Baseball is the writer's game, and these indispensable books prove it.
There are more good books written about baseball than any other American team sport—and that's not just because baseball has been around the longest. "This ain't a football game," manager Earl Weaver once said. "We do this every day." Through baseball books, we've come to understand the game and its history. The sport is catnip for writers: a game of contemplation and strategy that lends itself beautifully to numbers and analysis as well as poetry. These are our picks for the 100 indispensable books no baseball fan should be without. The best releases of the year revealed something about who we are as a people, right now. "It was hard for me to see the humor and camp in something that was so bloody. In real life, none of it was camp." "I'm just burning sage," says Jacob Elordi as he takes a lighter to the business end of a smudge stick. His voice, transmitted over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, is so deep that the words tend to blur together, as if this six-foot-five Aussie, in a baseball cap and a banana-yellow T-shirt, has been possessed by the spirit of Eeyore. Or it might just be how he's feeling today. "A little down in the dumps," he says. He dearly misses his family back in Australia: his brother and sister, both older, and "my best friends"—his parents. He's in production on season two of Euphoria, HBO's acid trip of a series that gives Gen Z the prestige treatment. "Work is the North Star. As long as I'm doing that, I'm good." You can get the most fought-over contribution for cheap. Skip the moaning and groaning. Save on Therabody's massage guns and wave rollers instead. Regarded as perhaps the finest piece of sportswriting on record, the furious saga of Teddy Ballgame — from boy to man and near death — is an unmatchable remembrance for an American icon. |
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