Now, I do not consider myself to be a very well read man, in fact I often find long passages of text quite difficult to get through unless they are very entertaining, or captivatingly informative. However, I recently purchased Bill James's New Historical Baseball Abstract, and I must say it is one of the best books I own. It has everything, great anecdotes, great use of statistics and great analysis of the use of statistics. You can read it cover to cover, or you can use it as top notch bathroom reading. You can find emphatic agreement or rabid disagreement. As I said, it has everything.
Now, I would not normally post on such a small issue, but we have been encouraging reader input with only mild results. So I ask you, the reader (ya you, that one guy who visits from time to time) what your favorite baseball books are. Baseball is a fundamentally poetic game, and there are many great literary works devoted to the subject. As far as single passages, you can't beat A. Bartlett Giamatti's The Green Fields of the Mind. That is an incontrovertible fact; not open to discussion. Books, however, are a different matter.
Just to get things started, a few of my favorite books: Obviously, I loved Moneyball, it's a very good book, though it's not the Bible (no one thinks it is, and I wish some people would get over this). I also enjoyed Roger Kahn's The Head Game, a very interesting history of Major League pitchers and pitching. Another book that I read in my youth and enjoyed was October 1964 by David Halberstam, an account of the fall of the Yankee's dynasty and rise of the Cardinals (no Red Sox bias, I swear). Just two off the top of my head.
We here at Nosebleed Baseball view one of our main goals as encouraging the reader to think. So I guess this will be the first test of our success. Please, write in and recommend your favorite books.
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4 comments:
Can we open this up and also talk about articles as well as books. If so, then I would say that my all time favorite has to be "The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" which contains my favorite passage in sports writing history:
"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again."
The book that contains this story can be bought here and it is definitely worth it.
I somehow can't think of any baseball books that I have read recently. However, I have a good one from when I was a child. I always loved this book and think that anyone who loved baseball as a child would. It is called Teammates and it is about the beginning of the friendship between Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese. Oh yeah, the important thing that I forgot to mention is that it is a picture book. It is great nonetheless.
Two of the most informative writers I've found are Jules Tygiel and Brad Snyder.
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, J. Tygiel (updated ed.1997)
Past Time: Baseball As History, J. Tygiel (2001)
Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball, B.Snyder, 2003
Brad Snyder also has a book to be released soon on Curt Flood's struggle against the "reserve clause."
Well I would just have to say that Galdstoner seems to be forgetting his early reader days.....There was a time when Matt Christopher was his favorite baseball writer.....
Galdstoner's mother
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