Baseball Books

Just read Summer of '49 -- was kinda hoping for a 50/50 split regarding Sox / Yankees nostalgia-tinted schmooze, & not back-in-the-day when-men-were-men Yankeeography action clumsily intercut w/ "these are fans!" anecdotes. (Unrelated: every time DH leaned on Triple Crown stats or W-L records, I rolled my eyes.) Some cool stories & quotes & stuff, but doesn't really seem to congeal as a book so much, and "the great DiMaggio" can go fart in a hat.

Also read excerpts of that O'Nan / King 2004 Red Sox diary thing a while back. Whatever interest I had in pro-RSN propoganda was totally squelched by that piece of shit.

NB: I hate everything. :p

the o'nan/king book was interesting early because that team did take a dip that looked like it would be their annual august swoon and o'nan totally starts ripping the team. but when they hold on and the playoffs it was too much even for me.

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14260000/14268611.JPG

I read "Summer of '49" when I was fifteen or so. I found it a bit long-winded and boring. No need to revisit it, I guess? :)

apparently it's full of errors.

We're pleased to make two major announcements to the SABR membership and the baseball community at large:

1) SABR is now the publisher of The Emerald Guide to Baseball, and
2) SABR is making the PDF version of The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009 available as a FREE download from the members-only section of the website (and be sure to direct friends and family to sabr.org so they can get a copy too).

Edited by acclaimed baseball historians (and SABR members) Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, The Emerald Guide distills the 2008 season down to 586 fact-filled pages that contain the pitching, fielding, and hitting statistics for every player active in the major and minor leagues in 2008. The Emerald Guide fills the hole in the baseball record left by the 2006 demise of the Sporting News Baseball Guide and contains all of the same features and then some, such as team-by-team daily results, a directory of important contacts, and a synopsis of the just-completed season. A bound version of The Emerald Guide is available via print on demand at Lulu.com for $23.94.

Making the PDF of The Emerald Guide available fre to anyone with accesss to a computer is a direct way for SABR to fulfill its mission of disseminating the history and record of baseball. And you, our members, help the organization fulfill this mission each and every day. One of our objectives is for sabr.org to be bookmarked by everyone with a serious interest in baseball. The Emerald Guide offers a step in that direction.

SABR plans to publish The Emerald Guide annually. Gillette and Palmer also authored 2007 and 2008 editions of The Emerald Guide (co-published with Sports-Reference). Free PDF versions of these editions are also available from the SABR website.

Thank you for your commitment to SABR and its mission. We hope you enjoy The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009.

Sincerely,

John Zajc, Executive Director

http://sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,2766,36,0

fwiw, i third (?) bellisarius and felicity's recommendation of you gotta have wa. it provides a lot of interesting history of japanese baseball even if it's bit dated at this point. it would be interesting to see a new edition taking into account ichiro, matsui et al on one hand and bobby valentine on the other.

anybody have an opinion on that somewhat recent dimaggio bio? i think the author was richard cramer?

huh. how about that...

http://www.amazon.com/Samurai-Way-Baseball-Impact-Ichiro/dp/0446694037/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236859004&sr=1-4

has anone bought the Fielding Bible II? Froma BP interview with author John Dewan:

The one thing I'd bring up that was kind of fun, was the analysis of Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez; McLouth won a Gold Glove, and Gomez didn't. Carlos Gomez had the most defensive misplays in center field, which is a characteristic of young players that we've found; other young players up there are Delmon Young, B.J. Upton, and his brother, Justin Upton. All of these players have more defensive misplays. But Carlos Gomez covers so much more ground, that it just shows through on the number of runs saved. The difference that we found between Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez was amazingly straightforward. Simply, Gomez is covering ground in deep center field, where fielding a ball is much more valuable, than Nate McLouth, who covers more ground in shallow center field, where making a catch means that you're saving a single. Gomez, meanwhile, is saving doubles and triples. It looks to be that the biggest problem for Nate McLouth is that he should play deeper. He has good skills and a lot of good fielding plays in our system, but when we break it down between shallow, medium, and deep, which is something we did in the book this year, he's plus on shallow balls, and minus on medium and deep.

