My Favorite Baseball Books
Discover the best baseball books with our curated list of favorites! From classic memoirs to thrilling histories, find your next great read for baseball fans.
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The Natural
by Bernard Malamud
Malamud uses the fanatical and aggressive world of professional baseball to mirror contemporary society.
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Shoeless Joe
by W. P. Kinsella
Inspiration for the movie "Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe" is the ultimate baseball novel.
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Eight Men Out
by Eliot Asinof
"The most thorough investigation of the Black Sox scandal on record . . . A vividly, excitingly written book."--Chicago Tribune
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The Teammates
by David Halberstam
Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky were all members of the famed 1940's Boston Red Sox. Their legendary careers led the Red Sox to a pennant championship and ensured the men a place in sports history. David Halberstam, the bestselling author of the baseball classic Summer of '49, has followed the members of the 1949 championship Boston Red Sox team for years, especially Williams, Doerr, DiMaggio, and Pesky. In this extremely moving book, Halberstam reveals how these four teammates became friends, and how that friendship thrived for more than 60 years. The book opens with Pesky and DiMaggio travelling to see the ailing Ted Williams in Florida. It's the last time they will see him. The journey is filled with nostalgia and memories, but seeing Ted is a shock. The most physically dominating of the four friends, Ted now weighs only 130 pounds and is hunched over in a wheelchair. Dom, without even thinking about it, starts to sing opera and old songs like 'Me and My Shadow' to his friend. Filled with stories of their glory days with the Boston Red Sox, memories of legendary plays and players, and the reaction of the remaining three to Ted Williams' recent death, The Teammates offers us a rare glimpse into the lives of these celebrated men-and great insight into the nature of loyalty and friendship.
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Summer of '49
by David Halberstam
David Halberstam's New York Times bestselling classic chronicle of baseball's most magnificent season, as seen through the battle royale between Joe DiMaggio's Yankees and Ted Williams's Red Sox for the heart of a nation. With incredible skill, passion, and insight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam returns us to the miraculous summer of '49 ... and to a glorious time when the dreams of a now almost forgotten America rested on the crack of a bat.
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The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
by W. P. Kinsella
From the author of the bestselling "Shoeless Joe" comes another vintage baseball tale that "like magic . . . holds together and entices you from one page to the next, until at the end you ache for more" ("Milwaukee Journal").
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The Thrill of the Grass
by W. P. Kinsella
No one can write about baseball with the same brilliant combination of mysticism and realism as W. P. Kinsella. Lovers of the game and lovers of fine writing will thrill to the range of the eleven stories that make up this new collection. From the magical conspiracy of the title story, to the celestial prediction in The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, to the desolation of The Baseball Spur, Kinsella explores the world of baseball and makes it, miraculously, a microcosm of the human condition.
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The Southpaw
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The Southpaw is a story about coming of age in America by way of the baseball diamond. Lefthander Henry Wiggen, six feet three, a hundred ninety-five pounds, and the greatest pitcher going, grows to manhood in a right-handed world. From his small-town beginnings to the top of the game, Henry finds out how hard it is to please his coach, his girl, and the sports page?and himself, too?all at once. Written in Henry?s own words, this exuberant, funny novel follows his eccentric course from bush league to the World Series. Although Mark Harris loves and writes tellingly about the pleasures of baseball, his primary subject has always been the human condition and the shifts of mortal men and women as they try to understand and survive what life has dealt them. ø This new Bison Books edition celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Southpaw. In his introduction to this edition, Mark Harris discusses the genesis of the novel in his own life experience. Also available in Bison Books editions are The Southpaw, It Looked Like For Ever, and A Ticket for a Seamstitch, the other three volumes in the Henry Wiggen series.
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Japanese Baseball and Other Stories
by W. P. Kinsella
Kinsella weaves his characters into the thrill of the game, be it in Japan, Central America, Canada or the U.S., with a variety of comic, tragic, and mystical results. This collection captures the dazzling wit, compelling insight, and obsession with baseball that have made Kinsella more popular than a ballpark frank.
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Bottom of the Ninth
by John McNally
Skillfully edited by John McNally, Bottom of the Ninth: Great Contemporary Baseball Short Stories collects nineteen contemporary baseball short stories from a successful mix of well-established writers, lesser-knowns, and a few up-and-comers. These stories are characterized by the same dramatic elements that draw people to the sport itself--the mythologizing of players, the obsessions and romance of the game, the bonds between players and fans, parents and children. From a key play, a missed catch, a chance lost, these are tales of characters facing high stakes and calls to action, metaphorically and literally, in the bottom of the ninth.