5 Baseball Books To Get Your Loved Ones This Holiday Season
5 Baseball Books To Get Your Loved Ones This Holiday Season
If you're looking for a gift for the baseball fan in your life, look no further than these fantastic baseball books, both old and new.
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Pregame Pepper: Joe Posnanski Discusses “Why We Love Baseball”
Leading Off
Baseball Books For Your 2023 Holiday Shopping List
By Russ Walsh
I am back with my second annual baseball book gift givers guide. Looking for a gift for that baseball fan in your life? How about a good read? No sport, indeed, few human endeavors have generated as much good writing as baseball. Whether it’s essayist Roger Angell, novelist Chad Harbach, poet Donald Hall, or journalist Jayson Stark, baseball makes for good writing and good reading. Here are a few books for your consideration – some new and some old, some non-fiction, some fiction, and one somewhere in-between.
Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski
Posnanski makes my list for the second year in a row with this indispensable book. Last year in The Baseball 100, Posnanski presented his own list of the greatest baseball players ever. Any author who posits a “Best of…” list in baseball leaves himself wide open to second guessers, yet Posnanski opens himself up to second guessing once again with this compilation.
All the expected moments are here, like the Mays catch, the Thomson home run, and the George Brett pine tar incident, along with more than a few surprises, like the woman hurler who whiffed the Babe and the time an aging Satchel Paige pitched to Josh Gibson. What makes this book so great, however, is not the moments selected, but the way Posnanski tells the story of each moment, framing each remarkable event in the context of its contribution to our abiding love of the game.
If you buy the Audible version of the book, you will get the extra treat of hearing Posnanski share reading aloud duties with actress and fanatical Philadelphia Phillies fan Ellen Adair. She reads the “Five Bonus Baseball Memories” sections that are interspersed throughout the book, such as “Five Trick Plays'' and “Five Blunders.” By the end, you get more like 100 memorable moments in a book that advertises 50. If you only read one baseball book this year, you owe it to yourself to read this one.
The Grandest Stage by Tyler Kepner
Last year I recommended Kepner’s book, K: The Story of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Kepner, formerly of the New York Times and now writing for The Athletic, like all the best baseball writers is both a huge fan and a fine writer. In this book, he chronicles baseball’s biggest event, the World Series. If baseball is a game of heroic feats and epic failures, the World Series is the place where heroism and failure are magnified one-thousand-fold.
Reggie Jackson lives forever in fame as Mr. October. Bill Buckner lives forever in infamy because a ground ball rolled through his legs. It all just matters more during the World Series, and Kepner is a worthy guide to all the great moments we remember and a number of great moments we may not. What makes for success on this grandest of stages? Why do a few succeed where so many fail? Kepner asks this question of David Ortiz, perhaps the greatest of all World Series heroes. Big Papi’s response: “Some people got it, some people don’t.” Yep. This book is destined to become our standard reference book on the World Series.
Wingmen, The Unlikely, Unusual Friendship between John Glenn and Ted Williams by Adam Lazarus
Here is a story I had never heard before. I was aware of Williams’ two tours of duty in the military, and I was vaguely aware that Glenn was a Navy flier before becoming a famed astronaut and United States senator. I had no idea that the two ended up in Korea in the same airplane squadron flying mission after mission together, getting shot out of the air a few times, and developing lifelong respect and friendship.
Two more different personalities would be hard to find. The modest, measured, family man Glenn versus the brash, moody, foul-mouthed, thrice-married Williams. Both were past the age for most Navy pilots by the time of the Korean War, but Glenn wheedled his way into a commission, while Williams and the Red Sox tried everything to get Ted excused from his surprise callup. Once in battle, however, both proved their merit and earned the other’s respect. The book offers some harrowing details of near misses, ocean landings, and runway crashes as it builds its story of a surprising, abiding friendship.
Pitching in a Pinch, Baseball from the Inside by Christy Mathewson
You already know that Mathewson was the greatest pitcher of his era, with a record of 373-188 over 17 seasons from 1900-1916. You may also know that Matty, as he was known, was one of the most intelligent players of his era, having attended his hometown Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. This book proves that Mathewson was also one of the game’s great storytellers and students of the game.
Mixing a keen eye for detail, a sparkling vocabulary, and the patois of the turn of the century baseball field, Mathewson clues us in on how he got Ed Delahanty out with high fastballs, how he and his New York Giants teammates drove “Giant Killer” Harry Coveleski back to the Minor Leagues, and how he saved his strength during a game so he had a little extra in the “pinch.” An “inside baseball” book by one of the great masters and characters of the game.
Casey at the Bat (A Centennial Edition) by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, illustrations by Barry Moser, afterword by Donald Hall
This edition of Casey at the Bat was created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first publication of baseball’s most famous poem. The book is out of print, but if you can find a copy (I got mine on Abe Books website), it is a treasure. You know the Thayer poem, of course, but what makes this edition special are Moser’s illustrations, which were rendered from historic photographs and drawings from the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and the afterword by U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall that places the poem in historical context somewhere between a Homeric epic and the ground ball that snuck between Bill Buckner’s legs.
Every baseball game provides a unique story. Every baseball book offers unique rewards. Give the baseball fans in your life a book to warm them through the winter until the stories begin again this coming spring.
Russ Walsh is a retired teacher, die hard Phillies fan, and student of the history of baseball with a special interest in the odd, quirky, and once in a lifetime events that happen on the baseball field. He writes for both the SABR BioProject and the SABR Games Project and maintains his own blog The Faith of a Phillies Fan. You can reach Russ on Twitter @faithofaphilli1