For serious fans, the end of the World Series doesn't mean the end of baseball. There may not be any more games to watch, but the most literary of sports is rich in off-season reading. Booksnreview.com editors put together 10 terrific titles to nurse diehards through until spring training. Our favorites include accomplished fiction and nonfiction stylists, whose works who explore baseball history, biographies of the game's icons, the rise of analytics and the role of the front office -- and a few peeks at the darker side of the sport, from gambling scandals to the science behind the rash of pitching injuries that define the modern game.
If you can't play ball, at least read on!
Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess, Evan Drellich
The other Texas team, the Houston Astros, has been a perennial powerhouse since 2014, though a cheating scandal in 2017 tainted its first-ever World Series triumph. Drellich looks at the whole Astros organization, starting at the top with general manager Jeff Luhnow. The brash baseball outsider imported a freewheeling management style to the team's front office, revolutionizing its draft strategy to land future stars like George Springer, Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman, the nucleus of the championship 2017 squad. But Luhnow's toxic style permeated the front office culture, and ethical lapses made their way to the players on the field. This doggedly researched sports business story tells a potent cautionary tale.
Ball Four, Jim Bouton
The first tell-all tale from a player blew back the curtain that shielded baseball's dirty laundry from its fans, long accustomed to sanitized versions of the game's personalities and locker-room politics by a compliant sporting press. A half-century later, the former star pitcher's tale of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros reads as a lot less racy, but the humor and insights into the game endure.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis
Baseball today is a sport transformed by the relentless application of data and analytics that leave no facet of the game untouched by quantitative analysis. Lewis' engaging story of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's then-revolutionary use of data to scratch out wins through unseen advantages and propel his team to the 2002 American League playoffs on a tiny budget with a team full of bargain-basement players is a fun account of the start of the sabermetric revolution.
The Arm, Jeff Passan
Pitching a baseball overhand is among the most violent and unnatural motions in sports, but soft throwers don't get looked at by professional scouts. Passan delves into the physics of the human body and the movements of a pitched ball as he charts the rise in pitching injuries and the corresponding increase in Tommy John reconstructive arm surgery. Tracking two pitchers, Daniel Hudson and Todd Coffey, through their surgeries and grueling rehab journeys, Passan demonstrates baseball's dependence on the health of pitchers' ulnar collateral ligaments, and how the emphasis on velocity is spurring these injuries as early as Little League.
A Pitcher's Story: Innings With David Cone, Roger Angell
Angell raised plenty of eyebrows at the New Yorker magazine when he started writing about baseball, but few other publications would grant a writer enough leeway to reshape sports coverage while becoming the sport's finest prose stylist. A Pitcher's Story stands out from his many other works, mostly collections of New Yorker articles, by tracking star hurler Cone through the 2000 season. It turned out to be his worst year in the majors, just one season after reaching the pinnacle of the sport, pitching a perfect game, only the 16th time in the entire history of the sport. Angell's chronicle of Cone's shipwrecked season showcases the athlete's intelligence and drive, while Angell's powers of observation and insight are also near their peak.
Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, Eliot Asinof
The 1919 gambling scandal that nearly broke the sport gets a careful, compassionate look from Asinof. The story of the eight Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing games to lose the series to the Cincinnati Reds evokes the rough-and-tumble world of gamblers dirty players and the few, like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Eddie Cicotte, whose ambiguous roles make them tragic historical figures.
Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella
This novel isn't afraid to tug - hard - on the heartstrings as it drifts into magical realism. The story of an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield, followed by some wonderful, if heavily sentimental events that inspired the film Field of Dreams.
Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball, Luke Epplin
This tale of the 1948 World Series touches on the boundless changes wrought by the integration of baseball through the stories of four central figures: Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige. Each man's path to the World Championship touches on aspects of the game and its history during a period of profound change.
Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams
The steroids era of the late 1990s pushed offensive stats to stratospheric levels, as Sammy Sosa hit 66 homers in 1998, losing the single-season record to Mark McGwire's, followed by Barry Bonds' 73 dingers in 2001. Rumors of performance-enhancing drug by stars and benchwarmers alike use gradually turned into open secrets. In 2004, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Fainaru-Wada and Williams exposed the supply pipeline from BALCO, a nutritional supplement company run by Victor Conte, and broke a story that federal investigators got Yankees outfielder Jason Giambi to admit to steroid use. The fallout was widespread and harsh. This book offers a blow-by-blow account of baseball's doping scandal, which left a stain on the records and reputations of players who would otherwise be thought of as all-time greats.
The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn
Baseball history can be intensely personal, and Kahn's 1972 classic weaves personal memoir with the histories of the 1955 Dodgers before and after their World Series triumph. His profiles of Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider and Pee Wee and their less iconic teammates, stalwarts like Clem Labine, Carl Erskine, Preacher Roe, Joe Black, George Shuba, Carl Furillo and Billy Cox hearken back to an era when baseball and Brooklyn meant everything to the fans. The author's and players' looks to their pasts as players and younger men are sweet, sometimes poignant examples of how the game lives on in memories.