also measures Varitek as worst recent Boston catcher, lol

Yeah that was weird though cuz it sort of seemed like the return of CERA which seems very suspect.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 SABR-Sporting News Awards: Ron Selter for Ballparks of the Deadball Era; Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson and Tim Wiles for Baseball's Greatest Hit; and Jim Walker and Rob Bellamy for Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television. The winners will receive their awards on Saturday, August 1, 2009, in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott, Pennsylvania Avenue during SABR's annual convention.

The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award recognizes outstanding baseball research published in the previous calendar year in areas other than history and biography. The Award is designed to honor projects that do not fit the criteria for The Seymour Medal or the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. The Sporting News sponsors the $200 cash awards that accompany the honor.

Ballparks of the Deadball Era is Ronald Selter's comprehensive study of Deadball Era-ballparks and park effects, in which he shows the extent to which ballparks determined the style of play. Organized by major league city, this fact-filled, data-heavy commentary includes all 34 ballparks used by the American and National Leagues from 1901 through 1919.

In Baseball's Greatest Hit, Strasberg, Thompson, and Wiles present the complete story of the third-most frequently sung song in America: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The book features countless photos and illustrations, providing a pictorial history of the song’s influence on the game and American culture. A bonus CD is also included, which features many rare and classic recordings of the song from artists such as Dr. John, the Ray Brown Trio, Carly Simon, and George Winston.

In Center Field Shot, Walker and Bellamy trace the sometimes contentious but mutually beneficial relationship between baseball and television, from the first televised game in 1939 to the contemporary era of Internet broadcasts, satellite radio, and high-definition TV. Ultimately, the association of baseball with television emerges as a reflection American culture at large.

Baseball America's top ten of '09:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2009/269330.html

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Hair-Plastic-Grass-Baseball/dp/0312607547/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266884385&sr=8-1

Thanks, Matos WK.

dude's got a blog too!

http://www.bighairplasticgrass.com/

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/baseball-historians-get-their-own-hall/

Anyone read this?

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Strikes-Out-Baseball-Promoted/dp/1595581952/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269999008&sr=8-3

Started Fifty-Nine in '84 last night. It's pretty decent so far. A little too fond of sounding like a 19th c. newsman at times.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html

Anyone have this coffee table book?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0711/neil.leifer.baseball.book/content.1.html

Fifty-nine in '84 was weirdly obsessed with the existence of hookers and the possibility that Hoss Radbourn's true love had been one

The Bullpen Gospels is basically a feel-good Ball Four. You get mentions of baseball groupies and drinking, but none of the gory details. Damn, I need to read Ball Four again.

Haven't read it but I'm guessing it's solid.

Beyond Batting Average
Over the past few decades, a multitude of advanced hitting, pitching, fielding and base running measures have been introduced to the baseball world. This comprehensive sabermetrics primer will introduce you to these new statistics with easy to understand explanations and examples. It will illustrate the evolution of statistics from simple traditional measures to the more complex metrics of today. You will learn how all the statistics are connected to winning and losing games, how to interpret them, and how to apply them to performance on the field. By the end of this book, you will be able to evaluate players and teams through statistics more thoroughly and accurately than you could before.

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=873874

RFI: a basic baseball book for my GF. I feel like I need to introduce slash stats before I can get all wonky. Also, she watched a little of SNBB w/ me last night and, say what you will abt J morgan, having super slo-mo shots of swings is v v educational.

basic as far as analysis or history goes?

