* TWIBB — April 9

This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, April 9.

Title	Rank
General
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	1
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca	2
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	3
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	4
<Kiss It Good-Bye: The Mystery, The Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, by John Moody	5
Essays and Writing
<The Bullpen Chronicles	1
Moneyball	2
Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of Fame Hitter Talk about How the Game is Played, by Lonnie Wheeler	3
Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Power, Precision, and Long-Term Performance	4
The Bill James Gold Mine	5
History
Willie Mays	1
Kiss It Goodbye	2
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement, by H.A. Dorfman	3
Fifty-Nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had, by Edward Achorn	4
Sixty-Feet, Six Inches	5
Statistics
Baseball Prospectus 2010	1
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	2
Bill James Gold Mine	3
Baseball America 2010 Prospect Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide to Rising Stars from the Definitive Source on Prospects	4
The Bill James Handbook 2010	5

(Note: The list includes print editions/baseball titles only, allowing for non-baseball titles and kindle editions that affected the rankings. Also, the rankings change hourly, so the result you get when you visit Amazon.com might not be the same.)

Analysis: Any time a book lands in Amazon’s Top 1,000 is a good time, given the millions of titles that the site offers. Dirk Hayhurt’s memoir makes the Top 100, coming it at 85. Baseball Codes (210), Willie Mays (502), and Moneyball (638) also make the cut.

Hayhurst’s effort pays off: According to the NY Times site, his book appears at #19 on the Paperback best-seller list — for April 18. Now that’s thinking ahead.

Making their debut on Amazon: No new titles as of this posting.

Welcome back: Sixty-Feet, Six-Inches, the back-and-forth between Hall of Fame slugger Reggie Jackson and pitcher Bob Gibson.

FYI: Barnes and Noble also has a “best-seller list.” Just for fun I compared it with Amazon. They handle their lists a bit differently. While you can search under “baseball,” they don’t divide them into separate categories.

So the top ten BN baseball titles for this date (again, counting different versions of the book as one entity):

1. The Bullpen Chronicles
2. Baseball Prospectus
   
3. Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero
4. Willie Mays
5. Kiss It Goodbye
6. The Baseball Codes
7. Baseball America Prospect Handbook
8. The Baseball Fan’s Bucket List
   
9. New York Yankees 2010 Media Information and Record Guide (It used to be that the annual Yearbooks would be for the fans and the Media Guides reserved for the actual media. Too much democratization.)
10. High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time

Tagged as: baseball books