Baseball Best-Sellers, November 24, 2023

Hope you all had a festive Thanksgiving. As you recover from all that overindulging, here’s some books for thought. Maybe you can pick up some of these at Black Friday sales prices!

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

KINDLE BOOKS

Why We Love Baseball
The Wingmen
Moneyball
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship, by David Halberstam
Davey Johnson: My Wild Ride in Baseball and Beyond, by Johnson and Erik Sherman
The Baseball 100
Sho-Time: The Inside Story of Shohei Ohtani and the Greatest Baseball Season Ever Played, by Jeff Fletcher
Al Kaline: The Biography of a Tigers Icon, by Jim Hawkins
The Baseball Mysteries: Challenging Puzzles for Logical Detectives, by Jerry Butters and Jim Hente
Mrs. Morhard and the Boys: One mother’s vision. The first boys’ baseball league. A nation inspired, by Ruth Hanford Morhard

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.

Why We Love Baseball
Moneyball (unabridged, narrated by Scott Brick)
The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, by Jane Leavy
The Baseball 100
Ball Four: The Final Pitch, by Jim Bouton (read by the author)
For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball, by Bud Selig
Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich
The Bad Guys Won, by Jeff Pearlman (read by the author)
Banana Ball, by Jesse Kole with Don Yeager
Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and, “the Worst Baseball Team in History”—The 1973–1975 Texas Rangers, by Mike Shropshire

Just as quickly as it appeared a couple of weeks ago, the book about the Texas Rangers winning the World Series is no longer on the charts. Back to the usual suspects with no new titles appearing this week. Now that the season is over, look for Walker’s series of trivia books to fill the ranks more often.

Still not in the Amazon top ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, as of this posting it ranks 979,703 overall in books (#78 in Literary Bibliographies & Indexes); last time, 2,780,826. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 2,794,511; last time, 2,729,608.

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. But wait!

NOTE: A new edition of 501 is on the way. Stay tuned for details!

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.