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BaseballChronology Books
BaseballChronology proudly features the baseball book reviews of Dr. John Eigenauer, who evaluates both the latest "hot off the press" baseball books as well as classics you have missed.

"There is one feature of the American game of baseball that will not be found in any other game of the country, and that is, the abundance of books and papers devoted partly, and many of them exclusively, to the interest of our national game."

These remarkable words were published in Oliver Optic's magazine in the April 10, 1869 issue! Whatever the relative popularities of the principle sports of America now, one thing hasn't changed: more is written about baseball in this country than any other sport. If you enjoy good books on the history of baseball, then you know it is sometimes difficult to separate the sincere efforts to enhance our understanding the of the game from the fluffy rehashes of previous books simply by looking at the cover. We aim to make it easier for you by featuring quality reviews and listing the finalists and winners of the major baseball book awards.

BaseballChronology Book of the Month:
We aim to publish one historical baseball book each month and are starting with Baseball in Old Chicago from 1939 as our March, 2008 selection and Henry Chadwick's The Game of Base Ball from 1868 for April. J.M. Ward's Base-Ball: How to Become a Player is a bonus selection for April. We also have Michael "King" Kelly's Play Ball: Stories from the Playing Field as our May selection. For June we have Harry Ellard's 1907 classic Baseball in Cincinnati and the bonus book is Henry Chadwick's Baseball Manual for 1871.

Future selections will be listed here, so bookmark this page!

BaseballChronology List of Baseball Book Awards:
If you are looking for some more great baseball books to read, you could do far worse than to check out all the Seymour Medal and CASEY Award winners that you haven't read yet. We also have Dave Moore Award and Larry Ritter Award winners. We also list the 57 books that made up SABR's list of what the members then (1988) considered an "essential baseball library."

We have looked high and low for other baseball-related book awards without success. A few have pointed out baseball books that have won unrelated awards. For example, Spitball magazine's fiction editor Mark Schraf pointed out the only baseball biography to ever be named as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize was Charles Einstein's Willie's Time. Glenn Guzzo points out that his book, Strat-O-Matic Fanatics, won a bronze in ForeWord magazine's "sports book of the year" category while Peach, a biography of Ty Cobb by Richard Bak, won gold (a complete list of winners is posted here). Lastly, Rob Edelman reminded us that his Baseball on the Web was cited by Amazon.com as one of their "10 Best Internet Books" of 1998. Congratulations to all and keep up the great work!

Publishers and authors: Please use the Contact link at the top right of this page if you'd like to have us consider your latest book or if you are willing to allow us to publish an excerpt from it. Decisions to review books are made solely by BaseballChronology and its reviewers.