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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The Natural
Bernard Malamud
Audiobook
The Natural, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's first novel, tells the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era and invests it with the hardscrabble poetry that is at once grand and altogether believable.
Shoeless Joe
W. P. Kinsella
Audiobook
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
Audiobook
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...
Bang the Drum Slowly
Mark Harris
Ebook
Bang the Drum Slowly is the second in a series of four novels written by Mark Harris that chronicles the career of baseball player Henry W. Wiggen. This series is among the finest novels ever written to use baseball as a theme. Published in 1956, the book is a simple, moving testament to...
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
Paper Book
"One of the best baseball--and management--books out.... Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."--Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy...
The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
Audiobook
The Boys of Summer
Roger Kahn
Ebook
"A moving elegy . . . [to] the best team the majors ever saw . . . the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s."  -- New York Times The classic narrative of growing up within shouting distance of Ebbets Field, covering the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, and what's happened to everybody since.<...
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
Kadir Nelson
Paper Book
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 ...

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