* Baseball beach reading, via ESPN

An “annotated” list of several general sports titles from ESPN’s D.J. Gallo includes baseball books such as:

• Baseball Places to See Before You Strike Out” by Josh Pahigian. Hey, who says I’m going to strike out, jerk? I was a two-time Little League All-Star. Two times! Be a bit more complimentary with your title and perhaps I will consider getting your book. Not buying it, mind you, but borrowing a copy at my local library for free.
• Yankee for Life: My 40-Year Journey in Pinstripes by Bobby Murcer. Gross. This guy could probably use a shower and some clean laundry.
• Dugout Wisdom: Life Lesson from Baseball by Dan Migala. If how to spit tobacco or spot hot chicks in the stands are the life lessons you seek, this is the book for you.
• Get in the Game: 8 Elements of Perseverance That Make the Difference by Cal Ripken Jr. It’s a good thing Ripken wasn’t No. 54 or 99 or something. This would have been a ridiculously long book.
• Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston’s Rise to Dominance by Michael Holley. Finally! A book about the Boston Red Sox. You know what I would like to read? A book about Red Sox players who golf.
• We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved by Fay Vincent. No doubt all the ex-players included in this book talk about how they donated all of their baseball income to charity.
• Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher by Jonathan Mayo with a foreword by Roger Clemens. Soon to be followed by the book: Facing Clemens: Congressmen on Confronting Baseball’s Most Awesome Hero,” by Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC
• Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember by John Feinstein. This book follows the 2007 seasons of New York pitchers Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine. I can’t wait for the 2008 follow-up about Phil Hughes and Oliver Perez called Dying on the White: Two Pitchers, Countless Meatballs, One Season to Forget.
• The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 — When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone by Mike Shropshire. I wasn’t alive in 1975, but my dad says that back then in the good old days, book titles stayed under 130 words.
• Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective by Al Santasiere. Thankfully this is not a scratch-and-sniff book.
• The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ‘78 by Richard Bradley. Wait a minute … I thought the Giants-Colts game in 1958 was the best game ever? Author fight! Author fight! They’ll draw their laptops at dawn at Starbucks.
• The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made it to the Big Leagues After Eleven Years in the Minors” by Chris Coste. Coste’s name wasn’t in the Mitchell report, so this book might actually have a surprising and inspirational story to tell.
• The View from the Upper Deck by DJ Gallo. This book isn’t brand-new like the rest of these. But any book that has stayed entrenched in the top 350,000 of the bestsellers list for an entire year must be really, really good.

* Now we’re talkin’

I came across these posts from The Bronx Banter portion of The Baseball Toaster and The Hardball Times that cut to the chase of what The Bookshelf is all about.

Alex Belth, who writes Bronx Banter, got the ball rolling, in response to a query he received from Phillyburbs.com regarding his suggestions for “ten essential baseball books.”

As he writes on the blog, these are “Not the ten best books or even the ten most essential books just ten essential ones.” (emphasis in the original)

Thank you.

In turn, Belth asked 55 of his closest friends — historians, biographers, columnists, beat writers, screenwriters, novelists — for their considered opinions. He did yeoman’s work tabulating the results, some of which are reported here. (In these two posts, he reports on the ballots and comments of the participants, A-R and S-W.)

The top 15 choices, each of which received seven or more votes, yield no real surprise or argument:

1. Ball Four (35 votes)
2. The Glory of Their Times (29)
3. The Bill James Historical Abstract (27)
4. The Boys of Summer (20)
5. Moneyball (20)
6. Veeck as in Wreck (16)
7. Babe (Richard Creamer, 15)
8. Lords of the Realm(15)
9. The Summer Game (14)
10. Eight Men Out (13)
11. A False Spring (10)
12. The Summer of ‘49 (9)
13. The Natural (9)
14. Baseball’s Great Experiment ( 8 )
15. Dollar Sign on the Muscle (7)

Among the top authors are Bill James (41 votes) Jim Bouton/ Leonard Schechter (35), Lawrence Ritter (30), Roger Angell (28), and Michael Lewis and Roger Kahn (20). One surprising ommission: Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell, author of Why Time Begins on Opening Day, which was always one of my favorties and perhaps the first book that made me long to be a sportswriter.

I’m curious about the age demographic of this survey. Most of the titles mentioned are classics (the most recent is Moneyball, which came out several years ago), and seemingly not of interest to today’s fantasy fanciers and staheads.

I’m not going to go all the other books on the list, but I’m culling and picking out a few that seem non-essential, in my humble opinion.

