TWIBB: Oct. 8, 2010

October 8, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 8.

Title Rank
General
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by Jane Leavy 1
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis 2
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams, by John Updike 3
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton 4
The Mental ABC’s of Pitching: A Handbook for Performance Enhancement [MENTAL ABCS OF PITCHING], by H.A. Dorfman 5
Essays and Writing
Moneyball 1
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu 2
Ball Four 3
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst 4
The Game from Where I Stand: A Ballplayer’s Inside View, by Doug Glanville 5
History
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu 1
The Mental ABCs of Pitching 2
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch 3
Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero, by Danny Peary with Tom Clavin 4
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer 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 Tom Tango et al 2
The Bill James Handbook 2011 3
Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, by Baseball Prospectus 4
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract 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: There are no baseball books in Amazon’s top 100 overall titles, and only the as-yet-unreleased Jane Leavy’ biography of Mickey Mantle is in the top 20 sports titles. And what’s Mantle without Maris?

It’s news to me: The 2011 edition of the Bill James Handbook makes the list, so that’s two books in  TWIBB that aren’t even out yet.

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Tagged as: Ball Four, Dirk Hayhurst, james S. Hirsch, Jane Leavy, Jim Bouton, Mockey Mantle, Roger Maris

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