SABR members created
a list of 57 books meant to serve as an "essential baseball
library" back in 1987. Members were asked to submit the names of
books they considered essential, hoping to have a list of 50. Over 200
books were nominated and three votes were necessary to be on the list.
That list, by category and originally compiled by Paul D. Adomites,
follows with links to the books at Amazon.com.
"The headlines proclaimed the 1919 fix of the World Series and
attempted cover-up as "the most gigantic sporting swindle in
the history of America!" Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the
entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight
Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading
gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly
describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the
actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury
indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he
perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and
the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Here,
too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed
the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story,
and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to
the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a
superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American
history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the
Roaring Twenties."
"The 1908 National League pennant race was without question the
most exciting and dramatic battle of all time. Three teams, the
Giants, the Cubs, and the Pirates, battled from start to finish,
concluding the season with just one game separating them in the
standings. The story of this race is like a Hall of Fame sprung to
life, including John McGraw, Christy Mathewson,
Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, and
Honus Wagner. Yet the one name that truly stands out belongs to a
young Giant rookie, Fred Merkle. His base-running blunder in a key
game between the Giants and the Cubs cost the New Yorkers the
pennant through an entirely unforeseeable set of circumstances that
set off a near-riot in New York."
"Offers a decade-by-decade
look at baseball history, encyclopedic listings of players and their
stats, insightful player ratings and comparative performance
evaluations, and essays on a host of baseball topics."
"At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has
not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with
the most marvelously appealing of teams." Sentimental because
it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past,
the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first
published in the early Super70s, sets its tone. What follows only
gets better, deeper, more sentimental, and more bittersweet. The
team, of course, is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team
of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph
and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were
filled with dignity and pathos."
"Fred Lieb, who covered his first ballgame in 1911, continued
on to prowl pressboxes across the land for nearly seven decades. His
Baseball as I Have Known It, is aptly titled; over a long and
distinguished career, he knew just about everyone worth knowing in
the game, and saw pretty much everything worth seeing. His
recollections of the 1919 Black Sox, the Yankee dynasties of the
'20s and '30s, and his affectionate reminiscences of Christy
Mathewson and Lou Gehrig make Baseball as I Have Known It
particularly worth knowing, too."
"Any book calling itself The Ultimate Baseball Book has
a lot to live up to. But when Ken Burns tags it "the Cadillac
of baseball books," the authors have obviously succeeded. The
book is divided up into innings, one per decade. Each inning
contains a historical overview of the decade, followed by an essay
written by baseball's literati: Robert W. Creamer on "The Old
Orioles" in the first inning (1876-1900), Roy Blount, Jr. on
"How DiMaggio Made It Look Easy" in the fifth (1930-1939),
George F. Will on "Chicago the Unmitigated" in the extra
inning (1981-1990). Fun to read and full of anecdotes, one-liners,
and hundreds of black-and-white photos, The Ultimate Baseball
Book is a must-have for all baseball fans. Though oversize (9 by
12 inches), it's better suited to a bedside table than a coffee
table--you'll want to take the time to read it, rather than just
flip through and look at the pictures."
"These two critically-acclaimed volumes mark the beginning of a
monumental multi-volume study of baseball by the man whom Sports
Illustrated has called "the Edward Gibbon of baseball
history." Now available in paperback, Harold Seymour's The
Early Years and The Golden Age together recount the true story of
how baseball came into being and how it developed into a highly
organized business and social institution. The first volume, The
Early Years, traces the growth of baseball from the time of the
first recorded ball game at Valley Forge during the revolution until
the formation of the two present-day major leagues in 1903. By
investigating previously unknown sources, Seymour uncovers the real
story of how baseball evolved from a gentleman's amateur sport of
"well-bred play followed by well-laden banquet tables"
into a professional sport where big leagues operate under their own
laws. Offering countless anecdotes and a wealth of new information,
Seymour explodes many cherished myths, including the one which
claims that Abner Doubleday "invented" baseball in 1839.
He describes the influence of baseball on American business,
manners, morals, social institutions, and even show business, as
well as depicting the types of men who became the first professional
ball players, club owners, and managers, including Spalding, McGraw,
Comiskey, and Connie Mack."
