What is the best non-fiction, non-statistical treatise, baseball book ever written? (Feel free to add suggestions in "Comments")
| Ball Four |  42 (40.78%) |
| The Boys of Summer | 10 (9.71%) |
| The Catcher Was a Spy | 2 (1.94%) |
| Bums | 0 (0.00%) |
| The Glory of Their Times | 7 (6.80%) |
| Men at Work | 0 (0.00%) |
| Moneyball | 36 (34.95%) |
| A Pitcher's Story | 2 (1.94%) |
| Summer of '49 | 3 (2.91%) |
| The Umpire Strikes Back | 1 (0.97%) |
- Nice Guys Finish Last
- The Pitch That Killed
- Prophet of the Sandlots
- A Lefty's Legacy
- Nine Innings
That said, I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who did, in fact, actually prefer Moneyball as a work of non-fiction literature.
The life of Moe Berg would make a great movie -- hell, a miniseries -- someday, though you'd end up with a Chuck Barris-like denoument, wondering if he imagined the whole damn thing or not.
"The Glory of Their Times" gets my vote by a nose over "Ball Four," reluctantly. But I want to give a shout-out to the first baseball book that captivated me when I was a wee small thing - "Inside Baseball" by Arthur Daley. It was my dad's before me, I think I found it in an attic. Anyway, Daley used to write baseball for the New York Times, and this book wanders, freely and at random, over the years 1901-1950. It's where I first learned the legends of Ruth and Gehrig, Johnson and McGraw.
I wish David Halberstam would stick to writing about war and politics and the economy. He loves baseball, true, but doesn't take it seriously enough to get stuff right. And finally, my favourite baseball biography of all time: "Veeck - as in Wreck."
Or, for that matter, to The Glory of Their Times, which besides being a great baseball book is a work of great literary merit - one of the great works of oral history ever assembled (along with Studs Terkel's Hard Times and Ronald Fraser's Blood in Spain).
But comparing Ball Four to a finely aged steak? It's a zippy, fun little book, but it's fast food. Fast food can be delicious, and Ball Four is that, but it isn't what I'd call nourishing.
Moneyball is a terrific business book, and a terrific baseball book, and that's something to be said for it. I wouldn't call it a great book, but it's very good.
Of the books listed, I've read all but The Catcher Was A Spy, which I haven't bought yet. In my opinion, all of them are good books, with the exception of Ron Luciano's boring, self-congratulatory The Umpire Strikes Back. Ball Four, TGOTT, Moneyball, A Pitcher's Story, and Summer of '49 are all particularly good, and would all make my list of Fifty Baseball Books To Start A Library With.
I think Me & The Spitter and Pitching in a Pinch (Gaylord Perry and Christy Mathewson, respectively) would both be on that list. I also remember as a youngster being quite touched by Andy Thornton's Triumph Born of Tragedy.
Roger Angell, The Summer Game.
Eliot Asinoff, Eight Men Out
Tom Boswell, How Life Imitates the World Series
Jim Brosnan, The Long Season
Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary
Bart Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise
Alison Gordon, Foul Balls
Arnold Hano, A Day in the Bleachers
Pat Jordan, A False Spring
Kevin Kerrane, Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting
Martin Quigley, The Crooked Pitch: The Curveball in American Baseball History
William Zinsser, Spring Training
Brosnan, Kerrane, and Quigley are great reads. As is any Roger Angell. And I agree with those who voted for The Glory of Their Times--a wonderful book.
It's not a problem with Moneyball... the book stands on its own merits as a book. If it was a bad draft (which it wasn't) it's a problem for the Oakland A's.
Moneyball doesn't make extravagant claims about the draftees, they're just an example of the process. If the process is seriously flawed, well that might leave something to be desired from the book. (I don't think the process is seriously flawed, but at any rate you can't tell it from one draft).
Three of those draftees are already in the majors three years after being picked, so the draft can't have been that terrible. The college players seen as the "next best" to Oakland's group (i.e. the guys they could have got instead, as measured by draft position) are Royce Ring, Derrick Grigsby, Luke Hagerty, Dan Meyer (who is now an Athletic), Chadd Blasko, Matt Clanton, and Mark Schramek. I think the A's group of Swisher, Blanton, McCurdy, Fritz, Brown, Obenchain, and Teahen was better. Like, about a billion times better.
2002 was a terrible draft class... saying that the A's didn't get a gang of worldbeaters with seven low first-round picks just means they did a little better than average.
While the book doesn't make extravagant claims about the players selected, the book upset a lot of people for a reason. Depicting Beane as a genius and then framing it in the context of this draft is just going to fall flat. Only the most hardcore baseball fan understands that the 2002 draft was so far below average, everyone else is going to look at 7 picks in the first 39 and wonder why they came up with so little. I love Beane, and to me he's one of the top 2 or 3 in the business, but his fit about Bonderman looks stupid since he'd trade all 7 of those players (if they still had all 7) to get Bonderman back in a heartbeat.
As for the 3 players in the majors, Swisher and Blanton have been horrible and Teahen really doesn't belong yet. If Swisher and Blanton turn it around then it can still be a success. It will look even worse if some of the high school players selected later end up being productive (not that there are a lot of huge prospects there).
It was a bit of bad luck for the A's, that 2002 draft is going to make studies like the one that BP just did make high school picks look even better because that is a lot of wasted picks on bad college players.