5 Important Books
By: John Thorn
Tags: Fives, Books, Henry Chadwick, Baseball, Bill James

5 Important Books

For gorgeous prose, the champion

I have often been asked to name baseball’s greatest books and have always deferred with a request for more specificity: greatest work of history … or fiction … or biography … or memoir … or statistics? I tackled the question about historical tomes a decade ago, for a British website (https://bit.ly/2SvJKft). And the term “great” begs the further question of what is meant: merit … popularity … enduring if not initial influence? I think this last category is the one to go with today, or else this column could be entirely about the two Rogers, Angell and Kahn.

As has been true for evaluating films, especially, the best works have been published in recent years, just as the players have relentlessly improved. The arts of photography and illustration, on the other hand, have in my view declined, but so has the manufacture of slide rules and buggy whips. All the same, the five-era approach that has largely served this series well continues to be useful.

Pioneering works are rightly recalled: the first novel (Changing Base, William Everett, 1868), the first ghosted memoir (Play Ball, King Kelly, 1888), the first rudimentary history (Sphere and Ash, Jacob Morse, 1888), the first self-written autobiography (The Long Season, Jim Brosnan, 1960). Yet none of these may be accounted the best of its genre. (Absent from this column are important works predating the onset of Major League Baseball, from the Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player of 1860 to Charles A. Peverelly’s Book of American Pastimes, 1866.)

When the team at my book production company Baseball Ink first published Total Baseball in 1989, we asked Paul Adomites to create a feature ultimately called “The Total Baseball Library.” So many fine baseball books had begun to be published annually that he was, by his own admission, bailing against the tide with a teacup in trying to read them, let alone evaluate them in a historical context.

“What are the best books,” he wrote, “in each of the areas of baseball writing — not as collectors’ items, but in how they illuminate some aspect of this great game for our eyes, how they remind us of the game’s pleasure, or how they use the game’s myths and memories to create something altogether new?” Let’s try to answer that, with one selection and four runners-up for each of the five eras that are by now familiar.

A point of amazement: from 1966 to 1972, five baseball books were published that each might lay claim to being called the greatest ever. Accordingly, among the outstanding books that had to fall by the wayside in considering the period 1948–1976 are Harold and Dorothy Seymour’s Baseball (1960 and 1971), the work most influential on my odd choice of career.

Points of order: no author is represented more than once, and yours truly is not considered at all.

1876–1919

America’s National Game, Albert G. Spalding, 1911

The subtitle gives a hint of the book’s breadth and bombast: “Historic Facts Covering the Beginning, Evolution, Development, and Popularity of Baseball, with Personal Reminiscences of Its Vicissitudes, Its Victories, and Its Votaries.” When James Whyte Davis of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club died in 1899, he left his collection of priceless baseball materials to Henry Chadwick. When that incomparably influential writer — who had gathered Harry Wright’s papers among other treasures — died in 1908, he left his aggregated collection to Spalding. The result is this sprawling history, the cornerstone for any study of the early game.

Runners-up: Jacob C. Morse, Sphere and Ash, 1888; John Montgomery Ward, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, with the Origin, History and Explanation of the Game, 1888; William Patten and J. Walker McSpadden, eds., The Book of Baseball: The National Game from the Earliest Days to the Present Season, 1911; Christy Mathewson with John N. Wheeler, Pitching in a Pinch, 1912.

1920–1947

Who’s Who in Major League Baseball, Harold (“Speed”) Johnson, 1933

This lavish hardcover book is not to be confused with Who’s Who in Baseball, which began in 1912 as a 56-page adjunct of the popular Baseball Magazine. Baseball bibliophile Frank V. Phelps called the 1933 edition, the first of its kind though annual editions ensued from 1935 to 1955: “Probably the finest single (nonencyclopedic) baseball volume ever: records, pictures [all the players posed in suits and ties], bios of 358 players, managers, 34 immortals, execs, trainers, statisticians, umpires and radio announcers.”

Runners-up: Ernest J. Lanigan, The Baseball Cyclopedia, 1922, with annual updates through 1933; John P. Carmichael, ed., My Greatest Day in Baseball, 1945; Robert Henderson, Ball, Bat, and Bishop, 1947; Robert Smith, Baseball, 1947.

1948–1976

The Baseball Encyclopedia, David S. Neft et al., Information Concepts, Inc., 1969

As noted above, this is the Golden Age of Baseball Books. Testifying to this assertion is the stature of the four runners-up, not to mention the other worthies left on the shelf. Roger Angell’s The Summer Game, for example, is brilliant, but if importance rather than beauty is the measure, it drops off. This mammoth volume, issued in nine subsequent editions over the years (though without Neft and ICI), revolutionized baseball’s recordkeeping and history. Despite its $25 price ($183 today!) it became indispensable.

Runners-up: Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times, 1966; Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., 1968; Ball Four, Jim Bouton with Leonard Shecter, 1970; Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer, 1972.

1977–2002

The Bill James Baseball Abstract, Bill James, 1982 (published annually 1982–1988)

Bill James is, to our generation, what Henry Chadwick was to his: incisive, unique, prolific. After five self-published Abstracts, he began publishing his quirky annual volume commercially and soon made sabermetrics, also called baseball analytics, the vanguard way to understand the game. Like Chadwick he created new statistics but more importantly he became the game’s culture hero.

Runners-up: Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 1983; Robert Creamer, Stengel: His Life and Times, 1984; Daniel Okrent and Glen Waggoner, eds., Rotisserie League Baseball, 1984; Marc Okkonen, Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide, 1991.

2003–2020

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis, 2003

With this book, Michael Lewis coined a phrase signifying that in baseball, as in other transactional environments, less could be made into more … as small-market clubs with limited capital could compete with the Yankees, Dodgers, and Cubs. All it took was creativity, a nimble spirit, and sabermetric analysis of the opportunity/dilemma at hand. Bill James and Pete Palmer had already altered the landscape for baseball’s advanced fans, but Moneyball made analytics big league in the dugout and in the front office.

Runners-up: Alan Schwarz, The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, 2004; David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, 2005; Peter Morris, A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations that Shaped Baseball, 2006; Jane Leavy, The Big Fella, 2018.