Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, by Bill Pennington
100 Things A’s Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Susan Slusser
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
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball, by John Feinstein
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
Championship Blood: The 2014 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, by Brian Murphy
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, by Dorfman

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 Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name is 12.

The book about As Fans replaces Jim Kaat’s If These Walls Could Talk as the Triumph Publishing entry for the week. Kaat was recently interviewed on The Brian Lehrer Show (you can hear it here) and will be at the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse on May 8. RSVPs are strongly recommended. In fact, it might already be sold out but check on the Bergino website.

I wonder how many pro players have read any of the Dorfman books?

Not on either list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. As of this post, the ranking is 328, 313, up a bit from 541,098 last week, but we can do better so 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.