My summer baseball reading list
Just take a look, it’s in a book.
When I was about 10 years old, I got really into baseball. I was a bookish kid already, so anytime I went to the library I checked out two kinds of books - Matt Christopher novels and baseball biographies. Matt Christopher wrote a series of fictional kids books about baseball like Catcher with a Glass Arm and The Kid Who Only Hit Homers, which I loved. I also loved reading biographies about players from before my time - Johnny Bench (which was more R-rated than I had expected), Harmon Killebrew, and Bob Allison (I guess the librarian was a Twins fan?)
The best time to read is the summer, when leisurely vacations and more downtime permits. I’ve been reading a lot of baseball books, inspired in part by Cullen Jekel’s baseball book list from last year, and I’ll share a few of my recommendations. I also have a list of books I plan on reading later this year - feel free to suggest your own.
Would recommend
The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson by Jeff Pearlman (2022)
Pearlman is very successful author whose book about the 80s Lakers was recently turned into an excellent TV series on Max (that deserves another season!). The Last Folk Hero is meticulously researched, both humanizing Bo but also making him somehow even more larger than life. Pearlman debunks some myths about the two-sport star, but also reveals much about what drove a poor kid from Bessemer, Alabama to become the most famous athlete in the world. The book covers his time with the Royals (with a reference from a certain Royals blogger!) and how he rubbed some teammates the wrong way, yet also amazed them with his talents.
The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds by Joe Posnanski (2009)
I don’t need to tell any Kansas City readers that Posnanski is excellent at his craft, and The Machine is some of his finest work. He digs in deep on one of the best baseball seasons over the last 50 years, but also takes apart the machine to look at the individual parts. He profiles players like Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Ken Griffey, George Foster, Dave Concepcion, Don Gullett, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, and skipper Sparky Anderson to find out what drove them. It wasn’t an easy road either, with Rose switching positions, Gullett nursing a fractured thumb, and personalities clashing at times, but it culminated in one of the best World Series ever played.
If you’re looking for a non-baseball book from Pos, I also enjoyed his book on Harry Houdini. He also has a new book out called Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments.
The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season by Barry Svrluga (2016)
Baseball is a hobby for us fans, but for those in the game, it is a profession that is year-round, even if the regular season is only six months long. Washington Post beat writer Barry Svrluga details the grind of the baseball season as he covers the Washington Nationals through their 2014 season. It’s a short read, coming it at just 170 pages, but he details how the marathon season affects different players, with perspectives from the star (Ryan Zimmerman) to the closer (Drew Storen) to the guy getting shuttled between the big leagues and the minors (Tyler Moore). The book even offers a behind-the-scenes peek how the season grind affects equipment managers, scouts, and players’ wives.
Cullen recommended this one, and I am so glad he did. Baseball management has become a professionalized occupation, but it wasn’t always that way. Mark Armour and Daniel Levitt look back at the history of general managers from the early days of baseball to the modern use of analytics. Some of the biggest innovators in the game serve as tentpoles for the history trip, men like Barney Dreyfuss, Branch Rickey, Pat Gillick, and Billy Beane. Some were former ballplayers, others were corporate executives who fell into a career running a baseball team, and while they may have taken different strategies, they won pennants.
The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity by Jeff Passan (2017)
Baseball is suffering an epidemic of pitcher injuries, and Jeff Passan was on top of this trend as it was unfolding with his 2017 book, The Arm. As pitchers try to throw harder and harder, they exert more and more stress on fragile ligaments. Passan talks to surgeons who are doing dozens of ligament replacement surgeries on teenagers.
The book follows Riley Pint, then a Kansas City-area high school pitcher trying to get to 100 mph to become attractive for the draft (he was selected fourth overall by the Rockies in 2016). It follows Daniel Hudson, who got off to a promising career as a starter only to have Tommy John surgery, then another one after the first one didn’t take, as he nervously rehabs, hoping he can resume his career. It follows Todd Coffey, once a terrific late inning reliever, trying to lure scouts to his showcases to show he is healthy enough to sign to a minor league deal. There are also great chapters on pitching in Japan and the courting of free agent Jon Lester (the Royals were interested!)
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn (1972)
We treat Major League ballplayers like conquering heroes and allow them to behave like man-children. But what happens when the career subsides, and real life begins? Considered one of the best baseball books of all time, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer traces Kahn’s baseball fandom and celebrates the champion 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers in the first half, but the more interesting part is the second half when the author visits the players a decade or more later, when they have retired and become family men, working stiffs like the rest of us, or in some cases, unmoored without the game of baseball.
Jackie Robinson has become a sanitized icon, but in Kahn’s book he’s a complicated man, proud of his legacy, but struggling to deal with a wayward child. Some former Dodgers, like pitcher Carl Erskine, thrive in post-retirement, devoting their lives to the children and becoming a pillar of the community. Others find they are strangers to their children, bitter about their careers or the money they felt owners cheated them out of. It’s a fascinating collection of profiles about men struggling to adjust to a very different world.
Kiley McDaniel of ESPN and Eric Longenhagen at Fangraphs have teamed up to write a detailed account of how modern baseball front offices operate. McDaniel has worked in several front offices, including with the Braves where he learned from Brian Bridges, now the scouting director for the Royals. The book gives a glimpse of how baseball lifers like Bridges and other longtime scouts view the game - with a very detailed explanation of the 20-80 scale.
But it also delves into how analytics and new data-gathering tools like Rapsodo and Trackman have shaped the game from how teams evaluate players to how they manipulate situations for trade reasons - like putting young players with good breaking balls and mediocre fastballs in Low-A because they know they’ll have great strikeout numbers that may not translate at higher levels. It offers advice for anyone looking to make a career in the game, but even if you’re just a fan, it’s an excellent guide to understanding what teams are thinking these days.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1970)
Bouton kept a diary of the 1970 season, near the end of his career when he had moved on from the proud Yankees to the fledgling Seattle Pilots. He tears the veneer off the sanitized version of Major League Baseball fans were accustomed to and details Mickey Mantle’s partying, the dumb things coaches say, and the road trip practices of ballplayers acting as peeping toms. It knocks players off the pedestals we put them on as kids and remind us these are just dudes playing a kid’s game who haven’t really grown up. But it also reminds us how precarious each player feels his position in the big leagues is - Bouton gets demoted and traded during the book, despite being a World Series hero earlier in his career. Teammates root for each other, but they also secretly root against each other, because they know they are competing for roster spots.
Here are a few I plan to read this summer:
The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W.P. Kinsella (1985)
From the same author that brought us Shoeless Joe, the book that was adapted into Field of Dreams, Kinsella pens a story about a mythical 2,000-inning game between the Cubs and the amateur Iowa Baseball Confederacy.
The Worst Team Money Could Buy by Bob Klapisch (1993)
Having just finished the TV series on Peacock about the lowly 1990 Yankees, there is a great satisfaction in seeing the big-market franchises at their worst moments. Klapisch writes about the 1992 Mets, a disaster of a team with high-priced stars.
The Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst (2010)
Hayhurst, a former Blue Jays and Padres reliever, wrote this account of his career as a fringe big leaguer, a bit of a modern take of Ball Four, with his own unique philosophy.
October 1964 by David Halberstam (1994)
One of the great non-fiction writers of the 20th century, Halberstam details an account of an aging Yankees club against an up-and-coming Cardinals team in the 1964 World Series.
Any other summer reading recommendations?