Very surprised not to see even a mention of "Glory of Their Times," my personal favorite.

No mention of The Pitch That Killed, either. *sigh* Or The Politics of Glory ... though if James is to be represented by only one book (that I've read), the first Historical Baseball Abstract should certainly be it. Probably my favorite sports book that isn't Terry Pluto's ABA oral history, Loose Balls.

(And I guess The Baseball Encyclopedia doesn't really qualify.)

Here's a vote for "Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball." One of my favorites- I just re-read it this past weekend.

Who are these people? Are they trying to go out of their way to be contrary, rather than provide decent picks?

One of them is a Primate. Out of the others, I've heard of Selter, but am not familiar with the others.

I knew I was in trouble by the second paragraph: “During four consecutive years [the Dodgers] entered autumn full of hope and found catastrophe. [Listen to me grunt as I heave the bulky phrases to the top shelf.] Twice they lost pennants in the concluding inning of the concluding game of a season. [What? You couldn’t afford the word last?].

Oh, the irony.

I am no Dodgers' fan. I live in Texas, far from Brooklyn. But I have always love "The Boys of Summer." OK, maybe I like nostalgia for a time I never knew. This book took me back in time, and it provided insight into many interesting subjects, including baseball race relations, baseball sports writing, and the post-baseball lives and careers of players.

I am no Dodgers' fan. I live in Texas, far from Brooklyn. But I have always love "The Boys of Summer." OK, maybe I like nostalgia for a time I never knew. This book took me back in time, and it provided insight into many interesting subjects, including baseball race relations, baseball sports writing, and the post-baseball lives and careers of players.

Hear, hear. It's a terrific book.

This summer's nostalgic favorite is Shut Out about the good ol' days of Red Sox baseball.

I admit that my preferences in baseball books are peculiar, but most of these choices are too. The book about the 1997 Marlins? Really? As one of the probably 12 people in the country who have read it, I can attest to it being somewhat interesting, but it's not particularly well-written. It is, as far as I know, the only book to go into any sort of depth at all in looking at Jim Leyland's managing, at least.

Living on The Black is another odd choice; it's got a very clunky narrative structure, but on the other hand it's the only book about Mike Mussina. A lot of these books on the list are valuable because they're the only ones of their kind. It doesn't mean they're the best.

The book about the 1997 Marlins

Where is that mentioned?

The first ten names in the Wasilla (Alaska) telephone directory could have come up with better choices than this, and Sarah Palin herself could have written a more coherent essay than Bill Begley.

By Selter I meant Kaplan.

The '97 Marlins book was If They Don’t Win It’s a Shame by Dave Rosenbaum; one of the honorable mentions.

Here [Bill James] is, for example, on Pete Rose: “...This was the guy, the one guy, who played the game the way it was supposed to be played... When Pete Rose was discovered to have feet of clay, the sportswriters who had lionized him turned on him like a pack of vultures.” Everything James hates about the conventional approach to baseball is contained in this paragraph–the substitution of personal qualities for actual achievement, the change of opinion based on irrelevant information...

It's more than just sportswriters. This is, to me, a characteristic of being American. There's an assumption there that successful people are good people one doesn't find so much in other parts of the world. Sticking to sports, and using as an example that Italia '90 England side that was so important to the retrieval of soccer in England from the clutches of mass hooliganism, I don't think anyone ever thought Paul Gascoigne, say, was a model citizen on and off the pitch. Gary Lineker, yes; Gascoigne, not so much. Gascoigne was appreciated as much for his faults as for his abilities.

That's why I liked James from the get-go. I didn't agree with his take on a lot of issues, but in his 1980s Abstracts he really did yeoman's work in attempting to get past the narrative mythologizing that encrusts so much of the National Pastime. Oddly European for a man from Kansas.

Horatio Alger, fp?

Maybe more Frank Merriwell, Jon.

GTTM has it right. 'The Pitch That Killed' by Sowell is an outstanding book. I would also like to mention 'The Diamond Appraised' by Craig Wright. I haven't read it for a while and it may be dated but the chapters on Honus Wagner and pitcher use are still worth a look.

Bill James is an excellent writer and none of his stuff can be thrown out.

Does anyone have the Dickson Baseball Dictionary?

I recently received it as a gift, one of those sorts where someone asks what you'd like and then they come thrrough.

I like it, but I'm not nearly so "OMG!" about it as I thought I'd be; I thought it would be the OED of baseball. It's close--there are definitely a lot of citations and examples of first uses. (E.g., I didn't know "rookie" seems to have been an English term before an American one; Dickson cites Kipling referring to a term used by soldiers.)

