The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written

Mark Winegardner’s book about Tony Lucadello, the successful baseball scout who scouted Mike Schmidt, is written in a clean, almost invisible prose style. Winegardner’s understated approach pays off when the story ends with an unexpected twist. Scouts, like trainers in boxing, often make rich characters, and Winegardner’s devotion to Lucadello pays off in one of the truest baseball stories you’ll ever read.

One of the first baseball books for adults, A Day in the Bleachers is really a long magazine article made into a tidy book. It’s about how Hano took the subway uptown to the Polo Grounds one day and bought a bleacher ticket for a World Series game. It just so happened to be one of the most famous games in World Series history because of an amazing play Willie Mays made in centerfield. Hano had a perfect view of the catch, and the even more remarkable throw. He’d been going to the Polo Grounds alone since he was four-years-old, and he was most at home in the bleachers. This is a gem.

First of the seminal three-part history of the game by Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills. Essential.

There might be funnier books—we can always argue—but you’d be hard-pressed to find a book that is more overall fun than this one. Boyd and co-author Fred C. Harris bring an infectious irreverence to their love of baseball cards from the 1950s. The digressions, such as a listing great baseball nicknames like Bow Wow Arft, Turkeyfoot Brower, Noodles Zupo, and Oyster Burns, are priceless. This great big smile of a book is a must for any baseball fan.

If you want to know the history of the Negro Leagues, you start with this book. Period.

It's rare when a book, of all things, has an impact on a sport, but Moneyball is that book. The term, for better and worse, stuck inside baseball as a shorthand for the analytics revolution. But the reason Lewis’ book is so compelling is because Billy Beane is a wonderful character. In a master storyteller’s hands, that’s a powerful thing.

Eliot Asinof is best-known for Eight Men Out, his entertaining—if historically shaky—account of the Black Sox Scandal (he is less famous for once being married to Marlon Brando’s sister). But you don’t want to miss his 1955 novel about a minor league ball player. Asinof played minor league ball himself, and this novel is blunt, unsentimental, and modern in its depiction of professional sport. Writing in The New York Times, the great sports writer John Lardner called it “the first realistic baseball novel I can remember ever having read...it is the only novel, so far as I know, that gives a sharp, fair account—it’s an eloquent, moving account.”

The definitive portrait of Hank Aaron, one of the greatest ballplayers ever, most famous for setting the all-time home run record. Aaron was hated and loved for surpassing Babe Ruth as the home run king—his performance, either way, obscured the man behind the athlete. “You what what the hardest thing is?” Aaron tells Bryant. “What nobody wants to understand—is me. People want their memories of me to be my memories of me. But you know what? They’re not.”

It’s no secret that baseball movies are almost universally terrible. The original Bad News Bears is the exception, but you wouldn’t be wrong to roll your eyes at the 1977 sequel, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. However, one person’s trash is another fan’s treasure, and nobody writes about the intersection of pop culture and personal history like Josh Wilker, who is always funny and often poignant.

Not only was Roberto Clemente a fascinating man and a Hall of Fame player, but he had something even rarer than greatness: style. Sleek and lean with a powerful throwing arm, he was a beautiful fielder. Even the way he walked up the plate was stylish, which makes Clemente a good choice for a graphic novel. After Clemente’s command performance in the 1971 World Series, Roger Angell wrote: “And then, too, there was the shared experience, already permanently fixed in memory, of Robert Clemente playing a kind of baseball that none of us had ever seen before—throwing and running and hitting at something close to the level of absolute perfection, playing to win but also playing the game as if it were a form of punishment for everyone else on the field.” Santiago captures Clemente’s violence on the field, as well as his loneliness. It’s a beautiful evocation of an era and a life.

Glenn Burke was the first openly gay big leaguer, and he suffered accordingly. We are fortunate that his story is in the hands of a writer as talented as Maraniss.

Before Bill James and the analytics revolution, the principles of sabermetrics were put into practice by longtime Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. A baseball lifer, Weaver was infamous for yelling at umpires and frightening his own players. Beyond the cartoon-like demeanor, however, was a brilliant strategist ahead of his time.

Joe Posnanski is a true believer—and if you’ve never read his charming book about Buck O’Neil, or the spirited account of the Big Red Machine, they are juicy baseball books. The essays in this collection originally appeared online at The Athletic, but they gain heft compiled together. You always learn something reading Posnanski; he makes you a smarter, more well-informed fan, but the surprise here is how much storytelling and emotion fuel these essays. It is a big, fat orgy of baseball goodness.

Ted Williams wanted to be the greatest hitter that ever lived, and if he wasn’t, he’s certainly in the conversation. Here is the classic picture book breaking down his method.

Rob Neyer was Bill James’s protégé, but he was no imitator. Neyer is not only incredibly bright and funny, he’s got a knack for making numbers less intimidating to the average reader. When you put Neyer and James together on a project, you get baseball nirvana, like this excellent guide to pitching, pitches, and pitchers.

Before it was a charmed mid-’80s HBO movie with William Peterson and Virginia Madsen, Long Gone was a charmed novel by Paul Hemphill. Once known as the Jimmy Breslin of the South, Hemphill made his bones as a newspaperman in the ’60s, then became a freelance magazine and book writer, including an indispensable history of country music, The Nashville Sound. Hemphill flirted with playing minor league ball as a young man, which provided the foundation for this slim but tasty novel. You can tell why movie people loved it. Jack Nicholson was rumored to play the hero for years; instead, it was Peterson, who gave the character the same kind of spark Paul Newman had in Slap Shot. He had a lot to work with, and you see it all on the page in Hemphill’s novel.

Dick Allen was one of the great players of his generation though he didn’t enjoy a Hall of Fame career. He played in Philadelphia in the 1960s when it was exceedingly rough for Black players. The story of his career is fascinating. True, Allen wrote an engaging memoir, Crash, but we suggest Nathanson’s tremendous biography for an even fuller portrait of a legendary player.

Every baseball fan knows about the collective misery of the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox in the 20th Century, and thanks to Terry Pluto—who had his hand in a number of really good sports books—we have a detailed appreciation of Cleveland Indians’ misery. The Rocky Colavito trade signaled the demise of the Indians’ ’40s and ’50s success; it also catalyzed a series of events that would cast the team into the baseball cellar for the better part of three decades. That's the conceit of Pluto’s breezy, informal, and affectionate history. Like its literary cousin, The Curse of the Bambino, Pluto’s book takes a symbolic moment—the trading of a beloved player—and uses it as the unwitting catalyst for the team’s subsequent misfortunes. The unwitting hero of the book—the heart and soul—is pitcher Herb Score. His story alone makes this worth reading.

If we had to pick the five best baseball books, this would be one of them. Just get it, that’s all.