Best baseball writing

Going further back, I loved Matt Christopher kids' fiction about all kinds of sports, I'm sure baseball included.

As for adult baseball reading?  I'm a little stumped--I haven't read any baseball books lately--besides the obvious one.

                                        -JDS

Roger Angell - Any of his long essays, originally written for the New Yorker, and collected into several books. The most recent, Game Time, is a sort of best-of collection. No other writer can capture the beauty of baseball and make you feel like you're at the park the way Angell can. Not only the best baseball writing, but some of the best non-fiction of any sort I've ever read. Required.

Bill James, Baseball Abstracts - People who have never read these probably think of them as being solely about statistics. But the Abstracts were more like a precursor to todays blogs; James wrote about all aspects of the game in his characteristic witty, opinionated (sometimes cranky) style, and his popularity was based as much on the quality of his writing as on the quality of his analysis. Last year Rich Lederer wrote a series called "Abstracts from the Abstracts" highlighting some of James' best bits. Those who never read the original Abstracts need to read it (and those who have, will want to).

Jim Bouton, Ball Four - The first autobiography to open up the locker room and reveal what the players were really like, and still several cuts above almost all other autobiographies "written" by ex-jocks.  I need to read this again sometime, as it's been so long that I don't remember most of it. Another one in the same category is Pat Jordan's A False Spring, about his struggles as a minor leaguer.

Moneyball, of course.

Fiction

Philip Roth, The Great American Novel - The story of the misfit Ruppert Mundys of the Patriot League (a rival league to the AL and NL during the 1940s, whose history has been brutally suppressed), as told by sportswriter "Word" Smith. The first chapter is kind of slow going, but the subsequent adventures of Gil Gamesh, Big John Baal, Nickname Damur, et al. are hilarious.

W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe - A dreamy look at some of the magic of baseball. The basis for the movie Field of Dreams which was a bit sappy, but still good.

Anyone read George Will's book Men at Work? The cover features a picture of Will from a skybox at the coliseum before Mt. Davis. My dad has the book and I was wondering if I should give it a read. As an aside, does anyone remember an old saturday night live skit where they parodied George Will's baseball knowledge in a Jeopardy like game show. George Will (Dana Carvy) was the host and Tommy LaSorda (Jon Luvitz) and Mike Schmidt (Corbin Bernsen) were contestants. "Piffle or not piffle?" Friggin hilarious.

I also highly recommend the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers. It leaves out a few guys, but it's an interesting read.

I LOVED Bernard Malamud's "The Natural". I read the book prior to watching the movie, and I felt cheated. Anyone else?

I really want to read Aces, I have it on my list, but I'm reading some Chuck Palahniuk right now.

Fiction--
Double Play by Robert Parker
An engaging story of a WWII veteran hired to serve as Jackie Robinson's body guard.  Definitely better than his usual Spenser fluff.  Occasionally insightful, even moving at times.

Here's a great source if you're looking for baseball fiction:
http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/baseball/index.html

It is also a great book for anyone who has played baseball at a level past high school, because it provides a certain amount of closure to your career.

More than a baseball book, it is a book about people.

BTW- Kielty is a Cape League HOFer.

Okrent follows a random and unremarkable game from the middle of the 1982 season between Milwaukee and Baltimore and dissects every aspect of it. You get to know each player, manager and GM as Okrent explains how every player got to that team and where he had been before.

What's interesting to us now is that this was sort of a Moneyball for its day. Milwaukee and Baltimore were two of the best teams of the day with extremely well-known GMs. It's really interesting to see how GMs of the day put teams together, what criteria they used. Also, Earl Weaver's prominently featured, and he, of course, is a Moneyball manager in the truest sense of the word. Basically, you can read about two teams that really thought outside the box, and two teams that had a lot of success in the early 80s because of it.

Very good read. I didn't know hardly ANY of the players, so it read differently to me than it might have had I remembered them well. But because of this, it just became an interesting baseball book, as opposed to Moneyball, which is somewhat personal for an A's fan (the discussion of playoff failures still stings ... which is why I can't read Aces, though I've tried ...). Nine Innings might work better because of this distance from the players and any kind of loyalty people might have had to these teams. It becomes a snapshot of a point in baseball history, and an interesting one.

I highly recommend Nine Innings. Has anybody else here read it?

"Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming.  He ran as he always ran out home runs--hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of.  He didn't tip his cap.  Though we thumped, wept, and chanted 'We want Ted' for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back.  Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved.  But immortality is nontransferable.  The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters."

"Field of Schemes," by Neil De Mause

The Baseball Prospectus Annuals

"The Sinister First Baseman"

"Saving the Pitcher," by Will Carroll

"The Numbers Game," by Alan Schwartz

"The Big Book of Baseball Lineups," by Rob Neyer

For those who like a book that makes you think, check out Baseball and Philosophy.

Double Play by Robert Parker

I've got Three Nights in August on my desk right now - I'll be reading it next week.

Not Coover's best novel (for my money, "The Public Burning" -- although historical events since its publication have rendered part of its thesis, um, problematic) but an excellent read. One of his more accessible works. And very apropos of the SABR/Strat-O-Mat/Moneyball mindset.

I very recently read "The Brothers K", on the recommendation of Scott Hatteberg.  No, he's not in my book club, but he mentioned it in a Boston Globe article from which my sig is taken.

I also just read, in this off-season, "Bang The Drum Slowly", and Mark Harris's other three books.  Very good -- "The Southpaw", which is the first, and "BTDS", which is the second, are better than the last two I thought.

But my two favorite non-fiction books haven't been mentioned yet so here they are:
Runner-up: "Slouching Towards Fargo", Neal Karlen
in which the writer hangs out with the Saint Paul Saints for two seasons when Daryl Strawberry and Jack Morris were there.  
All-time best: "Dock Ellis In The Country of Baseball", by the poet and author Donald Hall with Dock Ellis.  A wonderful combination of beautiful, romantic writing and extremely unsentimental observations about major-league life.