An All-Star Break: 8 Baseball Books For Restless Fans

For fans, baseball has a problem: it doesn’t happen 365 days a year. Sure, with pitchers and catchers reporting in February and the occasional World Series game in November (Hey, Derek Jeter!), fans can live and breathe baseball for about nine months a year. That still leaves almost three months without baseball. For a little kid who soaks up the game and can recite baseball stats the way other kids identify Pokémon characters, that’s three months too long. 

Then there’s the All-Star break. Just as baseball becomes exciting, they put the season on hold. What to do? Read a book about baseball, of course! 

Kevin Baker is an historian and novelist with serious baseball bona fides. He co-wrote Reggie Jackson’s memoir Becoming Mr. October. He wrote the final chapter in the expanded edition of Baseball by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns. And Baker’s newest acclaimed book is The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City ($35; Knopf), an intertwined history of the game and the city where it flourished. Buy it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org. 

Here Baker discusses the once glorious tradition of the All-Star Game, shares memories of the first one he ever watched and then charts his lifelong love of baseball through the books he read growing up and into adulthood. It’s a companion piece to his Father’s Day tribute to seeing games with his dad and uncle, an article that also featured his picks for the 14 best baseball books of all time.

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The following is by author Kevin Baker. 

The first full baseball game I ever saw was the 1967 All-Star Game, on television from Anaheim, California. It was really a terrible game. Some broadcasting genius had decided to start it at 4:15, Pacific Coast time to accommodate the East Coast audience and nobody could see the ball in the late afternoon sun. There were some 21 future Hall-of-Famers in that game—but all of the great hitters on hand struck out a combined total of 30 times and the only scoring came on three solo home runs.

I loved every minute of it.

The game went 15 innings, and I got to stay up until Tony Perez's home run ended it, around 11 p.m., New Jersey time—way past my eight-year-old's bedtime. For years, I loved watching the All-Star Game, usually with my father. The two leagues really played hard to beat each other in those days, and often it was the only time you could see some of the great stars in the other circuit. There were so many memorable moments: Willie Mays winning the game's MVP award in 1968, Pete Rose running over Ray Fosse at the plate to decide the 1970 game, Reggie Jackson's mammoth home run off Dock Ellis in 1971.

The All-Star Game doesn't seem to have the same panache now, what with interleague play and abominable features such as on-field interviews while the game is still in progress. The players don't take it very seriously, and they don't stay in for very long. In that 1967 game, Roberto Clemente, Henry Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, Gene Alley, Brooks Robinson, Tony Oliva, Harmon Killebrew, Tony Conigliaro, Carl Yastrzemski, and even the American-League catcher, Bill Freehan, played all 15 innings. This is not to say they don't make players like they used to. They certainly do, and even better. But I'd rather see a little of that old intensity, rather than gimmicks such as the home-run derby.

A Fan’s Progress: Reading My Way Through Life With 8 Baseball Books

I make no claim that these books are the best ever written about our national game. They are, instead, the ones on which I grew up, and came of age on, as a fan and a writer. I read them repeatedly, loved them dearly…and still do. Most of them I still have, though some of the covers are beginning to crumble and the bindings are starting to give way—not unsimilar to their owner.

They are, in (my) chronological order:

1. The Story of Baseball: A Completely Illustrated and Exciting History of America’s National Game by John M. Rosenburg

My father bought me this book in the first year that I started to follow the game. I was all of eight years old. And while it contained some of the foundation myths still prevalent at the time, it conveyed, as advertised, all the excitement and history of the sport.

The Story of Baseball: A Completely Illustrated and Exciting History of America’s National Game by John M. Rosenburg (Out of print; Random House)

2. The Glory of Their Times by Lawrence S. Ritter

I first read Ritter’s wonderful, oral history of early 20th century baseball in 1967, when my parents bought me a subscription to The Sporting News–the old “Bible of baseball”–and it was serialized there. The stories of the players in their own words I have never forgotten. 

