Baseball best-sellers, May 15, 2015

May 15, 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.

  1. https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/journeyhome_final_106987585.jpg?resize=159%2C240The Journey Home: My Life in Pinstripes, by Posada with Gary Brozek
  2. Pedro, by Pedro Martinez and Michael Silverman
  3. Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen
  4. The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers, by Jon Pessah
  5. Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius, by Bill Pennington
  6. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
  7. Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, by Joe Pepitone and Barry Stainback
  8. The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
  9. Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter. (Bookshelf review here).
  10. Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty, by Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan

Here’s the latest list of New York Times sports best-seller list (10 plus 10 more). The Martin bio is 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.

Once again, a good portion of the titles are Yankees-centric, with the “debut” of the Posada memoir and the return after 40 years of Pepitone’s book. I don’t remember that one causing such a sensation as many who are writing abut it now, such as Dan Epstein in this piece in Rolling Stone.

Kind of surprised the Molina book ranks so high, although, to be honest, I haven’t read it yet.

Not on either list? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. As of this post, the ranking is 776,220, up a tick  from last week’s 847,230, 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.

 

0Shares

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post:

script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-5496371-4']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();