Homerunweb -- Reviews of Baseball Books

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Book Reviews by David H. Martinez

Baseball has produced more great literature than any other sport. It's that simple. What is it about the sport that inspires the best writers to choose it as their subjects? Maybe it's because the rhythms of the game—sporatic, langorous—allow time for contemplation. Maybe it's because the game is played in summer, when people are outdoors and eager to sit and watch and think.

Regardless, baseball fans are a lucky bunch. We have more books than we can ever possibly read, on just about every possible facet of the game.

On this page, you can find links to my reviews of some excellent baseball books. Some reviews are long, others are short. But I hope they'll give you some ideas on what to buy next time you're at the store. And be sure to check back periodically because I'll update this as the season wears on.

License to Deal: A Season on the Run with a Maverick Sports Agent by Jerry Crasnick

Exhaustively researched, the book is full of stories and facts and insights that will surprise and delight both the casual and the most relentless student of baseball history. Read on for the complete review (long).

Without a doubt the most insightful and fascinating baseball book I own... possibly the best overall history/statistics book ever written. This book combines two great premises. The first half of the book is a decade-by-decade look at baseball history, filled with anecdotes, explanations, and analyses of the important and not-so-important people and events. The second half is a position-by-position look at the greates players of all time, using James's groundbreaking methods of statistical analysis. Whether you've read James before or not, you WILL learn a lot from reading this book, and you will start to look at the game of baseball in a new and exciting way.

Two hundred and sixty-nine pages of essays, articles, and fiction about home runs, written by such luminaries as Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Red Smith, Roger Angell, and more. This book is a wonderful treasure, with stories about Aaron, Maris, Ruth, Josh Gibson—plus little known facts and other lore.

The great baseball book written by Jim Bouton recounting the first season of 1969 Seattle Pilots expansion team. It gives an inside account of things such as contract negotiations and the off-field habits of players—both considered off-limits to the public in those days. In trying to tell the truth about what he saw, Bouton succeeded in angering the baseball establishment. The book jacket even brags that commissioner Bowie Kuhn told Bouton, “You’ve done this game a grave disservice.” These days, tell-all books are common, and the media seem to be all-knowing. But in the late 1960s, people didn’t know that some players cheated on their wives, that every other word out of their mouths was profane, and that drinking was their second favorite sport. Ball Four is still in print, and even though some of the parts that were scandalous at the time might seem tame now, it’s definitely worth reading.

A landmark book, the first of its kind: the baseball oral history. Lawrence Ritter’s book is a collection of interviews with more than two dozen ballplayers from the first third of the century, including Hall of Famers Edd Roush, Goose Goslin, and Paul Waner. It’s a great insight into the early days of baseball, full of terrific stories and honest opinions. It’s also a wonderful place to learn about the legendary ballplayers who died before their stories could be told. In The Glory of Their Times, Sam Crawford talks about Ty Cobb, Tommy Leach about Honus Wagner, Chief Meyers about Christy Mathewson. Ritter says he got the idea for the book in 1961, when Cobb died at the age of 74, and he decided that somebody should, before it was too late, tell the stories of some of the men who influenced the game that has affected American society so much. Ritter’s book succeeded so well that there have been dozens of imitators, with more coming out each year. Whenever you see a new baseball oral history, remember that it’s there because of Lawrence Ritter.