By Owen Griffiths and Andrew Nurse
Another baseball season upon us so it seems like a good time to revisit some of the best baseball books ever written.
No sport is as connected to — or immersed in — history as baseball and no sport can boast as powerful a lineup of literary figures. From Ring Lardner, Roger Angell, and Donald Hall to Jane Leavy, David Halberstram, and Michael Lewis, baseball has always featured an All-Star lineup of writers from various backgrounds.
At its best, baseball history has never been just about the game. It has connected sport history to wider themes of social and cultural formation central to understanding the historical trajectories of communities large and small across Canada, the US, and the world.
Why read baseball history? Because, we think, it has important and interesting things to say.
Baseball is also fundamentally argumentative. As the season begins, we thought we’d put out a list of our favourite baseball books, but you might think differently.
Feel free to contribute. Do you have a favourite? Or, more than one? History is often a search for missing pieces and untold stories. It is also about taking old stories and looking at them in new ways. Here, we offer a solid lineup but potentially with holes. Feel free to fill in the gaps and let us know why. Play ball!
Jim Bouton, Ball Four, World Publishing Company, 1970.
- A baseball classic and perhaps one of the best-known books about the sport. Crafted around Bouton’s diary playing in the 1969 season, it was perhaps the first book to lay bare the darker undersides and excesses of the game and the colourful characters who played it.
Howard Bryant, Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, Plume, 2006
- Perhaps the best book about baseball’s steroid era. We learn of the motivations of player and owner alike, and the complicity of those around them, in their endless struggle to chase profit and push performance beyond its limits.
Dan Epstein, Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s. St. Martins, 2012.
- The image of a decade where Major League Baseball’s key ambition seemed to be to turn itself into a bizarre consumeristic spectacle. It captures the disco-esque experience of Major League Baseball that paved the way for the drug scandals, ill-considered promotions (ten-cent a beer night), and the increased absurdity that came to dominate the game.
Charles Fountain, The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball. Oxford UP, 2016.
- Fountain’s story revisits the Black Sox scandal in a way that contextualizes it and shows why it became so important for baseball. The 1919 World Series emerges as a turning point not because baseball was shocked by gambling but because it wasn’t. In 1919, baseball’s connection to crime and gambling was old news. What was different was a new connection between baseball and consumer culture and this required a new image.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 1997
- Pulitzer-prize winning Kearns takes us back to her childhood in New York in the 1950s, opening a window on the intersection of baseball, culture, and religion. Through Kearns’ eyes, we learn about a world of innocence and ignorance both reflected and reproduced in the seasonal rituals of baseball.
Alison Gordon, Foul Ball!: Five Years in the American League, Dodd Meade, 1985
- Gordon, who covered the Blue Jays from 1979 to 1983, provides insights into the early Jays teams, the game itself, and the challenges of being a rare female reporter. Those who enjoy baseball in their crime stories, should also check out Gordon’s fiction series featuring sports journalist Kate Henry.
John Helyar, Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball, Ballantine Books, 2011
- Helyar’s Casey Award winning book takes us on a century-long ride of baseball history from the perspective of player-owner relations. Published in the wake of the 1994 players’ strike, it provides a fascinating but sobering account of baseball’s evolution as big business and the battle over how the profits should be divided. Anyone interested in how we arrived at $750 million contracts would do well to read this.
Colin Howell, Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball. UTP, 1995.
- The classic study of a community sport, frequently neglected by our focus on “The Show.” Howell‘s work reminds us that baseball’s heartland, despite its urban origins, lies in the parks and fields of communities throughout Canada and beyond. Howell attributes the decline in community baseball in North America’s northeast to the rise of consumerism and the spectacle of The Show.
Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer, Harper Reissue (1972), 2006
- A poetic classic from a time long gone when baseball was America’s game. Kahn, who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s and 1950s, tells the story of “Da Bums” up to their first World Series in 1955. With a title drawn from Dylan Thomas’ poem, “I see the boys of summer,” Kahn has given the baseball world one of its great literary classics from someone who grew up close enough to hear the cheers from Ebett’s Field.
Jonah Keri, Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos, Random House Canada, 2014
- Published exactly a decade after the 1994 strike killed what could have been the Expos best season, Up, Up, and Away offers a colourful account of Canada’s first MLB team, its high and lows, and the memories that still linger. A must read for all Expos fans and those who still dare to dream.
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, Harper Collins, 2002
- A beautifully written book crafted around a perfect game and embedded in the context of the turbulent 1960s. Leavy tells story of Koufax’s s struggles and triumphs, not the least of which was the continual excruciating pain he pitched through. And this before the real money of free agency made pain easier to bear.
And another by Leavy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. Harper Collins, 2010.
- A biography that is much more than a biography. It charts Mantle’s life while illustrating the ways in which his celebrity became a commodity itself that worked with a stark distinction between the innocence baseball presented to modern America and the economic and cultural factors that were veiled behind it.
Charles Leerhsen, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
- Leerhsen deserves credit for taking on perhaps the single most difficult personality in baseball history. His arguments may be overstated but in covering much same ground as Fountain, he highlights the violence of the game and addresses Cobb’s historical reputation in surprising ways. Spoiler: Leerhsen may not succeed in rescuing Cobb’s reputation, but he does raise questions about why and how historical reputations develop.
Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game, Norton 2003
- The book that introduced fans to Sabermetrics, Moneyball documents the revolution in talent evaluation in the early 2000s, led by Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane. It is dramatically different – and better – than the movie! It captures what turned out to be a failed moment in baseball history that looked to use math to find ways small-market franchises could compete in with MLB’s mega markets.
Sparky Lyle, The Bronx Zoo: The Astonishing Inside Story of the 1978 World Champion New York Yankees. Crown Publishers, 1979.
- The autobiography of a year. After Boulton, one of the best insider takes on a game being changed by free agency and the hyper consumerism Epstein describes and the rancorous way this played out in the locker room and on the field. Lyle’s bitter commentary captures the confusion of a star player who no longer seems to be able to recognize the sport he’s playing amidst its changed nature.
Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White, Oxford UP (1970), 1992
- Peterson brings the world of the Negro Leagues to life and locates it in the larger context of 20th century American history. Writing during the civil rights era, Peterson was one of the first to document the world of black baseball at a time when black voices were just coming into the mainstream. A pioneering work that laid the framework for future works, including Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary masterpiece.
Extra Innings
Baseball’s historians tell no one singular story about the game. Perhaps they can’t. But their voices can be heard amidst the endless stream of conversations about halls of fame, championships rings, or trivia about who was the better player. At its best, baseball history is history at its finest. It explores the changing character of sport and leisure, community and consumerism, and a great deal more. One could do much worse than read some of these books over the season.
Owen Griffiths and Andrew Nurse are historians at Mount Allison University.
Great list! Thanks for putting this together and sharing.