"The second volume, The Golden Age, explores the glorious era
when the game truly captured the American imagination, with such
legendary figures as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in the spotlight.
Beginning with the formation of the two major leagues in 1903, when
baseball officially entered its
"golden age" of popularity, Seymour examines the changes
in the organization of professional baseball--from an unwieldy
three-man commission to the strong one-man rule of Judge Kenesaw
Mountain Landis. He depicts how the play on the field shifted from
the low-scoring, pitcher - dominated game of the "dead
ball" era before World War I to the higher scoring of the
1920's "lively ball" era, with emphasis on home runs, best
exemplified by the exploits of Babe Ruth.
Taken together, these volumes offer a serious and dramatic study of
the game both on the field and in the business offices."
Daguerreotypes
by The Sporting News (Paul MacFarlane) (Many editions)
The Putnam Team
Histories. G. P. Putnam's Sons produced team histories for all
16 Major League franchises in the 1940s and 1950s. Fred Lieb, who
received the Spink
Award in 1972, wrote six of the histories. The other volumes
were written by such men as Harold Kaese, Lee Allen, Franklin Lewis,
Shirley Povich and Warren Brown. Only the Cardinals
book was later updated. Here are the others: Cubs,
Red
Sox, Pirates,
Yankees,
Dodgers,
Giants,
Orioles,
Braves,
Reds,
A's,
Indians,
White
Sox, Senators
(out of print), Phillies
(out of print), and Tigers
(out of print). While the last three remain out of print, the
Senators volume by Povich is particularly hard to find.
"No single volume sings the epic saga of the game with quite
the rhythms of The Baseball Encyclopedia. Now in its 10th
edition, the granddaddy of all sports reference books is, at just
over eight pounds and 3000 pages, the National Pastime's weightiest
tome. As all-seeing as Homer and Milton, as all-knowing as
Shakespeare and Yeats, the encyclopedia finds its poetry in the
rhythms of baseball's numbers. Every player--regardless of
significance--is present, with all the essential statistics of his
career. There are, no doubt, some soulless creatures who may open
the encyclopedia and just see page after page of dry, meaningless,
numbing data; the rest of us know better: 755, 714, 61, 511, .406,
1.12, and 4,256 are all self-contained dramas filled with tension,
and inspiring awe. It is in these stats, and thousands more, that
the mysteries of the game begin to reveal themselves.
"Statistics are to baseball as nails are to carpentry: they
define, inform, and hold the game together. When the teams fly south
for spring training, fans, eager to sort through and argue over the
numbers, flock to the sports shelves for the statistics. The
Sports Encyclopedia has what baseball aficionados want. There
are details of every playoff and World Series game ever played,
profiles of every no-hitter since 1901, updated stats on RBIs,
on-base percentages, and fielding, plus classic baseball legends and
intriguing trivia. As salaries and sports politics get murky, it's
refreshing to surround yourself with pages and pages of solid,
quantitative information."
"The Official Baseball Rules 2006 is an official publication of
Major League Baseball. SPORTING NEWS has published it every year
since 1940. The Official Baseball Rules is updated each and every
year to reflect any changes in batting, pitching and fielding
regulations or field and equipment rules. Umpires and coaches, both
professional and amateur, praise the size and binding for its easy
use. Thousands of amateur and professional umpires buy the new rules
book every year."
"It has complete year-by-year major and minor league
statistics, helping fantasy leaguers make smart drafting and trading
decisions. Exclusive reports by major league scouts break down
players' strengths and weaknesses and project their performances for
2006 and beyond. It also chronicles big-League managers' careers and
breaks down their in-game tendencies-pitching changes, bunts, steals
and many more categories."
"A Revolutionary Approach to
Baseball and its Statistics, revealing: The best players of today
and all time / Why the sacrifice bunt is a bad play / What Cobb
would hit today, what Brett would have hit in 1920 / Why clutch
hitting is an optical illusion."
"W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical
novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, Field
of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a
cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the
ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple,
and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like
Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball
as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game
to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we
need."
"Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, makes the
mistake of pronouncing aloud his dream: to be the best there ever
was. Such hubris, of course, invites divine intervention, but the
brilliance of Bernard Malamud's novel is the second chance it offers
its hero, elevating him--and his story--into the realm of myth. Made
into a
movie starring Robert Redford."
"Long before the triumph of Jackie Robinson, America had a
strong tradition of black baseball with its own pantheon of
superstars - Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Joe Williams,
Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many more. This was
the other half of American baseball, the half that was ignored for
decades. Yet these black players, on their black teams and in their
black leagues, may have been playing the most exciting - and
possibly the best - baseball seen in America during the sixty
"blackball" years from 1887 to 1947. Certainly, in over
four hundred games that have been uncovered between the black teams
and barnstorming white big leaguers, the blacks won at least two out
of three. John Holway, who has done more than anyone to gain
recognition for the Negro Leagues and to help their most deserving
stars gain their rightful places in the National Baseball Hall of
Fame, crisscrossed the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s
seeking out the surviving veterans of the old Negro Leagues and
putting their stories on tape; he then spent countless hours in
libraries to confirm these stories. The result, in the words of
nearly two dozen old-time players, and with statistics from the
newspapers of the time, is one of the most important books on
baseball history."
"When Only the Ball Was White was first published in 1970,
Satchel Paige had not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame and
there was a general ignorance even among sports enthusiasts of the
rich tradition of the Negro Leagues. Few knew that during the 1930s
and '40s outstanding black teams were playing regularly in Yankee
Stadium and Brooklyn's Ebbets Field. And names like Cool Papa Bell,
Rube Foster, Judy Johnson, Biz Mackey, and Buck Leonard would bring
no flash of smiling recognition to the fan's face, even though many
of these men could easily have played alongside Ty Cobb, Walter
Johnson, Hack Wilson, Lou Gehrig--and shattered their records in the
process. Many baseball pundits now believe, for example, that had
Josh Gibson played in the major leagues, he would have surpassed
Babe Ruth's 714 home runs before Hank Aaron had even hit his first.
And the great Dizzy Dean acknowledged that the best pitcher he had
ever seen was not Lefty Grove or Carl Hubbell, but rather "old
Satchel Paige, that big lanky colored boy." In Only the Ball
Was White, Robert Peterson tells the forgotten story of these
excluded ballplayers, and gives them the recognition they were so
long denied. Reconstructing the old Negro Leagues from contemporary
sports publications, accounts of games in the black press, and
through interviews with the men who actually played the game,
Peterson brings to life the fascinating period that stretched from
shortly after the Civil War to the signing of Jackie Robinson in
1947."
B
A
L
L
P
A
R
K
S
Green
Cathedrals by Phil Lowry (1986, new edition published in October
2006)
Green Cathedrals is a celebration of the sport of baseball,
through the lens of its ballparks—the “fields of dreams” of
players and fans alike. In all, some 405 ballparks have, over
time, hosted a Major League or Negro League game, and each one of
them is given its due, from hard statistics about dimensions to
nostalgic and current photographs, to anecdotes that will inspire
the memories of fans all over the country. From Fenway Park
and Gus Greenlee Field (home of the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh
Crawfords), to Ebbets Field, Camden Yards, and the brand-new parks
that have opened in the past two years, Green Cathedrals
presents a cavalcade of the most beautiful sporting venues in
history. Fully revised and updated since its previous edition
a decade ago, with more than 130 new ballparks and hundreds of new
photographs, Green Cathedrals is an essential reference for
baseball aficionados and a perfect gift for baseball fans
everywhere.
"Five Seasons covers the baseball seasons from 1972 through
1976, described as the "most significant half decade in the
history of the game." The era was notable for the remarkable
individual feats of Hank Aaron, Lou Brock, and Nolan Ryan, among
others. It also presented one of the best World Series of all time
(1975), including still the greatest World Series game ever played
(Game Six). Along with visiting other games and campaigns, Roger
Angell meets a trio of Tigers-obsessed fans, goes to a game with a
departing old-style owner, watches high-school ball in Kentucky with
a famous scout, and explores the sad and astounding mystery of Steve
Blass’s vanished control. Angell’s Five Seasons is a gem and a
gift for baseball lovers of all ages."
