This is time of the year when publications come out with their naughty and nice lists. For the purposes of this blog, of course, we will only concern ourselves with those about baseball books.
I’ve come across two such pieces so far, including Esquire magazine’s “The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written,” by Alex Bleth. A bold statement, to say the least, prompting the anticipated discussions/arguments. John Thorn, whose contributions to baseball are renown, wrote in a Twitter thread on the Esquire article which wondered if such amount is enough, given the wealth of literature on the national pastime over more than 150 years. “100 is enough,” Thorn writes. “There are not 501 great baseball books. Ron Kaplan meant to cover the waterfront, as I did with Paul Adomites’ “Ultimate Baseball Library” in Total Baseball. But there are not 100 great ones.”
(Upon further reading, however, the reader will note that Bleth might have dialed it back a bit when he downgrades from “best” as he offers “our pick of 100 indispensable books no baseball fan should be without” (emphasis added). Not necessarily the same thing and kind of what I had in mind with my own 501.)
The other list comes from the prolific Dan Schlossberg with “Ranking the best baseball books of 2021” in Sports Collectors Digest.
This one will probably engender even more controversy since Schlossberg does dare to rank them and especially when he leads off with one about his favorite team: 150 Years of Braves Baseball. Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100, which has been in the top three of Amazon’s lists of baseball best-sellers since it was released, can do no better than third place. I’m not going to quibble — this is an opinion, after all — other than to ask if an annual like The Bill James Handbook is really the 10th best book of the year? With more than 20 “honorable mentions,” the article cites just about every major book that came out in 2021.
Another issue I had is that three of the 40 entries are not baseball books at all, rather special editions of magazines: Sports Illustrated on Derek Jeter and ESPN and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the late Hank Aaron. If your going to make such audacious claims, at least stick to the parameters.
Guessing that we will see similar lists in the weeks ahead.
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