But the good stuff is diluted by a lot of terms in there any of us would know, and those who don't could figure out from context. Then again, to see the questions supposedly submitted to the "email the booth" feature on the local FSN channel, maybe all those terms need to be in there.

Anyway, I am probably being too hard on it. It certainly is a unique reference work and I'm glad to have it.

Makes me wonder how the Dickson compares to the Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, a tolerably cheap copy of which I finally came across a few years ago. Sounds like there's some overlap.

Maybe more Frank Merriwell, Jon.

I figured there was some 100 year old writing that affected how Americans perceive things opposed to the rest of the world.

I haven't read "Spoke" yet but Charles Alexander's biographies on Ty Cobb and John McGraw are my favorite bios. (The Hornsby bio fell short after Alexander set a very high standard.)

I am glad "Seasons in Hell" got some respect. Extremely underrated.

"The Echoing Green" (1951 Giants vs Dodgers) is probably the best baseball book I have read over the last couple years.

I liked the Hornsby bio myself, but couldn't finish the Cobb or Speaker one. I think I'm not as much of a Deadball Era guy as I once thought that I was.

AndrewJ had a great line about The Echoing Green when it first came out. I'll see if I can dig it up. Essentially, Prager is the type of guy who would give you the history of Stonehenge and the Mayans if you asked him what time it was, yet would probably still listen to his digression.

Morineko,

Peter Pascarelli's book "The Toughest Job in Baseball" follows Leyland and the Pirates through the 1992 season. It paints a good portrait of him, as well as telling some good anecdotes from 80's and 90's baseball. You can get it used on Amazon for essentially the cost of shipping.

I remember liking the Hornsby bio as well. Not sure what else I've read by Alexander -- probably the McGraw, at the very least, though I may instead be confusing it with someone else's book (that I also liked) on Wee Willie Keeler & the original Orioles.

I've got a Christy Mathewson bio somewhere in the pile of books & stuff by my front door that I've been meaning to unearth & resume reading (I got only about 10 pages into it before life interfered a few months ago ... stupid life). I also need to dig out the Honus Wagner bio that I started a few years ago but got sidetracked from.

I'm surprised that Jim Brosnan's The Long Season didn't get a mention. It still holds up as the best baseball player diary ever published.

I'm surprised that Jim Brosnan's The Long Season didn't get a mention. It still holds up as the best baseball player diary ever published.

Agreed. The Bros could write. Both his books are excellent.

Has anyone mentioned Riley's Negro League Encyclopedia? Despite its flaws, thumbing through that book gave me a real thrill. It was like opening up a new world.

I very much enjoyed Turkey Stearnes and the Detroit Stars and Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. I love deadball and Negro League stuff.

Oh and for one season reviews my favourite is Reed Browning's "Baseball's Greatest Season: 1924"

Boys of Summer is two books, and only the first one is good. The second half — his post-career interviews with the players — really drags. I whizzed through the first half; it took me literally months before I finished the second half.

Boys of Summer is two books, and only the first one is good. The second half — his post-career interviews with the players — really drags. I whizzed through the first half; it took me literally months before I finished the second half.

I agree that the first part is far superior to the second. But I found some (not all) of the post-career interviews to be quite engaging.

How old were the old Dodgers when Boys of Summer came out? In their early 50s? They looked older than I imagine the 1991 Twins look today and we are as chronologically distant from 1991 as Kahn was to "The Era" when that book was written.

How old were the old Dodgers when Boys of Summer came out? In their early 50s?

Well, you can do the math, Jon. Some were in their early 50s, some were a little younger, and Roe was a little older.

The Boys of Summer gets blamed far too much for the cottage industry of Brooklyn Dodger nostalgia which it lent its name to but arguably didn't create. It's a book which actually doesn't have that much nostalgia in it, IIRC (it's been about 3 years since I read it). It's more Kahn's recounting of his time as a beat writer for the Herald-Tribune followed by some interviews in which his subjects come off as complicated people. Duke Snider is something close to a born-again Nixonian Moral Majority type, or his wife anyway; Carl Furillo is what we would now recognize as racist.

Peter Golenbock's Bums is far, far more of a "HOW GREAT IT WAS TO WATCH THE DAWJUHS" tome and is the real creator of Dodger nostalgia.

The Boys of Summer gets blamed far too much for the cottage industry of Brooklyn Dodger nostalgia which it lent its name to but arguably didn't create. It's a book which actually doesn't have that much nostalgia in it, IIRC (it's been about 3 years since I read it). It's more Kahn's recounting of his time as a beat writer for the Herald-Tribune followed by some interviews in which his subjects come off as complicated people. Duke Snider is something close to a born-again; Carl Furillo is what we would now recognize as racist.