"Between the miseries of the 1962 expansion Mets and a classic
1971 World Series between the Pirates and the Orioles, Angell finds
baseball in the 1960s as a game in transition—marked by league
expansion, uprooted franchises, the growing hegemony of television,
the dominance of pitchers, uneasy relations between players and
owners, and mounting competition from other sports for the fans’
dollars."
"Featuring the new statistic, Total Average. Essays discuss the
nature of baseball and portray some of the most outstanding players,
including Sandy Koufax and Rod Carew."
"Sportswriter Tom Boswell of the Washington Post here devotes
twenty essays to baseball in the late 1970's and early 1980's, with
emphasis on the Baltimore Orioles and a couple other teams. Boswell
gives fans a sense of what the players feel in terms of pressure,
and how they deal with heart-breaking losses. There's also a section
on pinch hitting, 23 pages on the late batting guru Charlie Lau, and
another chapter on how pitchers pamper their arms. You'll read of
the 1981 World Series, and of Mark Fydrich's attempted comeback
,chapters about catchers, umpires, pinch hitters and third
basemen-including at Graig Nettles' defensive philosophy."
"The wonderfully substantial one-volume reissue of the
two all-star volumes that made up the Armchair books of baseball is
cause to fire up electronic scoreboards throughout the land. The
line-up of writers is monumental: Roger Angell, John Updike, Robert
Fitzgerald, Gay Talese, James A. Michener, Wilfred Sheed, Russell
Baker, Irwin Shaw, and that's just scratching the surface of Volume
I. The sequel calls up Walt Whitman, E.L. Doctorow, Willie Morris,
Grantland Rice, Fred Lieb, John Lardner, Garrison Keillor, Damon
Runyon, Philip Roth, and--the Babe Ruth of them all, from Stratford
in the old Elizabethan League--Bill Shakespere. Shakespeare? Sure.
What sport do you think he was commenting on with lines like "I
will run no base," "Now let's have a catch,"
"What foul play had we?" and "And so I shall catch
the fly"?"
"Probably the most volatile, fear-inspiring presence in
baseball history, Ty Cobb was one of the most brilliant players in
the game during his twenty-four-year career in the major leagues.
Drawing on primary sources and personal interviews, Alexander brings
Ty Cobb and his era vividly to life, showing the profound changes
that took place in the sport of baseball during the tumultuous first
half of the twentieth century."
"As a player, former hurler Jim Bouton did nothing half-way; he
threw so hard he'd lose his cap on almost every pitch. In the early
'70s, he tossed off one of the funniest, most revealing, insider's
takes on baseball life in Ball Four, his diary of the season he
tried to pitch his way back from oblivion on the strength of a
knuckler. The real curve, though, is Bouton's honesty. He carves
humans out of heroes, and shines a light into the game's corners. A
quarter century later, Bouton's unique baseball voice can still
bring the heat."
"The classic inside account of a baseball year by a major
league pitcher. It begins, appropriately, with the winter doldrums
and sweating out a new contract, then follows the author and his
family to spring training in Florida and through the full season's
schedule to October."
"The companion piece to his baseball classic The Long Season,
Jim Brosnan's Pennant Race recounts the game-by-game lives of the
Cincinnati Reds during their pennant-winning 1961 season — as only
Mr. Brosnan could write it. He was a pitcher with Cincinnati that
season, but also one of the sharpest and wittiest writers baseball
ever produced. His insider's account concentrates on how and why the
Reds won the pennant that year. Mr. Brosnan displays an uncanny
knack for capturing the alternating excitement and tedium of a
baseball season, its colorful characters, and the droll and
uproarious aspects of everyday baseball."
"Babe Ruth is without a doubt the most famous character ever
produced by the sport of baseball. A legendary player, world-famous
for his hitting prowess, he transcended the sport to enter the
mainstream of American life as an authentic folk hero. In this
extraordinary biography, noted sportswriter Robert W. Creamer
reveals the complex man behind the sports legend. From Ruth's early
days in a Baltimore orphanage, to the glory days with the Yankees,
to his later years, Creamer has drawn a classic portrait of an
American original."