The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It by Lawrence S. Ritter ($18.99; Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

3. The Hank Aaron Story by Milton J. Shapiro

Back in the 1960s, sportswriters still made extra money by writing biographies of great baseball players aimed at children and young adults. Our local library in Pigeon Cove, Massachusetts—the Story Library, now long gone, sadly, two small rooms tended by very kind librarians named Mrs. Francis and Becky Eaton—contained many of these. They were hardly tell-alls, and usually out of date, but I read right through them all, several times over. Aaron was not my favorite ballplayer and the Braves were not my favorite team. Yet I was fascinated by his heroic story—not half-complete at the time!—noting how he had been the very first Black player in the old “Sally” (South Atlantic) League. How could a skinny, 19-year-old kid be that brave? Hank Aaron taught me so much, right in my little hometown.

The Hank Aaron Story by Milton J. Shapiro (Out of print; Julian Messner)

4. Daguerreotypes of Great Stars of Baseball edited by Paul Mac Farlane in collaboration with Leonard Gettleson

One of the things you got with a subscription to The Sporting News was a choice of different books the magazine published. Except for one year when I bought my dad a history of the NFL as a Christmas present, my choices were always baseball books. The one I remember most fondly—mainly because I still have it on the bookshelf above my desk—was this collection. The “daguerreotypes” were little more than photographs and statistical histories—leaving out all the most important stats by our lights today—but the numbers and the records of trades, and the sketch of Babe Ruth’s face looking as though it was fading back into the cover, were enough to mesmerize me. Here, it seemed, was a key to something more.

Daguerreotypes of Great Stars of Baseball edited by Paul Mac Farlane in collaboration with Leonard Gettleson (Out of print; The Sporting News)

5. The Baseball Encyclopedia ed. by David S. Neft, Lee Allen, and Robert Markel

I bought several baseball encyclopedias over the years, and they only got better. But the best was the one that somebody bought for me, namely my mother and father: a beautifully bound, 1969 edition with its own box. It must have cost my parents more than they could easily have afforded at the time, and out of respect for that sacrifice I have kept it in good condition still, box and all, though from all the years of use the title has faded on the spine. Out of the numbers, a great story.

The Baseball Encyclopedia ed. by David S. Neft, Lee Allen, and Robert Markel (Out of print; Macmillan)

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6. Ball Four by Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Schecter

This was a very different birthday purchase by my unwitting, straitlaced parents. They assumed it was one more baseball memoir, largely ghosted by its editor. They were wrong. More than setting the sports world on fire, Bouton’s book set my own world reeling. Here was an early revelation that all might not be what it seemed, that my heroes could have feet of clay. And just what were they doing? I knew it was something dirty, but had to go to classmates to find out. Hey, I was a slow learner. Much later in life—before his stroke—I got to meet Bouton, and we had a good laugh over it.

Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues by Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Schecter (50th Anniversary edition $33.99; Turner) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

7. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James

Bought for me by Ellen, my wife-to-be, when I was still 27. (I did learn!) It was Bill James at his iconoclastic best, peppering his book not only with the irresistible reason that transformed our assessments of the game but also countless anecdotes, the evolution of baseball uniforms and nicknames, and all sorts of other stories. Here, the stats were already transformed into literature. Ellen, in her dedication, called it “not such a romantic gift,” but I disagree. And even more romantic was that, when I first met her, she lived next to a monument in Hoboken that marked the site of the (alleged) first baseball game.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract by Bill James ($40; Free Press) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

8. Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, with a new chapter by Kevin Baker

This was the 2010 edition, companion volume to Burns’ magnificent Tenth Inning, the sequel to his first baseball documentary. And now, thanks to the grace of Ken and Geoff, I was writing part of it. The last chapter, at least, taking us up to the “present.” I turned 52 that year, and it had taken me a lifetime to get to this place—and what a splendidly lucky life it was, to spend with such pastimes. 

Baseball: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, with a new chapter by Kevin Baker ($39.95; Knopf) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble

The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City ($35; Knopf) Buy it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org. 

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