Here are 100 books that How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball fans have personally recommended if you like
How Bill James Changed Our View of the Game of Baseball.
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I’ve worked in sports media since graduating college, first as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, then as an editor at ESPN The Magazine and eventually becoming editor-in-chief of the magazine as well as espn.com. I’ve also written several books, including The Odds, which was my immersion into the world of sports betting. Like the books on my list, the experience of writing The Odds scratched every itch: It was about sports, it featured intense and passionate characters and it revealed a secret world with massive influence. The Odds led to a career in betting media, including creating the sports betting beat at ESPN and, eventually, launching The Action Network, a sports betting media network.
This hits every high note for me. It’s both aspirational and accessible. The “Moneyball Generation” has had a profound impact on every element of sports—from how games are managed, how they’re covered, who is valued, and who makes decisions. That’s because of Lewis, whose writing I love because it is so breezy and conversational, especially when explaining complicated concepts.
My passion is telling stories that explain what’s happening behind the scenes and how they impact sports fans. Lewis does this better than anyone in this book.
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 book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have been a baseball fan since the New York Mets won the World Series in 1969. Unfortunately, I am not an athlete, so I needed to figure out how to experience the sport in my own way. That path led me to baseball analysis and fantasy and a career writing about them. I pinch myself every morning that I have been able to turn my passion into my career.
I always enjoy a “fish out of water” story, and this one hit home for me–a newspaperman who had never played fantasy baseball joining the most prestigious league of national experts.
I was amused at how he thought all his professional connections would give him a leg up, but the narrative was played for laughs, making it a very enjoyable read.
Every spring, millions of Americans prepare to take part in one of the oddest, most obsessive, and most engrossing rituals in the sports pantheon: Rotisserie baseball, a fantasy game where armchair fans match wits by building their own teams. In 2004, Sam Walker, a sports columnist for the Wall Street Journal, decided to explore this phenomenon by talking his way into Tout Wars, a league reserved for the nations top experts. The result is one of the most sheerly entertaining sports books in years and a matchless look into the heart and soul of our national pastime.
I have been a baseball fan since the New York Mets won the World Series in 1969. Unfortunately, I am not an athlete, so I needed to figure out how to experience the sport in my own way. That path led me to baseball analysis and fantasy and a career writing about them. I pinch myself every morning that I have been able to turn my passion into my career.
Back in the mid-2000s, I invited Matthew Berry to speak at my conferences, so I know firsthand how he can instill humor and entertainment into the geekdom of playing fantasy sports.
In his book, I loved how he interspersed stories about how we play fantasy with his own personal narrative. His book is about me, you, and everyone who loves this crazy game.
Includes new chapters with small, easy-to-understand words. Bestselling words!
Fantasy football, fantasy baseball, fantasy basketball, even fantasy sumo wrestling: the world of fantasy sports is huge, and still growing. Today, more than 35 million people in the United States and Canada spend hours upon hours each week on their fantasy sports teams. And as the Senior Fantasy Sports Analyst for ESPN, Matthew Berry is on the front lines of what has grown from a niche subculture into a national pastime.
In his New York Times-bestselling Fantasy Life, Berry celebrates every aspect of the fantasy sports world. Brilliant trash talk. Unbelievable…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have been a baseball fan since the New York Mets won the World Series in 1969. Unfortunately, I am not an athlete, so I needed to figure out how to experience the sport in my own way. That path led me to baseball analysis and fantasy and a career writing about them. I pinch myself every morning that I have been able to turn my passion into my career.
I love this hobby, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include a book that exposed our challenges as the industry has evolved.
There is some “fish out of water” element to this book, too, but I thought it was an important exposition of how Daily Fantasy Sports nearly destroyed the enjoyment we long-timers have experienced for the past four decades.
In the spirit of Bringing Down the House and The Wolf of Wall Street, “an engrossing and often hilarious behind-the-scenes look at the characters, compulsions, and chaos inside the fantasy sports gold rush. It’s the perfect meld of a sports and business book, engagingly written like a fun, page-turning novel” (The Wall Street Journal).
