Baseball Best-Sellers, February 2, 2024

Happy Groundhog Day! I never understood it: if the groundhog sees its shadow, doesn’t that mean that the weather is nice and that there should not be six more weeks of winter?

Meteorologists and sports pundits are the only professions where you can be wring half the time and still keep your job.

Moving on…

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
The Wingmen: The Unlikely, Unusual, Unbreakable Friendship Between John Glenn and Ted Williams, by Adam Lazarus
Ron Shandler’s 2024 Baseball Forecaster and Encyclopedia of Fanalytics
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
The Fantasy Baseball Black Book 2024, by Joe Pisapia
The Mental Game of Baseball, by H.A. Dorfman
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 Science of Hitting, by Ted Williams and Tom Underwood

KINDLE BOOKS

The Wingmen
The Bad Guys Won, by Jeff Pearlman
Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch
Moneyball
Why We Love Baseball
Late Innings, by Roger Angell
Ball Four: 50th Anniversary Edition, by Jim Bouton
The Baseball 100
I Was Right on Time, by Buck O’Neil with Steve Wulf and David Conrads
Fantasy Baseball Book 2024

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
Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball, by Keith Law
Heads-Up Baseball, by Tom Hanson
The Baseball 100
Baseball, by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (narrated by Burns)
The 1998 Yankees: The Inside Story of the Greatest Baseball Team Ever, by Jack Curry (read by the author)
The Bad Guys Won, by Jeff Pearlman (read by the author)
The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn
Ball Four: The Final Pitch, by Jim Bouton

Congrats, again, to Joe Posnanski, who wins Spitball Magazine‘s coveted CASEY Award for the third time, joining Kostya Kennedy as the only member of the “threepeat club.”

A couple of old favorites return to the list: Mental Game and Science. Welcome back; you’ve been missed.

Still not in the Amazon top ten? 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. FYI, as of this posting it ranks 955,716 overall in books (#80 in Literary Bibliographies & Indexes); last time, 2,658,622. Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War ranks 2,716,446; last time, 2,590,724.

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.