Great baseball debate: favorite books
| July 14, 2009 | 9:39 AM
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A great debate is ongoing at InsideTheRockies.com about the best baseball books. Join the conversation in the comments on Tracy Ringolsby’s post. For the record, here is my Top 10:
1) The Brothers K, David James Duncan. Only peripherally about baseball, but the spirit of the book revolves around the game and it includes some of the best baseball stories. The passage about the definition of a strike zone is a must read for baseball fans and the underlying story of how a single brother in a family of baseball-playing brothers deals with his lack of baseball skills rings true for those of us who figured out fairly early that we weren’t, in fact, going to play second base for the Cubs.
2) Box Socials, W.P. Kinsella. The book isn’t about baseball as much as it is the lives of a group of people who memorialize a single exhibition game in Canada. I include it among my favorite baseball books because it is that single game that drives much of the narrative of the book even though it happens over a very few pages near the end. It is how the memory of that game and how it affects the people who saw it and lived it and, more importantly, how they remembered it that makes the book a piece of perfect storytelling.
3) Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella. So much better than Field of Dreams, the movie made from it.
4) Prophet of the Sandlots, Mark Winegardner. Non-fiction story about the scout who discovered Phillies great Mike Schmidt. Tragic and true.
5) The Thrill of the Grass, W.P. Kinsella: A collection of short stories. The final story is my favorite single piece written by Kinsella.
6) Stolen Season, David Lamb: A trip around the minor leagues with a writer who loved the game but didn’t follow it for a living.
7) A False Spring, Pat Jordan: A fairly unsentimental autobiography of a bonus baby’s trip through the Braves system in the 1950s.
The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn: A great book nearly ruined by a Don Henley song, which makes it nearly impossible to ponder rereading the book without getting that song stuck in your head. But the book is good enough that it’s worth the pain.
9) Iowa Baseball Confederacy, W.P. Kinsella: The guy knows how to write baseball. The fantasy element of this book is less grounded than Shoeless Joe, but the stories of the old Cubs and how baseball itself can be a fantasy are memorable.
10) Good Enough to Dream, Roger Kahn: A baseball writer does what we all want to do: buys a baseball team, in this case the Class A Utica Blue Sox in the mid-1980s.
Journals, Sports, Steve Foster
