Baseball Best-Sellers, November 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 in 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 (romance/erotic fiction that features baseball as a theme although goodness knows there are a bunch of those out there).

So, with all that said…

The links under the authors’ names will take you to the Bookshelf Conversations I did with them. An asterisk denotes a book making its debut on the BBS list.

PRINT

Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, by Joe Posnanski
The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams, by Adam Lazarus
The Baseball 100, by Joe Posnanski
The Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams and John Underwood
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
Ballparks: A Journey Through the Fields of the Past, Present, and Future, by Eric Enders
The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II, by Anne R. Keene
The Ultimate New York Yankees Trivia Book: A Collection of Amazing Trivia Quizzes and Fun Facts for Die-Hard Yankees Fans!, by Ray Walker
The Yogi Book, by Yogi Berra
At Long Last: The Texas Rangers’ Historic Run to the 2023, by Rangers Today

KINDLE BOOKS

Sho-Time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played, by Jeff Fletcher
The Wingmen
Why We Love Baseball
The Baseball 100
Moneyball
Al Kaline: The Biography of a Tigers Icon, by Jim Hawkins
Wait Till Next Year, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Damned Yankees: Chaos, Confusion, and Craziness in the Steinbrenner Era, by Bill Madden and Moss Klein
Mrs. Morhard and the Boys: One mother’s vision. The first boys’ baseball league. A nation inspired, by Ruth Hanford Morhard
The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Great Team in Pinstripe History, by Jack Curry

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.

Moneyball (unabridged, narrated by Scott Brick)
Why We Love Baseball
Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up, by Alex Speier
The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, by Jane Leavy
The Baseball 100
Making It Home: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League, by Teresa Strasser (read by the author)
The Methany Manifesto, by Mike Methany with Jerry B. Jenkins
Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Thing in Sports, by Jeff Passan
Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, by Ben Reiter (read by the author)

As predicted, it didn’t take long for a book about the winners of the World Series. (As I also predicted on social media, this was the lowest-rated fall classic in TV history.)

Still not in the Amazon top ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, as of this posting it ranks 2,780,826 overall in books; last time, 2,617,866. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 2,729,608; last time, 2,690,317.

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 dictionary; it has the other books in it. Which kind of reminds me of one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite shows.

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.