Baseball Best-Sellers, January 19, 2024

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 Amazon’s 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
Baseball Prospectus 2024
Ron Shandler’s 2024 Baseball Forecaster and Encyclopedia of Fanalytics
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams, by Adam Lazarus
The Fantasy Baseball Black Book 2024, by Joe Pisapia
The Bill James Baseball Handbook: Walk-Off Edition
The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II, by Anne R. Keene
The Baseball 100, by Joe Posnanski
The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson, by Jeff Pearlman

KINDLE BOOKS

The Wingmen
Why We Love Baseball
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship, by David Halberstam
You Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond, by Robert Whiting
The Era, 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World, by Roger Kahn
The Baseball 100
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Takes a Swing at Baseball
Jeter Unfiltered, by Derek Jeter
The Fantasy Baseball Black Book 2024
The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 MPH, by Shawn Green with Gordon McAlpine

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.

Ball Four: The Final Pitch, by Jim Bouton
Ballplayer, by Chipper Jones
Moneyball (unabridged, narrated by Scott Brick)
Why We Love Baseball
The Baseball 100
Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up, by Alex Speier
The Methany Manifesto, by Mike Methany with Jerry B. Jenkins
The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever, by Jack Curry (read by the author)
Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, by Evan Drellich
Heads-Up Baseball, by Tom Hanson

Nothing new under the sun in the print list. Ho-hum.

Still not in the Amazon top ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, as of this posting it ranks 830,285 overall in books (#93 in Literary Bibliographies & Indexes); last time, 2,002,404. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 2,405,145; last time, 2,147,286.

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 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.