Baseball best-sellers, May 8, 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
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen
The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers, by Jon Pessah
Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter. (Bookshelf review here).
The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes, by Gary Cieradkowski
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, by H.A. Dorfman
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
100 Things A’s Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Susan Slusser

Here’s the latest list of New York Times sports best-seller list (10 plus 10 more). The Martin bio cracks in at No. 6 with several other baseball titles making their “debut,” including a couple of surprises. Moneyball is No. 11, following by John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name. Jim Kaat’s If These Walls Could Talk, a collection of Yankees stories, lists at No. 14 while I Never Had it Made originally published by Jackie Robinson in more than 40 years ago, is at No. 18. Jeter Unfiltered drops out altogether.

Jumping into the Amazon list are two new (to this recap) titles by Pessah and Cieradkowski, both of whom have been interviewed on national public radio programs (and, in the near future, will be on this site as well).

Not on either list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. As of this post, the ranking is 847,230 down quite a bit from last week’s 328, 313, but we can do better so ya’ll are gonna do something about that, right? I just heard via Facebook from a fella who was in my fifth grade class who said he would be buying a copy, so there’s that. 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.