TWIBB: Oct. 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.