Baseball Best-Sellers, Sept. 2, 2016

NOTE: 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 on with the show…

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.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
House of Nails: A Memoir of Life on the Edge, by Lenny Dykstra
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports, by Jeff Passan
The Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams, by Michael Tackett
The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager’s Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life, by Matheny with Jerry Jenkins
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team, by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller
The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, by H.A Dorfman
One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen

* Indicates debut on this list

Nothing much new. The Cobb bio returns to the list, as does Dorfman’s classic.

NY Times: The August list is still up on the Times‘ site so Nails remains No. 3 on their monthly list. Two other baseball titles in the top 20: Tom Stanton’s Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-era Detroit (#17) followed by Ron Darling’s Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life follows at #18.

Not on either the Amazon or Times‘ lists? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. Today: 1,261,236; last time: 1,007,313. Just sayin’. (You mean no schools are assigning this as required reading?) By the way, my forthcoming book, Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War, ranks at 2,330,989. Not bad considering I haven’t even handed in the manuscript yet.

If you have read 501, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing a review for the Amazon page; it’s never too late. 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.