Baseball Reading Lists
Back when I was also blogging Odyssey Online, a blog for the libraries, I compiled a couple of reading lists about books on baseball here at the ODY “Field of Dreams.” While it’s a busy time this “late innings” moment in the semester, the sum total of these lists is here:
- Smart Ball: Marketing the Myth and Managing the Reality of Major League Baseball by Robert Lewis
- The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad by Robert Elias
- Jackie Robinson and the American Dilemma by John R.M. Wilson
- Willie Mays: The Life and Legend by James S. Hirsch
- Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame by Zev Chaftets
- Live All You Can: Alexander Joy Cartwright and the Invention of Modern Baseball by Jay Martin
- The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound by Ron Darling and Daniel Paisner
- Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself by Michael Shapiro
- Willie’s Boys: the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Legend by John Klima
- Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: the Triumph of the American Pastime by Mark Frost
- Perfect: Don Larsen’s Miraculous World Series Game and the Men Who Made it Happen by Lew Paper
- Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game by John Thorn
- Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: the Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime by Jason Turbow and Micheal Duca
- 100 Baseball Icons from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Archive by Terry Heffern
- Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball by Bill Madden
- Venezuelan Bust Baseball Boon: Andres Reiner and Scouting on the New Frontier by Milton Jamail
- Cheater’s Guide to Baseball by Derek Zumsteg
- Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball by Norman Macht
- Jews and Baseball by Burton and Benita Boxerman
- Knuckler: My Life With Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch by Tim Wakefield and Tony Massarotti
- The Stars are Back: the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Sox, and Player Unrest in 1946 by Jerome M. Mileur
- Nikkei Baseball : Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues by Samuel O. Regalado
- Mr. Wrigley’s ball club : Chicago & the Cubs During the Jazz Age by Roberts Ehrgott
- Long Shot by Mike Piazza
- Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics by William H. Mullins
- Smoky Joe Wood: the Biography of a Baseball Legend by Gerald C. Wood
- A Chance to Win: Boyhood, Baseball, and the Struggle for Redemption in the Inner City by Jonathan Schuppe
- American Pastimes: the Very Best of Red Smith edited and with an introduction by Daniel Okrent
- Stories & Other Writings by Ring Lardner
The last title is a Library of America edition edited by Ian Frazier–Lardner is the author of the short story “You Know Me Al,” and one of the great baseball writers of the early twentieth century. If you don’t know Ring Lardner’s work there is an imperative read for at least one summer day.