Allen Barra, a Birmingham native, has a history of Rickwood Field out:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2010/2610530.html

just finished The Bullpen Gospels last week. not a bad read. i preferred the lighthearted stuff over the more serious bits.

http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/archives/2010/09/ball-four-more.html

Haven't read the piece yet, but thanks for the link. Along with James's and Kael's books, and (its influence long since dissapated) The Catcher in the Rye, no book ever influenced me more. Read it at just the perfect time, when I was the 12th guy on my high-school basketball team, cracking wise about the despotic coach and some of the lunks ahead of me. I was booted off the team within a year or two of reading Ball Four; not sure if that would have happened without a nudge from Bouton.

has anyone read "'78" by bill reynolds?

no.

John Thorn has an early-days history coming in March:

https://baseballeden.com/Home.html

im reading '78 right now. BF got me eight men out for xmas, that's next.

David Ulin of the LA Times picks his all-time favorites:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-et-0331-baseball-books-20110331,0,7729658.story

"The Long Season" by Jim Brosnan (1960). Ten years before "Ball Four," Brosnan published the first (and still best) baseball diary

I've never heard of this book!

Was there nothing good written after 1983?

I liked the Bronsan book when I read it years ago, but I find it surprising that anyone would list it rather than--or at least alongside--Ball Four, unless you object to Bouton's book for the same reasons Bowie Kuhn and Mickey Mantle did.

This is perfect -- I was just hunting for a good baseball book list (and couldn't really find one anywhere).

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be). Have read about a third and have put it into the "not right now" pile.

I didn't read B4 til a couple years ago and found it immensely readable.

I've only read two of the books on that list in their entirety.

ie, Malamud and Angell.

tho I miiiight have read the Breslin book on the Mets a very long time ago.

the coover book is great but not really about baseball

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be).

Majorly, majorly disagree. Unlikeable, maybe--I find Bouton very likeable, more in love with the quirks and absurdities of baseball than an underpaid, aging reliever barely hanging on with a doomed franchise ought to be, but I can see where someone might find him to be a self-obsessed wiseass. But as to the other point, I think he's a better writer than most writers. (How much credit belongs with Leonard Shecter, his editor, I don't know.)

Clemenza and I totally agree! Bouton is immensely likeable and a great writer. A lousy actor though. Laughable in the Long Goodbye.

No Eight Men Out? That's a very good book imo.

I couldn't make the adjustment to us agreeing, Alex...I think Bouton's fine in The Long Goodbye. Not an actor, agreed, but the guy he's playing is a superficial operator whose slickness is supposed to contrast with Gould's dogged, somewhat clumsy virtuousness, and by that yardstick I think he does okay. When he tells Marlowe at the end that that's the way it is, guys like him are chumps who are there to be taken advantage of, I find Bouton credibly slimy.

I can't stand the movie so I don't really like anything about it.

Surprising...Just the movie itself, or '70s Altman in general? Mark Rydell delivers a line that's on my short-list of funniest ever.

The movie. Although there are other 70s Altman flicks I can't stand there is plenty I love.

1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, written by SABR members Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg, is the winner of the 2011 Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year.

http://sabr.org/latest/spatz-and-steinbergs-1921-awarded-2011-seymour-medal

Wow, impressed with the consensus on Ball Four. I should pick it back up then, huh!

I'd also recommend the follow-up, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which covers Bouton's half-season with the Astros in '70, his release, and the fallout from Ball Four (some priceless stuff on Bowie Kuhn). Not as good, but good nonetheless. He also wrote a book on managers that I read years ago and liked. There were chapters on Harry Walker, Joe Schultz (shitfuck, a must), Houk, etc. Pretty sure it was called I Managed Good, but Boy Did They Play Bad.

Bouton has a website where you can arrange to get books autographed: http://www.jimbouton.com/. I continue to think about doing this...it's a little pricey, but I think the money goes to charity.

for Ball Four fans:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/ball-four-tracers/

So thank you all for getting me to stick with Ball Four. It's an awesome piece of work, insightful and fascinating, and Bouton comes across clever, compassionate and decades ahead of his time. His team-mates, for the most part, not so much! I definitely want to pick up the sequel now.

Shawn Green has a Zen-inflected memoir out:

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2011/8/2/2306220/shawn-green-interview

never heard of this!