According to Merriam-Webster.com, “essential” is a noun dating from the 15h century meaning:

1. something basic <the essentials of astronomy>
2. something necessary, indispensable, or unavoidable

If my wife made me choose between her and a few books in my library, these are the ones considered indispensable by some of the voters that I would discard to keep the peace:

• Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher and Ed Linn — especially since it seems that’s not the actual quote
• The Bronx Zoo (Sparky Lyle) and Bo: Pitching and Wooing (Bo Belinsky) — Bouton, what hast thou wrought?
• Seasons in Hell by Mike Shropshire, about the Texas Rangers in the early-mid 1970s. He just came out with The Last Real Season, a new book on the subject (like we really need two?)
• Pride of the Bimbos — if I had to ditch titles, most of the novels would be among the first to go.
• The Life You Imagine, by Derek Jeter (might be essential for 10-year-old Yankees fans)
• The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney. Too many books of this type.
• The White Rat by Whitey Herzog (see Jeter’s book, but apply it to whatever audience would find this essential)
• Snap Me Perfect by Darrel Porter (see Herzog’s book)
• Don Baylor: Nothing But the Truth by Baylor and Claire Smith (see above)
• Hang Tough, Paul Mather by Alfred Slote and Baseball Palace of the Wold by Douglas Bukowski. Never heard of these, which automatically render them non-essential

The posts from THT can be read here and here.

* Baseball book roundup: The Boston Globe

A simple list of five titles, (and no commentary) with a couple of Red Sox-centric choices, as determined by Barnes and Noble.com for New England regional sales.

The list of five: Baseball’s movies best films, according to CSM

According to Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer:

With the new baseball season almost upon us, this is a perfect time to recommend a few standout movies about the sport – not that there have been many. Some of the most acclaimed, like “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural,” are so overblown they might as well be about the Knights of the Round Table. Monitor critic Peter Rainer selects five that continue to give us pleasure.

The list includes (with my very brief commentary):

• Pride of the Yankees (Agreed)
• The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motors Kings (No)
• Eight Men Out (Agreed)
• Bull Durham (Agreed)
• The Rookie (Agreed)

The reviewer points out that Field of Dreams is absent from his list. I don’t have any great problem with that, but there must be something better than Bingo, as good as that was. It can’t be a question of recently films, since Pride is in there.

2008 Roundup: Tampa Bay Online

As we head into the season, look for newspapers and magazines to start publishing collections of reviews, either as stand-alones or part of a “round-up” of brief items, like this one at TampaBayOnline which includes:

• Yogi: The Life and Times of an American Original
• Change Up: An Oral History of 8 Key Events that Shaped Modern Baseball
• Benchclearing: Baseball’s Greatest Fights and Riots
• The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct

Bits and pieces

• From WickedLocal.com, the Web site for the Lakeville (Mass.) Call and Enterprise, this list of favorite baseball titles.
• From WNBC.com, this brief profile about 100-year-old Bill Werber, believed to be the oldest ex-major leaguer. Werber published his autobiography in 2000, when he was a mere babe of 92.

Memories of a Ballplayer: Bill Werber and Baseball in the 1930s (Society for American Baseball Research)

• A piece from the Philadelphia Daily News on Phillies cather Chris Coste’s new book.

It’s a crazy business

Two items on the business side of the game:

• mentalfloss on odd contract clauses
• The Business of Baseball’s list of “most effective minor league promotions“

The All-Literary Team

I originally did this several years ago for Fastball.com, a now-defunct web site.

Pitchers	Roger “Samuel” Clemens, Josh “Samuel” Beckett, Craig “Larry” McMurtry, Jerry “Saint” Augustine, Casey “William” Blake
Catcher	Mike “F. Scott” Fitzgerald
First Base	Bud “Tom” Clancy
Second Base	Ed “Ernest” Hemingway
Shortstop	Bill “Bertrand” Russell
Third Base	Bill “James” Joyce
Leftfield	Buster “Henry” Adams
Centerfield	Dion “Henry” James
Rightfield	Chick “Stephen” King
Manager	Charlie “Brothers” Grimm

Other suggestions?

Yet another list…

Film critic Richard Roeper’s best and worst baseball films of all time:

Best (In order of preference)	Worst (In alpha order*)
The Natural	The Babe
Bull Durham	The Babe Ruth Story
Field of Dreams	The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
Bang the Drum Slowly	The Fan
Pride of the Yankees	Fear Strikes Out
Major League	Major League: Back to the Minors
	The Slugger’s Wife

* because the author says at some point, awful is just awful.

From 10 Sure Signs a Movie Character is Doomed & Other Surprising Movie Lists, Hyperion, 2003.

These have been culled from Roeper’s lists of all-time best and worst sports movies. There have been a few additional baseball films since this book came out. At the risk of speaking out of turn, I would venture to add The Rookie to the “best” side while some might put the remake of The Bad News Bears in the “worst” category.

Another “top” list

From the BookFinder.com blog comes this loist of classic titles deemed the best on the game.

“Compiling a list of books about baseball has only two inherent difficulties: where to begin, and where to end. In the final press release we would only be able to mention ten titles. Imagine my despair as I looked over my admittedly idiosyncratic list of a couple dozen essential baseball books, knowing that I was inevitably missing many great books, but also that I would have to further distill my list down to the required maximum ten titles.”

Unless I missed it, the entry doesn’t actually offer the list-of-ten. Nor could I find a link to the “press release” to which they refer. Maybe I’m just tired…