Baseball Best-Sellers, January 13, 2017

NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on with the show…

Caveat 1: Print editions only (at least for now); because I’m old school.

Caveat 2: Since the rankings are updated every hour, these lists might not longer be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them. But it’ll be close enough for government work.

Caveat 3: Sometimes they’ll try to pull one over on you and include a book within a category that doesn’t belong. I’m using my discretion to eliminate such titles from my list. For example, for some reason a recent listing included Tarnished Heels: How Unethical Actions and Deliberate Deceit at the University of North Carolina Ended the “The Carolina Way,” which, far as I can tell, is not at all about baseball, at least not in the main.

2017 Baseball Forecaster: & Encyclopedia of Fanalytics by Ron Shandler
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
Baseball Prospectus 2017
Sports Illustrated Chicago Cubs 2016 World Series Champions Commemorative Issue
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
Catapult Loading System: How To Teach 100-Pound Hitters To Consistently Drive The Ball 300-Feet, by Joey Myers *
One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season, by Chris Ballard
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports, by Jeff Passan
The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager’s Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life, by Mike Methany
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

* Making its debut on the Bookshelf Best-Seller List

Looks like the honeymoon is over for Cubs-loving readers. Now it’s time to prepare for the upcoming season, as evidence by the Forecaster, Prospectus, and System, a self-published book designed for younger players. And some old favorites are back: Manifesto, The Arm, and TGOTT.

MORE lists: Amazon has started a couple of new ones, including “Hot New Releases” and “Most Wished For.” A look at the top three in each, which have remained the same since last week:

Hot New Releases

2017 Baseball Forecaster
Baseball Prospectus 2017
A book about athletic training that features a baseball player on its cover but is not, by my accounting, an actually baseball book.

Most Wished For

Moneyball
Sports Illustrated Cubs edition
Baseball Prospectus

NY Times monthly sports Best-Sellers list: the Cubs book put out by MLB is #11. No other baseball title unless you want to include Joe Buck’s Lucky Bastard (which I don’t. By the way, and not that I care, but doesn’t a title like that get him banned from places like WalMart?).

Not on either the Amazon or Times‘ lists? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. Today: 1,316,749; last week: 1,177,424. Wrong way, folks. My forthcoming Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 1,011,885.

If you have read 501, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing a review for the Amazon page; it’s never too late. There haven’t been any in awhile. Doesn’t have to be long (or even complimentary, if you didn’t like it), but anything would be appreciated. And thanks to those who have.