Daniel Barbarisi quit his job as a New York Yankees beat writer and began a quest to join the top one percent of Daily Fantasy Sports (“DFS”) players, the so-called “sharks,” in hopes to discover the secrets behind this phenomenon—and potentially make some money along the…
I’ve been reading baseball annuals and previews since I was a kid and my must-haves were Street & Smith’s Baseball Yearbook and Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball. I was a contributing writer for several years to Ultimate Sports Publishing’s annual baseball magazines, which for a while came close to the old Mazeroski releases. I edited several of Baseball America’s Almanacs when I was on staff there and have written Top 30s for a number of the Prospect Handbooks. I get that everything is available online these days, but there’s something about having it all in one place, locked in for all time, there for reference whenever needed.
The Sporting News last released the Guide in 2006. TSN stopped printing magazines altogether several years later. But I have dozens of the old ones in my library, dating back to the 1940s. They’re a handy reference, and a great place to fall down rabbit holes. When the internet became the go-to place for baseball statistics, TSN found it hard to sell these.
Baseball America’s annual Almanac fills some of that real estate, and fortunately they keep printing them.
I’ve loved baseball since I was six years old when I watched that ground ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs and propel my New York Mets to their second World Series. I’ve loved film for almost as long. The best way to love something is to think critically about it–put it to the test. That’s why I wrote Baseball: The Movie. It was an effort to avoid unexamined nostalgia, to think hard about these things I love, and to make sure I love them honestly. I’ve spent 10 years as a freelance writer on baseball and movies, but not until I wrote this book did I feel like they had truly passed my test.
I love baseball books about underdogs, and there are no bigger underdogs than…every character in this book.
It’s the true story of when two data-driven baseball writers got to put their claims of superiority to the test by running an independent league baseball team for a season. Their players are a motley crew of cast-offs with only a faint hope of ever making the majors. But hope is all you need in the world of baseball.
The book chronicles one season in the lives of these players and front-office executives with humor, grit, and more than a little romanticism. As another book about a data-driven general manager once put it, how can you not be romantic about baseball?
It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies - with real players, in a real ballpark, playing in real time. That's what Ben Lindbergh and Sam Millergotto do when the Sonoma Stompers, an independent minor league team in California, offered them the chance to run the team's baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. Their story is unlike any other baseball tale you've ever read. We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have spent four decades studying the sports business. A lifelong sports fanatic and a trained antitrust lawyer, I originally approached the problem as a straightforward cartel by owners. When consulting for a UK government investigation into sports, I learned how often owners “leave money on the table” because they can’t agree on how to divide things up, and how often league decisions are not responsive to consumer preference. The book is part of a career of analyzing how the structure of sports governance fails to meet the expectations of fans and the general public.
Although the collection of essays by a wonderful journalist is a great read, the key is the chapter Going Green about the innovative investment and community-oriented management of the Oakland Athletics baseball team by the Haas family and the principal owner’s son-in-law, attorney Roy Eisenhardt.
I loved the articulation of why sports are important and how owners should behave, and how front office management should manage.
Our book would be unnecessary if owners were likely like Walter Haas, Jr. and his family.
Offering a unique perspective on the ins and out of baseball, the author examines in detail the job of the catcher, pitchers' strategies, and the intricate play of infielders, discussing the best players of the past five seasons and their greatest moments
I love including social issues and controversial topics in my plots. I love underdogs and the downtrodden. I enjoy unique and quirky characters with excellent, appropriate, and sometimes noir-ish voices. Twists and major reveals in genre books and movies are also very important to me. I’m not a subject matter expert in much of anything I write about (thank goodness for the internet), except for one novel yet to be published, which is a major catharsis for me.
The bestest novel I have ever read! The first-person narrative and humor just blew me away and helped me develop my own writer's voice. I was drawn in by the first few lines, and my interest never let up. First page: “Okay, here’s the deal. This is a book about a baseball player. Do you care? If you don’t care, read it anyway. There’s some other stuff in it, too.”
