Survey: What Baseball Books Do You Return to Most Often?

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).

 

ROGER ANGELL

The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter, because it opened up a whole era for so many of us. It was an essential sort of work, yet done with such modesty and elegance. Ritter did a tremendous amount of labor in researching all those players, but he just presented them to us with such honesty and directness. Its publication was an astonishing event. 

In addition, the first two Jim Brosnan books (The Long Season, The Pennant Race) were refreshing, because they were the first first-person player writings that were convincing. Brosnan’s attitude was compellingly different, because he was both involved and amused by what he saw, and because he was not only observing it, he was observing himself at the same time.

MARTY APPEL

The fondest memories of a baseball book go back to when I was a kid, and Gene Schoor’s biography of Mickey Mantle. It was the first baseball biography I ever had, and I used to do a book report on it every year. There’s another, kind of an obscure one I think was self-published about eight or nine years ago, The San Francisco Giants: An Oral History, by Mike Mandel. In it he interviewed everybody who had anything to do with the Giants in their first two decades. It was a marvelous book, with the one shame being that Willie Mays wouldn’t participate unless he was paid. There was a real sense of a joy of recollection, and the people really let their hair down for this writer. All modern players, but they really had interesting tales to tell. One more: Pat Jordan’s A False Spring. 

JOE GARAGIOLA 

You’re gonna get everyone mad at me. My favorite baseball books are the Fireside books. I love those books. You can open ’em to any page and get lost. Pick it up, put it down, anytime. Great airplane books. I also love Roger Angell’s books.

BILL JAMES 

It might be Nice Guys Finish Last, with Leo Durocher and Ed Linn. I like that book a lot. The use of the language is extraordinarily good. Veeck as in Wreck, Linn’s other book, gets a lot of praise for its foresightedness and the quality of the writing, but I think Nice Guys Finish Last matches it in those respects. I find the record of 40 years of controversies and people very engrossing. I have a lot of favorite books, but that’s one I like to mention because it doesn’t get mentioned often. 

LEONARD KOPPETT 

The Glory of Their Times. It’s the best baseball book I ever saw, because of the combined quality of who the people are and the immediacy of what they have to say. And, of course, it was the first time somebody had done this. Excellent. The timing: the distance in time between when it came out and the time the book was talking about was perfect. In addition, that was the first time anyone treated the subject as an historian. Veeck’s first two books, Veeck as in Wreck and The Hustler’s Handbook, are in a class by themselves. If you want to know about baseball, and particularly the promotion of baseball, they are excellent. Plus being a helluva good read. I also liked Joe Garagiola’s book (Baseball is a Funny Game), very well done, and I liked Bouton’s second book (Ball Five) much better than the first. By the second book, he had a lot more understanding in it, instead of just being a wise guy. In the second book, it came across as, “Hey a lot of those things I made fun of in the first book, I found out why they happened.” 

TONY KUBEK 

I rarely read sports books. I’m not trying to be flippant. I found out years ago when I read books that were written about incidents I was involved in, that it wasn’t the way it happened. I don’t know whether it was the author or the publishing company that wanted to sensationalize, but they never really came off the way it happened. They’re not that factual. For example, when Peter Golenbock started Dynasty, I was one of the first people he called. He spent three days with me, and I put him in touch with Roger Maris and Mickey. And when the book came out, there were so many factual errors I stopped counting. I just looked through one I got recently, A Baseball Writer, and I enjoyed it. It was written by a lot of good sports writers. 

DAN OKRENT 

The three volumes of the Fireside set. I go back to them constantly, for the variety, the surprise. I don’t think that necessarily any one of the three volumes has the best stuff written in their particular era, but the bizarre range that Einstein brought to the books really makes them special. 

PETE PALMER 

The 1969 version of the Baseball Encyclopedia, which has fewer mistakes. I’ve been doing a lot of research on the teens and ’20s. Looking at my desk here I’ve got The Sporting News publications for 1985, the Guide and Register. Daguerreotypes, the Macmillan book, the David Neft book and my book, which hasn’t come out since 1979, but I still have it because it’s more convenient than some of the others for some things. There are the SABR Research Journals, baseball guides and registers from previous years, and press guides. (“Small desk, ” ed.) Most of the stuff I’ve been doing involves using the 1969 Macmillan Encyclopedia. Most of my books are reference books. 

LARRY RITTER 

On reflection, my favorite is Veeck as in Wreck. The runner-up is My Baseball Diary by James T. Farrell. And No. 3 is Donald Honig’s Baseball America. 

ALLAN ROTH 

There are the baseball reference books, which I have to use in my work, and I use them all the time: The Sporting News annual books, Guide, Dope Book, Elias Bureau Record Book. And then there are leisure books, and then there are the combinations, like Bill James’ new book. James is very, very clever. I read a lot of Red Smith’s books. Probably the book that I have enjoyed the most over the years is a book I was very close to for two reasons: one, the writer is a very close friend, one of my closest in the sports world, and two, I was part of that book in a sense — I was with The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn. I knew all the people in it very well. As close as I was to the events and the people, the book was still on the money. 

DAN SCHLOSSBERG 

My own Baseball Catalog took me three years to put together, and it covered a lot of different kinds of areas of baseball: foods, superstitions, World War II. It was originally published in 1980, and it’s been revised for re-release in ’87. Actually, my favorite baseball book that’s not my own is The Baseball Hall of Shame by Nash and Zullo. I think it’s very funny and very clever. Another is A Baseball Writer, by Terry Pluto and some others.