* Nicholas Dawidoff picks his favorite baseball fiction

In a May 3 piece for The Wall Street Journal, Dawidoff — author The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg and, the just-released The Crowd Sounds Happy — lists his top choices in the genre:

1. You Know Me, Al by Ring Lardner
2. The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
3. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., by Robert Coover
4. The Greatest Slump of All Time, by David Carkeet
5. The Southpaw, by Mark Harris

Of course, such choices are always subjective. One man’s meat, and all…I never got into Coover’s book and am always pleasantly surprised when Slump gets a nod.