Baseball Best-Sellers, March 10, 2023

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. (See my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks.”)

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” adult books (no romance/erotic fiction that features baseball as a theme although goodness knows there are a bunch of those available).

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. An asterisk denotes a book making its debut on the BBS list.

PRINT

1. Baseball Prospectus 2023
2. The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox: More Than a Century of Championships, Challenges, and Characters *
3. A Damn Near Perfect Game, by Joe Kelly with Rob Bradford
4. Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Greatest Minds Creates Sport’s Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich
5. The Fantasy Black Book 2023, by Joe Pisapia
6. The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, by Jeff Pearlman
7. The Baseball 100, by Joe Posnanski
8. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
9. Baseball America 2023 Almanac
10. Ron Shandler’s 2023 Baseball Forecaster

KINDLE BOOKS

1. Winning Fixes Everything
2. Baseball Prospectus 2023
3. A Damn Near Perfect Game
4. The Franchise: The New York Yankees: A Curated History
   
5. The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox
6. The Baseball 100
7. A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics
8. Heads-Up Baseball 2.0
   
9. In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair
10. The Fantasy Black Book 2023

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. 1. Winning Fixes Everything
   2. The Baseball 100
   3. Moneyball (unabridged, narrated by Scott Brick)
   4. Sho-Time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played
   5. A Damn Near Perfect Game
   6. The Umpire is Out: Calling the Game and Living My True Self *
   7. Ball Four: The Final Pitch
   8. Heads-Up Baseball
   9. Ninety-Percent Mental
   10. The Matheny Manifesto

Note: Once again, Amazon lists The Athletic Baseball 2023 Fantasy: Win Your League! in the top 10 on the print list, but as I consider it a magazine, and not a book, I’ve excluded it. Blog mea, praecepta mea.

Looking forward to the Boston Globe recap, the only new title to break the list. Always interested in how one source changes over a long period of time. But looking at the preview pages, I was a tad disappointed: I was hoping they would reproduce the actual pages from the newspaper, rather than just reprint the text. One of my favorite books is Baseball Extra: A Newspaper History of the Glorious Game from Its Beginnings to the Present (the “present” being 1999. It was a monster, measuring almost 11″ by 14″ to accommodate full-page reproductions from dozens of newspapers. The selections chronicle not just the game — although many are just the sports page — but other things that were going on at the time. Just one example, totally at random, is The Boston Post of August 19, 1915 which includes headlines such as “Lynchers to be Protected” and “Cut Loan to England to 150 Million,” this during World War One.

Still not in the Amazon top ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, as of this posting it ranks 2,833,093 overall in books; last time, 2,800,539. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 2,469,551; last time, 2,448,255. Still only $1.99 for the Kindle version.

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.