What's your favourite baseball book?

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by skelly423

I got a number of great books for Christmas this year, but unfortunately I've already finished them. I'm looking to find another great baseball book to read. Give me your best recommendations

What books did you get? If you read them so quickly, they must have been good.

My top 5:
1) The Glory of their Times
2) Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession
3) The Card
4) K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches
5) The Baseball 100 (by Joe Posnanski)

Honorable Mention: Hank Greenberg The Story of my Life

[Jason Carota]

Hard to pick just one:

[Huck]

The Glory of Their Times
Men at Work
Dollar Sign on the Muscle
9 innings: The anatomy of a baseball game
Any of the three fireside books

[Fred]

So many great books about baseball.

Yes, Glory of Their Times is one of the better books for serious reading.

After that I think "Ball Four" was one of the more fun reads for me.

Really difficult to say there's a favorite.

[bnorth]

Another card book is: Sportscard Counterfeit Detector by Bob Lemke.
It is OK but not great if you use it for one of the single cards listed in it. It is absolutely amazing if you read the entire book. It shows you how to spot many different counterfeiting techniques. Another card book I highly recommend.

[SteveWhite]

Big Hair and Plastic Grass-A Funny Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70's
By Dan Epstein

The Machine-A Hot Team, A Legendary Season, and Heart-Stopping World Series. The Story of the 1975 Reds.
Joe Posnanski

[lampertb]

Originally Posted by SteveWhite

Big Hair and Plastic Grass-A Funny Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70's
By Dan Epstein

Yes, love that one, alongside "Talkin' Baseball: An Oral History of Baseball in the 1970s" by Phil Pepe.

I am surprised that no one has yet mentioned "56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports," which is an outstanding read!

[JimmyC]

Gosh, there are so many great books - I have over a hundred on the shelf…..hard to say which is the best…..sometimes I want stats and grab more stat related books and other times I want a deep dive into a specific player and will grab a book solely about a player and his career……

And then there are books like Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer”…..just hard to beat that one….

[Seven]

I absolutely loved "The Last Boy" by Jane Leavy about Mickey Mantle. Shows all of Mantles demons, paints a complete picture of how messed up his childhood was, and how truly gruesome some of the things happened to him were, over the course of his life.

[insidethewrapper]

"Catcher" by Peter Morris. If you want to learn about the evolution of this position from the early days to present.

All Pete Morris books are great about the early days ( 19th Century).

I also liked "Miracle Ball". It was a page turner. Tells the story of what happened to the ball Bobby Thomson hit (the shot heard round the world ). I did have a lot of questions after reading this book. Anybody else read this book ?

[jimtigers65]

Originally Posted by SteveWhite

Big Hair and Plastic Grass-A Funny Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70's
By Dan Epstein

The Machine-A Hot Team, A Legendary Season, and Heart-Stopping World Series. The Story of the 1975 Reds.
Joe Posnanski

I enjoyed Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein that I ordered his other baseball book, Stars and Stipres.

[jwjohn06]

I found a book in a used bookstore many years ago called "Don't Let Baseball Die" by Art Hill. It focuses on the 1977 Detroit Tigers, but includes other stories as well. I truly think it is one of the best reads I ever read about baseball. It is soft cover and hard to find now, but definitely worth a look.

[JCM2009]

Ty Cobb by Charles Alexander

[tlhss]

Moneyball

Fastpitch - The Untold History of Softball and the Women Who Made the Game

Ty Cobb - A Terrible Beauty

One Shot at Forever - A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season

Doc

Ball Four

Lefty - An American Odyssey

[Exhibitman]

Baseball book: The Boys of Summer.
Baseball card book: Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child's Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business by Pete Williams. Takes a deep dive into the seamy, dirty filth of modern cards, at the height of the junk wax era. Ironically, the thieving, scamming and money-grubbing he reports at Upper Deck pales in comparison to what goes on today.

[rats60]

The best baseball cards book is The Great American Baseball Card Flipping Trading and Bubble Gum Book.

[Exhibitman]

Originally Posted by rats60

The best baseball cards book is The Great American Baseball Card Flipping Trading and Bubble Gum Book.

Foster Castleman: “Of course a ballplayer with a name like this is never going to amount to anything. If you have a name like an orthodontist you’re going to play like an orthodontist. The guy never really had a shot."

Harvey Haddix: “the reluctantly self-deprecating smile of the perennially dumped-on, the wry smile of the universal victim, the man who expects very little of his peers and knows secretly that he’s going to have to settle for quite a good deal less.”

Reno Bertoia: "The back of Reno's card is interesting. It says that his average last year was .162 and that, although he did not get to play in too many ballgames, he gained valuable information about American League hurlers that would help him in the future. I suspect that the information he gathered was that every pitcher in the American League could get him out, and that perhaps he should try another line of work."

Hector Lopez: "the worst fielding third baseman in the history of baseball. Everyone knows that. It is more or less a matter of public record. But I do feel called upon somehow to try to indicate, if only for the historical archivists among us, the sheer depths of his innovative barbarousness. Hector Lopez was a butcher. Pure and Simple. A butcher. His range was about one step to either side, his hands seemed to be made of concrete and his defensive attitude was so cavalier and arbitrary as to hardly constitute an attitude at all. Hector did not simply field a groundball, he attacked it. Like a farmer trying to kill a snake with a stick. And his mishandling of routine infield flies was the sort of which legends are made. Hector Lopez was not just a bad fielder for a third baseman. In fact, Hector Lopez was not just a bad fielder for a baseball player. Hector Lopez was, when every factor has been taken into consideration, a bad fielder for a human being. The stands are full of obnoxious leather-lunged cretins who insist they can play better than most major leaguers. Well, in Hector's case they could have been right. I would like to go on record right here and now as declaring Hector Lopez the all-time worst fielding major league ballplayer. That's quite a responsibility there, Hector, but I have every confidence you'll be able to live up to it."

Ted Williams: "In 1955, there were 77,263,127 male American human beings. And every one of them in his heart of hearts would have given two arms, a leg and his collection of Davy Crockett iron-ons to be Teddy Ballgame."

Satchel Paige: "could have been the greatest pitcher in major league history, if he'd been given the chance. Don't look back, America, something might be gaining on you."