Baseball Best-Sellers, March 18, 2022

A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes.

In addition, occasionally the powers-that-be over there try to pull a fast one by including a book in a category to which it should not be listed (in my opinion). For example, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect has appeared on the BBS list. “Why” is a good question. There might be a smattering of the national pastime in it, but not enough to make it a baseball book per se (again, IMO).

Finally, adults only here. That is, no books for younger readers. Also no “adult” books here, that is, no romance/erotic fiction that features baseball as a theme either (although goodness knows there are a bunch of those).

So, with all that said…

The links under the authors’ names will take you to the Bookshelf Conversations I did with them. The asterisk denotes the author is a “member” of the Pandemic Baseball Book Club.

PRINT

1. Baseball Prospectus 2022
2. The Baseball 100, by Joe Posnanski
3. Ron Shandler’s 2022 Baseball Forecaster: & Encyclopedia of Fanalytics
4. The Fantasy Baseball Black Book 2022, by Joe Pisapia
5. Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide 2022
6. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
7. The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II, by Anne R. Keene
8. The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams with John Underwood
9. Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, by Tom Hanson
10. The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, by H. A. Dorfman

KINDLE BOOKS

1. Baseball Prospectus
2. The Baseball 100
3. The Fantasy Baseball Black Book 2022
4. Moneyball
5. Chili Dog MVP: Dick Allen, The ’72 White Sox and a Transforming Chicago, by David Fletcher and John Owens
6. Yankees 1936–39, Baseball’s Greatest Dynasty: Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and the Birth of a New Era, by Stanley Cohen
7. Phillies 1980!: Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, and Philadelphia’s First World Series Championship, by Lew Freedman
8. An October to Remember 1968: The Tigers-Cardinals World Series as Told by the Men Who Played in It, by Brendan Donley
9. The Cloudbuster Nine
10. Dodgers vs. Yankees: The Long-Standing Rivalry Between Two of Baseball’s Greatest Teams, by Michael Schiavone

AUDIBLE

Note: Amazon has changed the way they list audiobooks. No longer under the general category of “biography and memoir,” they are now treated in their own baseball/softball category. Here’s the general link to the section where you will find further links to the individual titles, their reader/narrators, and samples. Note further that these are updated regularly and the top ten list below might no longer be the same.

1. Moneyball  (unabridged, narrated by Scott Brick)
2. Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask, by Jon Pessah
3. The Baseball 100
4. Ball Four
5. Ninety Percent Mental, by Bob Tewksbury
6. Chipper Jones: Ballplayer
7. The Bad Guys Won, by Jeff Perlman
8. The Mental Game of Baseball, by H.A. Dorfman
9. Stealing Home, by Eric Nussbaum
10. The Methany Manifesto, by Mike Methany

I usually don’t post a picture of a Kindle book, but nothing in the print section was new and this looked pretty cool. Hoping to see some new titles with several release dates coming soon.

Still not in the Amazon top-ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, right now it ranks at 2,114,310 overall in books; last time, 1,838,453. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 1,771,868 ; last time, 1,629,801.

Shameless self-promotion: if you’re looking for some good baseball reading during this down time, why not pick up a copy of 501? It’s like the abridged dictionary; it has most of the other books in it.

A reminder: There’s an Excel “checklist” of the books list in 501. If you’re interested in keeping track of how many you have read or own, drop me a line.

If you have read either of my books, thanks, hope you enjoyed it, and please consider writing an Amazon review; it’s never too late.