Yes, I think "bittersweet" describes The Boys of Summer far more accurately than "nostalgic."

Carl Furillo is what we would now recognize as racist.

I didn't notice that, but it's been a while since I've read it and I may not be as sensitive to stuff like that as someone younger than me may be.

Bittersweet is a good word for it. Kahn's dad dying, his dad getting crappy seats from the Yankees which meant he missed the Pafko/Furillo HR catches in Game 5, Furillo's bitterness as he works construction with a .299 lifetime BA,and Kahn sitting in a car with Chuck Dressen talking himself and his ego out of the Dodger contract are all notably bittersweet moments. That summarizes Boys of Summer way more than "Going to Ebbets Field was like happiness and sunshine!".

A valid criticism of The Boys of Summer is that more than a few times, Kahn reaches for profundity or darkness that isn't quite there. But that's definitely not an exercise in nostalgia.

if you think boys of summer is too ponderous, you should read bums, by peter golenbock. its an oral history of the dodgers, and a helluva good book. the section on jackie robinson is brilliant.

if these guys didn't pick glory of their times, then they just don't know what they are doing.

The Boys of Summer gets blamed far too much for the cottage industry of Brooklyn Dodger nostalgia which it lent its name to but arguably didn't create. It's a book which actually doesn't have that much nostalgia in it, IIRC (it's been about 3 years since I read it). It's more Kahn's recounting of his time as a beat writer for the Herald-Tribune followed by some interviews in which his subjects come off as complicated people. Duke Snider is something close to a born-again Nixonian Moral Majority type, or his wife anyway; Carl Furillo is what we would now recognize as racist.

This is true, but IMO what set the tone for the "nostalgia" connection was when they had a preview excerpt in SPORT, coinciding with the book's release. The accompanying magazine photo by Ozzie Sweet was a beautiful color shot of the main players (Robinson, Snider, etc.) all smiling and standing around the batting cage, and as they say, a picture is often worth a thousand words. Sweet's photos were SPORT's stock in trade, and his style was totally Hollywood Glamor Photo, all sunny dispositions and never a cloud on the horizon. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the book's initial success had a lot to do with that one photo, which was the purest concentrate of nostalgia you'll ever see.

But I found some (not all) of the post-career interviews to be quite engaging.

I agree. Some of those interviews are more interesting than others, partly because some have more interesting lives than others. I liked the story of the outfielder (Pafko? I can't recall for sure.) who wanted to play catch with Kahn in the backyard, and kept throwing harder and harder, until Kahn wanted to quit because it hurt so much. Then the retired player lets Kahn know that he remembered a news article he wrote which said he had a weak arm. It turns out that it wasn't true but was just an effort by the Dodgers' front office to plant an unfavorable story about the player during salary negotiations. Kahn says he was a newbie reporter at the time and didn't realize it until much later.

And, I agree with the description of the book as "bittersweet," particularly thinking about Robinson's pain over his son's problems.

This is true, but IMO what set the tone for the "nostalgia" connection was when they had a preview excerpt in SPORT, coinciding with the book's release. The accompanying magazine photo by Ozzie Sweet was a beautiful color shot of the main players (Robinson, Snider, etc.) all smiling and standing around the batting cage, and as they say, a picture is often worth a thousand words. Sweet's photos were SPORT's stock in trade, and his style was totally Hollywood Glamor Photo, all sunny dispositions and never a cloud on the horizon. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the book's initial success had a lot to do with that one photo, which was the purest concentrate of nostalgia you'll ever see.

Perhaps the book sold many of its very early copies because of that attractive photo (which was on the cover of at least the paperback version), but it didn't become a huge, sustained bestseller for any gimmicky reason such as that. Its content is what made it a great success. And its content -- what Kahn wrote -- is distinctly not nostalgic happy talk.

Has anyone mentioned Riley's Negro League Encyclopedia? Despite its flaws, thumbing through that book gave me a real thrill. It was like opening up a new world.

Yup that's a fun one. My dad grew up in smalltown Manitoba watching the Mandak league, a semi-pro contingent with teams throughout Manitoba and North Dakota. Apparently a lot of negro leaguers played there in the early 50's, and I had a lot of fun looking through bios for mentions of the Mandak league. Turns out Satchell Paige even played there...the thought that my dad may have seen Satch is pretty darn cool.

I like the David Nemec books: The Beer & Whiskey League and The 19th Century Baseball Encyclopedia. Both are really well done and provide a solid base for a time-period that has been overshadowed. The SABR Deadball Stars books are great too. Oh and Crazy '08 was grand as well.

