TWIBB: Dec. 3, 2010

The top baseball books, according to Amazon.com as of Friday, Dec. 3 at

Title	Rank
General
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, by Jane Leavy	1
Beyond Belief: Finding the Strength to Come Back, by Josh Hamilton with Tim Keown	2
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis	3
The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, by Dirk Hayhurst	4
The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, by Jason Turbow and Micheal Dudca	5
Essays and Writing
Moneyball	1
Bullpen Gospels	2
The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond, by Jeff Silverman	3
Beyond Belief	4
The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2011	5
History
, by	1
The Philadelphia Phillies: An Extraordinary Tradition, by Scott Gummer	2
Giant Surprise: San Francisco’s 2010 World Champions	3
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch	4
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), by Lawrence Ritter	5
Statistics
The Bill James Handbook 2011	1
Hardball Times	2
Baseball Forecaster 2011, by Ron Shandler	3
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks, by Zack Hample	4
Great Baseball Feats, Facts & Firsts (2010 Edition), by David Nemec	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: The Last Boy keeps on going: No. 54 overall on Amazon’s top 100 list; No. 2 overall in sports titles, and No. 14 on The New York Times‘ non-fiction bestseller list.
It’s news to me: David Nemec’s latest revision makes me wonder the kind of market for books of this nature (See also, Burt Randolph Sugar’s The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac). It doesn’t strike me as the type of thing one buys over and over, like a new edition of The Hardball Times or Bill James Handbook. The material is basically the same, save for the few items/events that might have transpired the previous season to merit inclusion.