TWIBB: Week of May 7, 2010

This week’s best-selling baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, May 7.

Title	Rank
General
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca	1
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	2
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	3
Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball, by Bill Madden	4
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	5
Essays and Writing
The Bullpen Gospels	1
Moneyball	2
Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, by George F. Will	3
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton	4
The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville	5
History
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	1
Willie Mays	2
Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball, by Will Leitch	3
Men at Work	4
Of Mikes and Men: A Lifetime of Braves Baseball, by Pete Van Wieren	5
Statistics
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	1
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, by Tango et al	2
Baseball America 2010 Prospect Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide to Rising Stars from the Definitive Source on Prospects (Baseball America Prospect Handbook)	3
Baseball Prospectus 2010	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: No baseball on The New York Times paperback non-fiction Bestsellers List.

It’s new to me: I realize that Amazon changes its rankings hourly, so it might well be inaccurate to make a statement at any given time concerning the debut of a book on the list, so I’m changing things around a bit.

Bill Madden’s Steinbrenner bio is new to me. The Yankees owner has been in declining health the last few years, and the cover of the book, sadly, seems to reflect that. It’s not due for official release until Tuesday. I’ll be doing a review for Bookreporter.com in the near future. In the meantime, Madden’s employer — the New York Daily News — saw fit to hump the book in today’s issue.

Also new to me and appearing on the list before its due date is the love-fest “keepsake edition” (what, you throw it away after you’re done with it?) about the Phillies, which includes “interactive material,” such as replica tickets, a scouting report on Jimmy Rollins, etc.