Baseball's Best Books

Some fiction, some non, but all favorite books about America's favorite past time.
Updated September 19, 2022
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Shoeless Joe
W. P. Kinsella
Shoeless Joe, the soul-stirring novel on which the movie Field of Dreams is based, is more than just another baseball story. Kinsella captures the spiritual dimension that baseball represents for its most determined devotees in this tale of love and the power of dreams to make people come alive....
You know Me Al: A Busher's Letters
Ring Lardner
Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his...
The Brothers K
David James Duncan
This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. Here there is a father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered by a mill accident, a mother who clings obsessively to a religion as a ward against the darkest hour of...
Bang the Drum Slowly
Mark Harris
A new dramatization of one of the greatest baseball stories of all time. A poignant, touching, and often comic tale of a baseball team's friendship and loyalty to a dying teammate. Adapted from the novel by Mark Harris.An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Ed Begley Jr., John...
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball...
The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." 
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
Kadir Nelson
In this New York Times bestselling classic, Caldecott Medal-winning artist Kadir Nelson tells the incredible story of baseball's unsung heroes -- perfect for celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Negro Leagues! Winner of the Coretta Scott King Author ...
Queen of the Negro Leagues : Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles
James Overmyer

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