The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg

I have two copies of Thomas Klise’s wild and wildly out-of-print 1974 novel, The Last Western, and my friend Maria gave me both of them. It’s a strange, shaggy, ambitious book—one of those classic Catholic Social Apocalypse/Baseball novels, whose protagonist both pitches in the Major Leagues and becomes the pope, among other things; we talked about it at The Awl back in 2012. As it is not the social baseball novel that I’m writing about here, I will move on from it beyond encouraging you to seek it out. The reason I bring it up has more to do with Maria’s practice of buying a copy of the book whenever and wherever she finds it, and then giving that to someone she thinks would get something out of it. This seemed strange to me at the time, and I told her as much, but it makes more sense to me now. If you are going to love a book that’s hard to find, and want other people to love it, too, that is what you will have to do. And so, at least until Defector Classic Editions comes into existence and publishes a deluxe new edition of the book, I am committing to doing it when and wherever I find a copy of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel The Celebrant, the book I most enjoyed in 2023.

The Celebrant is easier to find than The Last Western, if nothing else; first editions are expensive and seem decently rare, but you can get copies of the most-recent printing, from 1993, from the University of Nebraska press and on Amazon. And I imagine it would still work if you got it that way, but there was something about how I found it that felt auspicious. Some friends had recommended it years earlier, and critics had praised the book widely when it came out decades before that, but the fact that it had fallen so far out of the conversation—it’s the only book that Greenberg ever published; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—made it seem all the more significant when it finally turned up on a shelf at The Strand. If you can get a Lost Classic on Amazon, it feels less lost, somehow, and maybe even like less of a classic for being on there alongside all the self-published anti-vaccine claptrap and knockoff HDMI cables. The thrill of discovering it, right in its place and where it had never been in any of my previous visits, felt more like what I’d imagined.

However lost it was, The Celebrant is indeed a damn classic. The Last Western concerns the end of everything—a whole world collapsing under the weight of human cynicism, malaise, jealousy, greed, unbelief, and all the other 1970s American Classics. The Celebrant, which is set around the turn of the 20th century and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family and their complicated personal and professional relationships with baseball in general, the New York Giants more specifically, and the iconic Giants ace Christy Mathewson in particular, is more a novel of beginnings than endings. It is a story about how baseball has made people into Americans, which it always has, and how fraught and complicated and implicating a thing that is. There is a lot of baseball in it, and Greenberg writes it elegantly and expertly; the turn-of-the-century details are carefully wrought; there’s nothing showy about the language, but the steakhouses and train carriages and ballparks are described in evocative and graceful ways. It feels real enough—crowded and smoky and half-drunk, or starched and fancified and lonely—that Greenberg’s detours into more debauched and dreamlike corners are made all the more disorienting.

It is a commanding performance, all told, and Greenberg’s stuff is all the more effective for how well he controls it, and how meticulous he is about setting up what needs to be set up, and how comfortably he changes speeds. As good as the baseball writing is, and as colorful as the color is, what has stayed with me about The Celebrant is how deftly Greenberg navigates the concentric and contradictory layers of reverence and awe and unreality and devotion that make fandom so simultaneously deranging and enriching a lived experience. The Kapinski family comes closer to these icons—to Mathewson, especially, and to the Giants’ irascible manager John McGraw—than they are strictly comfortable with, and ultimately perhaps closer than they can strictly handle. You’re not supposed to do business with your gods.

If what follows is tragic, it is mostly so in the same accumulative way that stories told over sufficiently long periods of time tend to be. Everyone is pushed and pulled by the forces that always push and pull people, and also by the abiding and All-American subsuming of the small by the large, and the past by the future. It’s a smaller book than The Last Western in a bunch of ways, if just as worthy of rediscovery. Both have to do with belief, but if The Last Western is about the crisis of a world without it, The Celebrant is about the strange and shifting shapes that belief can take, and the lonesome places our devotions can take us. - David Roth

Posnanski's Why We Love Baseball has won the 2023 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. It's his third Casey. How do I know all this? Joe, the world's greatest self-promoter--i.e., the world's most exhausting self-promoter--has a column about it today.

