Special Article
Best Baseball Books
By Collin Agee
At the start of the new season, MLB.COM republished this list of the best baseball books:
https://www.mlb.com/news/best-baseball-books-of-all-time
A few comments on some of these that I have read:
Ball Four
By Jim Bouton with Leonard Shecter
I read this when I was young; in the days when reporters didn’t put into print some of the unsavory things that ballplayers did. I know one fan who was outraged about what was said about Mickey Mantle, not just his drinking and womanizing, but the assertion that Mantle’s off the field behavior negatively impacted his play on the field; which Mantle admitted later in life.
Moneyball
By Michael Lewis
I was addicted to statistics before the term “analytics” was ever used. It also appealed to me as a Cleveland fan, because the franchise strategy described in the book offered small market teams a way to compete with the much richer teams. Also because, for a while, I was a blackjack card counter, and the statistical approach to baseball had parallels to the basic strategy that I used in blackjack, which was pure probability and statistics.
Beat the Dealer
By Edward O. Thorp
This is where I learned that strategy.
Bringing Down the House
By Edward O. Thorp
And this is a later book, Bringing Down The House that told the story of the implementation of the strategy by a team of students from MIT in the 1990s, which later became a 2008 movie called “21”.
Eight Men Out
By Eliot Asinof
This is the fascinating, true-story about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Yes, they threw the World Series. But the players were being exploited by the owners, and decades before free agency, they had no recourse but to play for whatever the owners deigned to pay them.
Shoeless Joe Jackson is a particularly interesting aspect of this story, because he took the money, then had a change of heart. In the 1919 World Series, “Shoeless Joe” recorded a remarkable .375 batting average with 12 hits, 6 RBIs, and 1 home run, leading both teams in hits and batting average. He had a .956 OPS and no errors, but was banned from baseball for life, starting a debate that has been waged for over a century.
The Umpire Strikes Back
By Ron Luciano, one of the most colorful umpires
(Editor’s Note: Ron Luciano was an accomplished and published writer. In addition to The Umpire Strikes Back, he wrote 4 other books, Strike Two, The Fall of the Roman Umpire, Remembrance of Swings Past, and Baseball Lite. They are all entertaining reads.)
They Called Me God: The Best Umpire Who Ever Lived
by Doug Harvey and Peter Golenbock
The autobiography of legendary MLB umpire Doug Harvey, co-written with Peter Golenbock, detailing his career from 1962 to 1992, his reputation for infallible calls, and his interactions with baseball’s biggest stars offering anecdotes and insights into his strict but fair approach to umpiring. The book covers memorable moments like Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run and Roberto Clemente’s final hit and explores Harvey’s core principles: never take anything from a player, never back down, and never carry a grudge.
It includes Harvey’s Rules, his three guiding principles for umpiring.
The Men in Blue: Conversations with Umpires
written in 1995
What is your favorite baseball or umpire book? One of the books in this article or something else?
Send it to me at [email protected] with the Subject, Best Baseball Book, and explain why you like it. For next month’s article, I will compile the responses and share them.
To get us started, Robert Fobian nominates “The SABR Book of Umpires and Umpiring” edited by Larry Gerlach and Bill Nowlin. At nearly 500 large format pages, this tome goes deep and wide.