Sitting here next to my bookshelves and there are just so many great baseball books to recommend....these jumped out at me:
Only the Ball Was White, by Robert Peterson This is the best book about the Negro Leagues that I've read.
The Long Season, by Jim Brosnan His diary of the 1959 season. If you want baseball history this one will really show you what it was like late in that decade.
You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting-great book about baseball in japan
The Catcher Was a Spy, by Nicholas Dawidoff, Moe Berg's story
Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, by Jimmy Breslin 1962 Mets, Breslin was a terrific writer
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life, by Robert W. Creamer
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
The Curse of Rocky Colavito, by Terry Pluto
Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
The Echoing Green, by Joshua Prager Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, etc. Really a neat book.
Dollar Sign on the Muscle, by Kevin Kerrane A great look at baseball scouting. Lots of fun stories about the profession. Not a new book but still a great read.
Crazy '08, by Cait Murphy
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen
Sayonara Home Run!, by John Gall and Gary Engel this one is about Japanese baseball cards. Highly recommended
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, by Jane Leavy My favorite baseball biography. All of her three baseball bios are worth reading but I'm partial to this one.
A False Spring, by Pat Jordan Jordan was a writer for SI (and a curmudgeon) but in high school, he was a pitching phenom signed by the Braves. This is my favorite book of them all. It's not uplifting to read about how his career in baseball went south but it's so well written! I pull it out every few years and re-read it.
Seasons in Hell, by Mike Shropshire, may be the funniest baseball book I've ever read. It's about Whitey Herzog's awful Rangers teams in the early 70s.
I have Dock Ellis and the Country of baseball cued up to read, and it's gotten lots of good reviews, but I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm still working on Joe Posnanski's The Baseball's 100
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People are crazy and times are strange, I used to care but things have changed -Dylan
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