Winners and nominees (launched in 1983):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Award

Bought this at a flea market--$10, still shrink-wrapped; a bit too much in that setting--only because I didn't know it existed until today:

https://i.postimg.cc/fR9xWtBY/kirk.jpg

Came out in '97, two years after Gibson retired and nine years after his famous HR. Oversized hardcover, almost a coffee-table book--surprised he got someone to publish it (he pretty clearly wasn't headed for the HOF). Also surprised the cover photo is him as a Tiger, and not what you'd assume would be on the cover.

Fine player, though--one of three or four Tigers who probably would have been a better pick for MVP than Willie Hernandez.

What's he got to say about his famous homer?

Big-deal acquisition today: Martin Levin, who used to edit Innings, a short-lived Toronto monthly I wrote for, gave me his copy of the 1977 Baseball Abstract, the first one.

https://sabrweb.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1977-Bill-James-Abstract.jpg

I don't know how many copies James self-published--my guess is 100. (The '78 edition, also self-published, sold 250 according to Wikipedia.) I've been trying for 20 years to get a copy, and I've never so much as seen one for sale online, whether eBay or Abe or anywhere. So I don't know what it's worth, but I'm guessing quite a bit.

(Martin also told me that he's donated some stuff to Cooperstown, including the half-dozen or so issues of Innings. Somewhere in the deepest catacombs of the library there, yes--I'm in the HOF!)

wau

I feel it's like owning a copy of the Magna Carta. I'm somewhat biased.

Damn that's incredible clemenza.

I missed a line in that Wikipedia entry: the first edition sold 75 copies (one of whom was presumably Martin)...I posted about this in Facebook. Half of me was thinking "You shouldn't be attracting attention with something this rare." The other half was laughing at that half: "Haven't you learned yet--no one cares about this stuff. Criminals are busy stealing cars--they're not combing Facebook looking for Baseball Abstracts."

So cool!

Amazing clem, congratulations on your acquisition (and your unofficial HOF induction)!

On the induction, thanks. On the other...Jesus, this is embarrassing...it's a reprint. When Martin gave me the book, I took a quick look and put it right in a bag. Looked exactly like the '78/'79/'80 editions I already have: card-stock cover, a little faded, hand-stapled. I was posting yesterday from a coffee shop on my way home; found the image above online.

So how did I figure out that it's a reprint when I got home? It required a lot of detective work:

https://i.postimg.cc/jSN0FyPy/reprint.jpg

(Thought about posting this in the absent-minded thread--yes, I actually managed not to notice that. If I had bought it online, I'd be looking at the expensive-stupidity thread, created by me for me.)

I don't even have the heart to revisit the Facebook post, where I tagged Martin. Still excited to have it, but obviously not quite where I was yesterday.

Let me now tell you all about the Picasso I bought on eBay last month.

Sorry to go on about this...As I suspected, the reprints are pretty rare in and of themselves:

https://picclick.com/Vintage-Bill-James-Baseball-Abstract-Set-1977-1978-262998858206.html

If that's accurate, this person sold the first five for $2,500, with the '77 and '78 editions reprints; I've got the '77 reprint and originals for '78-'81 (which Mike Saunders--Creem, Angry Samoans--gave to me years ago), so presumably the value would be comparable.

The story of the '77 reprint is pretty interesting according to that link: "reprints are just as rare as they were only produced (allegedly by Bill James' wife) upon written request." I don't know if that's how Martin got his or if he bought it second-hand.

Ordered a copy of this today:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-mccullough/the-last-of-his-kind/9780306832598/?lens=hachette-books

Honestly, it was mostly to support the one book store in town--I try to order something every month or two. I don't think it's something I would have bought otherwise, although at least it's a biography rather than an autobiography.