As for their list I don't get the hate for Moneyball. Obviously it has spawned a lot of resentment, ridicule and parody, but at its heart it's pretty fascinating book about fascinating people. It seems that the hate for it is simply backlash against it's overwhelming popularity. I'm thinking the hate for The Boys of Summer is similar (though I haven't read that one yet).

I'm not sure how The Glory of Their Times wasn't in their discussion. It's easily the best baseball book I've read.

Steve,

I don't disagree at all with your last post (#42). Nobody who read the book could disagree. But the power of even a single photograph in a major sports magazine in the pre-internet days shouldn't be underestimated.

It also goes into attention span. I used to run bootleg movies back around that time, and one of the shows I pasted together was a group of 18 cartoons that I first packaged as "A History of the Avant-Garde and Pop Cartoon." It was actually a terrific compilation, all the way from George Melies to Lenny Bruce's Thank You, Mask Man, with a bunch of early Disneys and a blue cartoon called Pecker Island thrown in.

But it didn't draw flies---until I changed the title to "An Orgy of Cartoons: 69 Years of Sex, Violence and General Bad Taste." Then, and only then, did the money start rolling in. Even though nothing had changed other than the title, plus a bit of re-wording of the descriptions---that didn't hurt, either.

The most perfect illustration of presentation over content was one night in Charlottesville, when my girlfriend was counting the crowd, and all of a sudden a small group of geezers stormed the cashier and demanded their money back, because they thought that this was supposed to be an X-Rated show! (Sure, with one stag cartoon surrounded by 17 not-so-stag ones.) My girlfriend asked the manager who these people were, and was told that they were "the old men with newspapers." That had to be among the saddest five words I've ever heard, and I almost felt vaguely guilty about having led them on with my 100% tongue in cheek descriptions of Bugs Bunny's relationship to Elmer Fudd, etc.

Not that this has much to do with Roger Kahn's book, but the underlying principle makes me always a bit wary of dismissing the power of a picture, or the power of suggestion.

There's an assumption there that successful people are good people one doesn't find so much in other parts of the world.

Really? Most people I know on the bottom assume that the vast majority of successful people got there by lying, cheating and screwing people over. The people at the top put out lots of propaganda about how rich people are successful due their to superior moral fiber but few at the bottom really believe it.

Also deserving mention are Harold Seymour’s Baseball: The Early Years and Baseball: The Golden Age. Seymour is a seminal baseball scholar. Many have cribbed from him without acknowledgment, perhaps adopting his findings second and third hand. He deals almost exclusively, and exhaustively, with primary sources. A combination of baseball history, lore, and how the game has been played on the professional level, those two books treat MLB as sort of a microcosm of America’s brand of capitalism and its growth and development. He actually makes the business side of baseball development, like the showdown between owner/capitalist Albert Spalding and Co. versus Monte Ward and The Brotherhood (workers/players), thrilling. Spalding, a former great pitcher, saved pro ball for the fat cats, but it’s as heroic and invigorating (speaking neutrally) as J.P. Morgan staving off the panic of 1905 (?) by personally taking to the streets in the business district of New York, striding from office to office to calm and restrain creditors and investors from losing their heads. The actual on the field stuff doesn't get short-shrifted either; neither does the lore of the game.

As for The Long Season, I remember it as being good, but not very memorable. I remember tons of tidbits from Ball Four, and Bouton himself is not a character you’ll likely forget. Which is quite an achievement since he’s not uniformly likable. I have to ask, exactly what stands out in The Long Season? I simply don’t remember it as being very colorful. What opinion, characterization, happening strikes the reader as remarkable? I have no such problem with Ball Four. From the beginning where Bouton lays out the comical and pointed negotiating ritual that transpired with the Houk and the Yankees to the elegiac ending, a player barely hanging out by his fingernails (literally) getting one more chance. “laying chicky, shooting beaver, no one’s too good to die, table #####, yeah, surrrre, explaining to your wife why she has to have a penicillin shot for your kidney infection, good hands, Dr. Strangeglove, tennis ball head, giving a lecture in the bullpen, men who “die” then have to grow up, ah, ########, throw him some low smoke and let’s go pound some Budweiser, Whitey Ford getting a tan in the bullpen, Mantle raffling a non-existent ham, Joe Pepitone’s different hair pieces—there’s, to coin a phrase, a veritable cornucopia of this stuff. There was nothing remotely like Ball Four before it, and it’s still the best. Those guys and what they do just come alive. It has story, characters, and great lines.