There are more good books written about baseball than any other American team sport—and that’s not just because baseball has been around the longest. “This ain’t a football game,” manager Earl Weaver once said. “We do this every day.” Through baseball books, we’ve come to understand the game and its history. The sport is catnip for writers: a game of contemplation and strategy that lends itself beautifully to numbers and analysis as well as poetry.
As longtime Washington Post writer Tom Boswell once wrote, “Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarky and winnowed their wisdom... this passion for language and the telling detail is what makes baseball the writer’s game.”
There are, of course, inner-circle Hall of Fame baseball books. On any self-respecting list, you’ll find The Glory of Their Times, The Summer Game, Eight Men Out, The Natural, Veeck as in Wreck, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, Ball Four, The Boys of Summer, The Lords of the Realm, and Moneyball. Those titles appear here, of course, along with our pick of 100 indispensable books no baseball fan should be without.