"From its original publication in 1984, Creamer's superb
portrait of one of the game's most cherished characters was quickly
acknowledged as a masterwork of sports biography. Its opening
line--"Casey Stengel naked was a sight to
remember"--helped establish the complex and often contradictory
personality that Creamer strips from its façade by work's end.
Stengel worked to build his image as the game's crazy clown prince,
but he was always crazy like a fox, remarkably resilient, quietly
brilliant, and always entertaining, from the day he broke into the
majors with Brooklyn in 1912 to the afternoon he finally hung up his
uniform as the loveable manager of the hapless Mets in 1964."
"The logical batterymate to Honig's classic Baseball
When the Grass Was Real--the oral history of the national
pastime from World War I to World War II--Baseball Between the
Lines captures the voice of the game through the men who played
it in the 1940s and 1950s. Once again, Honig, through his tape
recorder, has assembled a colorful roster of former stars as skilled
with anecdotes as they were on the field. Tommy Heinrich, Kirby
Higbe, Ralph Kiner, Herb Score, Monte Irvin, Robin Roberts, and Enos
Slaughter are among the best of those who throw their memories
around for us to catch."
"No sport reveres its past quite the way baseball does, and no
sport has mined the richness of its oral tradition quite the way
baseball has. Picking up where Lawrence Ritter left off in the
marvelous classic The
Glory of Their Times, Honig set out across the country with
a tape recorder to preserve the voices--and memories--of the men who
played the game between the two World Wars. This is a wonderful and
essential collection, full of bravado, pride, and passion for the
game, with a lineup that includes Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, Johnny
Mize, Charlie Gehringer, and Pete Reiser. You don't so much read it
as put your ear to it, as it alternately whispers and roars."
"A hard-throwing pitcher with
seemingly limitless potential, Pat Jordan finds the promised land of
the Majors receding due to his inconsistency and lack of control.
His fall from grace takes him from his signing as a bonus baby for
the Milwaukee Braves through the backwaters of minor league ball--McCook,
Waycross, Davenport, Eau Claire, and Palatka."
"This is a book about
baseball, and yet, it is much more than just a baseball book. For
each person here profiled has a certain compelling distinctness of
character transcending his own special talent. Players like Tom
Seaver, Sam McDowell, Johnny Sain, Bo Belinsky and others are
profiled by Pat Jordan a former pitcher himself: a successful one as
an amateur then a failure as a professional."
"Ban Johnson is one of the most important figures in baseball
history. Virtually single-handedly he created the American League...
His career ended sadly, anticlimactically, and, from Johnson's
perspective, tragically. But no other individual did so much to
shape the baseball world or today. Murdock's biography of Johnson is
an example of the new seriousness of baseball history. It is
scholarly, annotated, cautious, probing, and persuasive. If baseball
historians emulate Murdock in his professionalism, they will have no
difficulty having their enterprise taken fully seriously."
"Bill Veeck was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman,
and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. His
classic autobiography, written with the talented sportswriter Ed
Linn, is an uproarious book packed with information about the
history of baseball and tales of players and owners, including some
of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature."
"The voices of the game's distant past continue to reverberate
with a distinct freshness in Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their
Times. An oral history of the game in the first two decades of the
century, Glory sends out its impressive roster of players to tell
their own stories, and what stories they tell--the story of their
times as well as of their game; the scorecard includes Rube Marquard,
Babe Herman, Stan Coveleski, Smoky Joe Wood, and Wahoo Sam Crawford.
A delight from cover to cover, Glory is the next best thing to
having been there in the days when the ball may have been dead, but
the personalities were anything but."
SABR'S
ESSENTIAL BASEBALL LIBRARY CIRCA 1987
Note: Reviews from Amazon.com or the book's
publisher (which have quotes around them above). appear courtesy of the
publisher or Amazon.com.
SABR
The 1987 SABR Review of Books contained the first Essential Baseball Library.
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