The narrator identifies himself as an “old weird guy poet” and remains nameless. How can you not like that, and him? There are excellent major twists. This is an obscure little novel. So obscure that it has only two reviews on Amazon, and one of them is mine. I do wish more people had discovered it. It is not available as an ebook; get the hardcover. It's cheap.
Wondering whether Nabokov might have left any unpublished manuscripts behind and if so, did they have baseball themes? If anyone reading this knows the answer, please check the files to see if there's a manuscript for a novel named Chance. . . . It's a very good one, full of wit, good humor, and baseball. And if you don't care about the latter, take the advice the book offers in its first paragraph and 'Read it anyway. There's other stuff in it, too.' -Allen Barra, The Palm Beach Post
I split my writing time between fiction and non-fiction, the latter usually baseball-themed, and I’ve published two books of baseball writing. My reading is similarly bifurcated; there’s always a baseball book on my nightstand. I’ve also got a background in history, and I genuinely enjoy deep research (it’s a great way to put off, you know, writing). Baseball is such fertile ground, so ripe for deep dives—the nexus of sport, culture, entertainment, economics, labour relations, etc. The best baseball books are more than boxscores and transactions, they place the game in its historical context. Books that manage to synthesize all of the above are some of my favourite reads.
Henry Aaron’s career spanned the Negro Leagues, the Civil Rights movement, baseball’s expansion era, the turbulent ’60s, and the freaky ’70s, all while dealing with intractable racism, especially as he neared Babe Ruth’s home run record. Aaron’s autobiography, I Had a Hammer, is certainly worth reading, but author and NPR correspondent Howard Bryant is the right man to put Aaron’s life and career in historical perspective. The Last Hero is an intelligent and incisive social history of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as a stirring account of a heroic baseball life. Incidentally, Bryant’s next book is a biography of Rickey Henderson, which promises more of this goodness. I can’t wait.
This definitive biography of Henry (Hank) Aaron—one of baseball's immortal figures—is a revelatory portrait of a complicated, private man who through sports became an enduring American icon.
“Beautifully written and culturally important.” —The Washington Post
“The epic baseball tale of the second half of the 20th century.” —Atlanta Journal Constitution
After his retirement in 1976, Aaron’s reputation only grew in magnitude. But his influence extended beyond statistics. Based on meticulous research and extensive interviews The Last Hero reveals how Aaron navigated the upheavals of his time—fighting against racism while at the same time benefiting from racial progress—and how he achieved…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a former children’s librarian who writes books for children and young adults. I love history, especially black history. We didn’t get much in school when I was a child, so I’ve been catching up on some of what I missed. I am particularly drawn to under-told stories about people who deserve more recognition for their contributions. I’m proud that some of those people are members of my own family.
In Georgie Radbourn’s America, baseball (even the mention of it) is illegal, Winter is eternal and everyone over the age of eight must work in factories. All this because of dictator and embittered former baseball player Boss Swaggart. The people fear Swaggart and his Factory Police too much to resist. Georgie is born into this world, so he knows nothing else. Still, something in him rebels.
Shannon’s Orwellian tale is about baseball, yes, but it’s more than it appears (as is true of the best books). It’s about how we often don’t grasp how much we love something until it’s taken away. It’s about how, without the things that give us hope, spring never comes. It’s about how one brave person can triumph and inspire courage in others.
Bestselling Caldecott Honor artist David Shannon tells the story of a boy who overcomes a cruel tyrant using his love of baseball.
Chosen as a NEW YORK TIMES Best Illustrated Children's Book, HOW GEORGIE RADBOURN SAVED BASEBALL was published more than a decade ago, and it was the very first book award-winner David Shannon wrote and illustrated himself. Using his vast experience as an editorial illustrator, Shannon told an expressive, emotional tale of a time when spring no longer existed, and it was always winter in America. Why? Because an angry dictator declared baseball illegal, and once-happy citizens fell into…
