I was always a fan of “Ball Four” and “Paper Lion” myself, but as a Red Sox fan, I’ve got to say that Dan Shaughnessy’s “The Curse of the Bambino” (which I just finished about 20 minutes ago) is the best I’ve read.
Any others? (Discounting plain statistical-type books; I mean ones that are about sport but are actually intended to be read, not just used as a reference.)
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Shaara’s “For Love of the Game.”
The movie did it no justice.
“The Big Show: Inside ESPN’s SportsCenter” by Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick is the only sports-related book I’ve read (and liked) that comes to mind right now. It’s not centered around one sport, and it’s from the perspective of sports journalists, who I think see more of sports as a whole than any athlete or coach ever do.
Olbermann’s list of 100 players he thinks should go into baseball’s Hall of Fame is required reading for any fan of the game, IMO. You might not agree with his choices, but it’s still a mighty fine list.
Grapes: A Vintage View of Hockey, by the immortal Hockey Night In Canada know-it-all, Don Cherry. Close second goes to 20th Century Hockey Chronicle. What can I say… hockey’s my game!!
I suspect that it’s long out of print, but if you can find it then I recommend “Veeck as in Wreck”, by Bill Veeck. He was a baseball owner back in the fifties (?) and he probably did more than any other owner in history to change baseball from just a game into entertainment.
His fights with the other owners and his crazy stunts (he actually did send a midgit up to bat) make for a great book.
“You Gotta Play Hurt” by Dan Wilson is great! It follows a sports writer during a year in his life going to all the great events around the world.
Very funny, and quite interesting read.
The Game by Ken Dryden.
The single best book ever about hockey. It also showed that intelligence and hockey were not mutually exclusive.
Where to begin…
Personal Favorites:
Loose Balls by Terry Pluto - a look into the history of the American Basketball Association.
I Was Right On Time by Buck O’Neil - biography of a former Negro League ballplayer (became well-known to the American public in Ken Burn’s “Baseball” series).
The Baseball Abstracts by Bill James - James was one of the first “sabermetricians”, a person who analyzes statistics in order to help answer specific questions about baseball (Example: He found that ballplayers tend to have their “peak” year around 27 years of age). His analyses, along with other sabermetric research, helped fuel the proliferation of statistics (for better or worse) in baseball and other sports. I personally learned a great deal about baseball from James’ Abstracts.
Only the Ball Was White by Robert Peterson - A history of the Negro Leagues.
Shoeless Joe by W. R. Kinsella - The Movie “Field of Dreams” was based on this book. Another by Kinsella - The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.
The Natural by Bernard Malamud - Another book made into a movie starring Robert Redford.
The Unviersal Baseball Association: J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor by Robert Coover - Man creates a dice baseball game (a la Strat-o-Matic), and gets caught up in the fantasy world of the ballplayers.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton - already mentioned. A book that broke ground in depicting professional athletes as real human beings (What?! Mickey Mantle played while hungover?!).
If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. Hard to explain, but I recommend it highly.
As Veek has already been taken, I’ll go with “Temporary Insanity,” by Jay Johnstone. What other book has a story about hiding the golf cart wheels of the Dodger’s owner under Tommy Lasorda’s bed as a prank, and then convincing the owner to conront Lasorda about it?
Or how about the time Steve Garvey dragged Johnstone to the Playboy Club in Atlanta just for the buffet?
Or what significance the statue of General Sheridan at Belmont and Sheridan in Chicago has for baseball players? First one to post the correct answer gets my admiration.
I’m probably gonna get myself flamed for this one, but Have a Nice Day by Mick “Mankind” Foley is a great book. Other favorites are Season on the Brink, and pretty much any book on pre-1970 baseball.
Definitely the Bill James Baseball Abstracts.
Ball Four was one of a kind.
The already-mentioned “Veeck as in Wreck” was supposed to made into a movie starring Bill Murray. I’m not sure if it ever got made, though; I sure haven’t heard about it.
As for “The Natural,” I saw the movie a while ago, but just read the book this past summer. Uh, a bit different, to say the least. I know that any adaptation will be different from the book, but the entire essence of the story was Hollywood-ized, as it turns out. I couldn’t believe what I had read after being used to the Redford version. If you’ve seen the movie but not read the book, check it out.
I have several shelves of baseball books at home, and many of them I’m extremely fond of. There is one title, however, that I frequently include in lists of the best books I’ve ever read, regardless of the subject: *The Glory of Their Times:The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It
*, by Lawrence Ritter. Ritter conducted interviews in the early 1960s with a number of ballplayers from the era around and just after the turn of the century. Twenty-six of those interviews are included in the book. While it may not sound like much of an authorial achievement to simply interview people and print the results, Ritter did a fabulous job of asking the right questions and then letting the subjects talk, and of subsequently editing down the responses and selecting the best stuff (this is evident from the recent audio edition, which makes available a selection of the original interview tapes – only the most coherent were released, and even in those you can see how well Ritter has smoothed out the rough edges without altering the substance of what’s said).
Honorable mention:
[ul]
[li]any of Roger Angell’s baseball books[/li][li]The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly, baseball novels by Mark Harris[/li][li]Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? (aka The Politics of Glory), Bill James[/li][/ul]
Hey…I have a Ken Dryden autographed puck. It’s right next to my Joe Nieuwendyk puck and the 2 Cornell pucks I caught at games. It’s my little CU puck collection…now I need Kent Manderville…
Oh, and best sports book? ESPN’s Sportscentury book is pretty cool.
Jman
Thomas Boswell’s “How Life Imitates the World Series” and “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” are also excellent books.
Following up on “Veeck as in Wreck”, Veeck’s later books, also cowritten with Ed Linn, entitled “The Hustler’s Handbook”, a followup baseball book, and “Thirty Tons a Day”, about running a racetrack in Massachusetts, are also great.
Among those books already listed I also heartily recommend the Bill James Abstracts, Bouton’s “Ball Four”, Pluto’s “Loose Balls” and Dryden’s “The Game”.
[hijack]I notice no one else mentions You Gotta Play Hurt. Has anyone else read this book. I do know it has been out of print for a while, but was just curious.[/hijack]