While doing research for my project, I came across this list, published in 2002, of the 100 top sports books of all time as chosen by the editors of Sports Illustrated. Of those 100, “only” 32 were about baseball. The nerve.
Anyway, here’s the SI piece, trimmed to just baseball titles, with commentary from the original article. A lot of good stuff here, and I imagine just about all will be included in my book. The numbers refer to the book’s overall ranking. FYI, the No. 1 sports title: The Sweet Science, A.J. Liebling’s 1956 ode to boxing.
Of course, many fine titles were omitted, and you might think the ranking is off.For example, I would have put Glory of Their Times towards the top of the list and maybe subbed in other titles for what SI offered.
Also, note that I asterisked three titles. They’re not wholly about baseball, but there’s enough material that I consider it a baseball book. I can do that; it’s my blog.
2. The Boys of Summer
A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-’50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise’s 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it. Kahn writes eloquently about the memorable games and the Dodgers’ penchant for choking — “Wait Till Next Year” is their motto — but the most poignant passages revisit the Boys in autumn. An auto accident has rendered catcher Roy Campanella a quadriplegic. Dignified trailblazer Jackie Robinson is mourning the death of his son. Sure-handed third baseman Billy Cox is tending bar. No book is better at showing how sports is not just games.
3. Ball Four
Though a declining knuckleballer, Bouton threw nothing but fastballs in his diary of the 1969 season. Pulling back the curtain on the seriocomic world of the big leagues, he writes honestly and hilariously about baseball’s vices and virtues. At a time when the sport was still a secular religion, it was an act of heresy to portray players “pounding the Ol’ Budweiser,” “chasin’ skirts” or “poppin’ greenies.” (And that was during games.) Bouton’s most egregious act of sacrilege — his biting observations about former teammate Mickey Mantle — led to his banishment from the “Yankee family.” But beyond the controversy, Ball Four was, finally, a love story. Bouton writes, “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
5. You Know Me Al
This collection of letters from a fictional (and grammatically challenged) pitcher named Jack Keefe, originally published in installments in The Saturday Evening Post, earned Lardner a spot in the pantheon of American humorists alongside Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
14. Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris
Second of a quartet of baseball novels featuring star southpaw Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths, and a book that is in equal measures sober and silly. In this installment Wiggen’s roommate and catcher, Bruce Pearson, is dying of cancer.
18. The Summer Game, by Roger Angell
This collection of 21 New Yorker pieces, with gems on the woeful early Mets as well as the “flowering and deflowering of New England” during the Red Sox’ 1967 “Impossible Dream” season, cemented Angell’s place as the game’s greatest essayist.
19. The Long Season
In 1959 Brosnan, a burnt-out reliever for the Cardinals and the Reds, kept a journal chronicling such things as the insecurity of superstars and the behavior of stewardesses on team flights. The result: a well-rendered inside glimpse that groomed the mound for Ball Four.
24. The Natural
The movie was a Mawkish Rocky-in-flannels, but the novel is a darker, more subtle tale of phenom Roy Hobbs, who loses his prime years to a youthful indiscretion, then gets a second chance. TIME called the novel (which ends differently from the film) “preposterously readable.”
27. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life
This biography, which broke new ground with its voluminous research and unsentimental gaze at an American folk hero, is still considered the final word when it comes to separating Ruth fact from fiction, such as his alleged called shot in the 1932 World Series.
31. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life
Cramer takes DiMaggio from his boyhood in San Francisco to the hospital room in Florida where, as he lies dying, a trusted adviser slips the 1936 World Series ring from his finger. Brilliant, stylish and a riveting study in the degrading effects of adulation.
33. Veeck–As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck
Baseball is a lot less fun without promo-meister Veeck, who recounts the eureka moments behind the exploding scoreboard, the pinch-hitting midget and the contortionist first base coach. He always gave fans what they wanted, even if that was, in one case, a fire-eating pelican.
37. A False Spring
An honest and deeply affecting memoir by a now established journalist describing his brief, bittersweet pitching career, starting in 1959 as a $50,000 bonus baby with the Milwaukee Braves and ending after four mostly dismal minor league seasons.
39. The Red Smith Reader
These columns by the man The New York Times said “was to sports what Homer was to war” offer Smith on Willie Mays, Vince Lombardi and Leon Trotsky. On the Shot Heard Round the World: “Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
41. The Unforgettable Season, by G.H. Fleming
A literature professor re-creates the scintillating 1908 Cubs-Giants-Pirates pennant race (of Merkle’s Boner fame) entirely through excerpts of the era’s florid sportswriting — which means runners aren’t merely thrown out at the plate, they’re “massacred at the fourth bag.”
42. The Celebrant: A Novel, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
An oft-overlooked novel that blends fact and fiction to create a charming turn-of-the-century tale about the intertwined lives of New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson and the family of a young Jewish immigrant who makes his World Series rings.
44. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
James, recently hired by the Red Sox as a senior adviser, weaves together thoughtful essays and lists, often turning traditional wisdom on its ear with analysis that goes far beyond the numbers — and all without taking himself (or the game) too seriously.
47. Shoeless Joe, by W.P. Kinsella
The same richness as Field of Dreams, the movie it inspired, but on a wider canvas. The novel has plot twists and fascinating characters not in the screenplay, most notably author J.D. Salinger and Eddie (Kid) Scissons, who claims to be the oldest living Cub.
49. Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, by Eliot Asinof
The final word on the controversial 1919 Black Sox scandal, a critical event in sports history. Former minor leaguer Asinof persuasively argues that the only participant worthy of exoneration is not Shoeless Joe Jackson but third baseman Buck Weaver.
50. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, by Jules Tygiel
In what The New York Times called a “rich, intelligent cultural history,” Tygiel portrays not only Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough 1947 season with the Dodgers but also the arduous 12-year march toward integration by all teams in the major leagues.
52. Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting, by Kevine Kerrane
The author spent a year with the Phillies’ scouts when they were arguably the best judges of raw talent in the major leagues. The often hard lives of baseball’s underpaid hunter-gatherers are rendered in lively detail. (See the decoding of scout-speak in chapter 5.)
53. The Bronx Zoo: The Astonishing Inside Story of the 1978 World Champion New York Yankees, by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock
After this book Lyle was no longer known as just a Cy Young Award-winning reliever; he was the guy who liked to sit bare-assed on teammates’ birthday cakes. His hilarious as-told-to proves that a talented team can feud and ego-trip its way to the World Series.
Sure, you can find stats galore on the Internet. But for those who relish paging through career numbers and debating whether Smokey Burgess was better than Ed Bailey, this tome, which is revised every few years, is the final authority.
57. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, by Lawrence Ritter
Ritter spent six years tracking down professional baseball players from the early 1900s, then stepped aside to let them tell their remarkable stories in their own words. Virtually all of these men are gone now, but thanks to Ritter they’ll never be forgotten.
58. The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball: An All-Star Lineup Celebrates America’s National Pastime
This one-volume reissue of an esteemed two-volume collection includes essays and fiction, profiles and columns by such first-rank writers as Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould and John Updike. Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First? also cracks the lineup of 114 entries.
60. The Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar
Helyar, a Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of the best-selling Barbarians at the Gate, turns a critical eye to the businessmen who have run baseball for the past century. He delivers a withering analysis of the owners’ inability to manage themselves or the game.
61. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
The protagonist in this mind-bending novel, J. Henry Waugh, invents a baseball board game, only to become so obsessed with the tabletop world he creates that he begins to lose his grip on reality — especially after one of his players dies from a beanball.
74. Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams, by Robert Peterson
The Negro Leagues, which had folded two decades earlier, were fading from memory when Peterson wrote this landmark history, sparking renewed interest in the leagues and restoring Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and other black stars to their rightful place in baseball’s pantheon.
78. The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth
Considering their players — a one-legged catcher, a one-armed centerfielder, a 14-year-old second baseman and a dwarf relief pitcher — perhaps it’s not so surprising that the 1943 Patriot League team at the heart of this ribald satirical novel finishes 34-120.
82. Farewell to Sport
Gallico left the New York Daily News after 13 years spent covering a golden age of sports; this is his valedictory. His tales of Ruth and Dempsey ring with you-are-there immediacy, and his participatory journalism (golf with Bobby Jones) inspired George Plimpton.
84. Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Met’s First Year, by Jimmy Breslin
The hard-bitten newspaper man found himself charmed by the lovable bumblers known as the ’62 Mets — “three 20-game losers, an Opening Day outfield that held the all-time major league record for fathering children (19), a defensive catcher who couldn’t catch.”
86. Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams
The Splendid Splinter may not extol batters (“The ball isn’t dead, the hitters are, from the neck up”) or hurlers (who “as a breed are dumb and hardheaded”), but no one has more eloquently explicated the act of squarely hitting a round ball with a round bat.
93. No Cheering in the Press Box
His oral history of 18 golden-age sportswriters shows that greats such as Cannon, Gallico and Smith could talk it as well as they wrote it. Cannon sums up their philosophy: “Sportswriting has survived because of the guys who don’t cheer. They’re the truth-tellers. Lies die.”
98. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings: A Novel, by William Brashler
Rather than accept a shoddy contract from the Louisville Ebony Aces, star catcher Bingo Long forms his own team and hits the barnstorming road. Brashler befriended former Negro leagues stars while doing research, and he repays them with a warm portrayal of their humor and heartbreak.
is available on Amazon.com,
{ 1 comment }
A pretty good list, stood the test of time. Everyone will find some minor disagreement with some titles on the list or their ordering…But all in all…a good list. Thanks for sharing
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