Here are 100 books that Dueling with Kings fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
As someone who plays fantasy baseball and advises others on how to win, I was fascinated by Lewis’ real-world adventure covering the Oakland Athletics.
I had dabbled in trying to uncover underutilized statistics to evaluate talent in my own writings, but Billy Beane showed how someone in the pros was able to leverage undervalued skills to stay ahead of the competition. I found it a fascinating ride, and the book has become a classic (and a movie).
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…
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.
Bill James challenged common wisdom and turned us into more intelligent baseball fans with his Baseball Abstract series back in the 1980s.
I could have recommended any one of the many books he wrote, but this book is a terrific summary of his impact on the game as retold by “colleagues, critics, competitors, and fans.” Who better to describe how important he was to the game than those who were most affected by him? I consider this a great entry point to digging into his terrific work.
Since self-publishing his revolutionary Baseball Abstracts over 25 years ago, Bill James has changed the way that baseball insiders, professionals and fans look at baseball ? and not always for the better, according to some. Recently named to Time magazine's ?100 People Who Shape Our World, ? his influence has been recognized the world over. This book is a collection of essays from baseball insiders on what Bill James has meant to them and what they each see as his biggest influence on the game of baseball.
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…
Typically, we follow sports only on the playing field. I share that interest but I’ve become fascinated by sports off the field, and how they influence and reflect American society. After my fanatical baseball-playing childhood, I pursued an academic career, teaching and writing books and essays on politics and history, and wondering why it wasn’t more rewarding. Then I rediscovered sports, and returned again to my childhood passion of baseball. I began teaching a popular baseball course as a mirror on American culture. And I began writing about baseball and society, recently completing my sixth baseball book. The books recommended here will help readers to see baseball with new eyes.
In 1970, former New York Yankees pitcher, Jim Bouton, published Ball Four, a blockbuster best-seller that blew the lid off the behind-the-scenes life of professional ballplayers.
Providing such details, routinely covered up by sportswriters, was regarded as heresy and Bouton was condemned and largely banned from the sport. Yet Bouton inaugurated a revolution in sports reporting, and he remained an activist for the rest of his life, well beyond his sport, speaking and acting on civil rights, America’s illegal wars, ballpark preservation, Olympic protest, tenant and community rights, and immigration.
I loved this inspiring story of a man who became more than a “jock” and who transcended his sport to make a positive contribution to his society.
Named a Best Baseball Book of 2020 by Sports Collectors Digest New York Times 2020 Summer Reading List
From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (1939-2019) was the sports world's deceptive revolutionary. Underneath the crew cut and behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks lurked a maverick with a signature style. Whether it was his frank talk about player salaries and mistreatment by management, his passionate advocacy of progressive politics, or his efforts to convince the United States to boycott the 1968 Olympics, Bouton confronted the conservative sports world and compelled it to catch up with…
My father used to take me to watch the Twins play at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, a twenty-minute drive from our house in suburban Minneapolis. As soon as the Twins announced their schedule each year, he would buy tickets for the doubleheaders. Our favorites were the twilight doubleheaders, when we watched one game by daylight, and the other under the night sky. Baseball was pure to me then: played outdoors on real grass. Seated beside my dad during those twin bills, I felt his love for the game seep into me and take root. All these years later, almost two decades after his death, that love remains strong.
I liked this slice of history and the sense of importance David Halberstam imparted to it. He cared about the story, and so I did, too.
I love the All-Star cast—Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, et al.—that animates the action. I’m there on the field with these guys, sweating out the action Halberstam so passionately describes, and feeling their emotions.
This #1 bestselling baseball classic of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is “dazzling . . . heart-stopping . . . A celebration of a vanished heroic age” (The New York Times Book Review). The summer of 1949: It was baseball’s Golden Age and the year Joe DiMaggio’s New York Yankees were locked in a soon-to-be classic battle with Ted Williams’s Boston Red Sox for the American League pennant. As postwar America looked for a unifying moment, the greatest players in baseball history brought their rivalry to the field, captivating the American public through the heart-pounding final moments of the season. This…
Writing this book brought back memories from my childhood—of watching Perry pitch in the late 1960s and, more deeply, of relations with my parents. My father (a math prof at UC Berkeley) and mother cared little for sports, but by the time I turned seven, an identity uniquely my own emerged from my infatuation with the San Francisco Giants. By age ten, I regularly sneaked off to Candlestick Park, which required two long bus rides and a hike through one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. I knew exactly when I had to leave to retrace my journey to get home in time for dinner. Baseball was, and remains, in my blood.
Both for sheer inspiration and for studying the craft of biography, I read this book at least five times while researching and writing Spitter. Absorbing, controversial, and courageous, this book offers a deeply disturbing look into the rise and fall of the most famous baseball icon of the twentieth century—and ‘the loneliest hero we ever had.” DiMaggio is rendered so vividly you almost want to look away. The book taught me the supreme importance of building the character, starting on page one, and of sustaining and expanding central and supplementary themes, chapter by chapter. It is also, simply put, a romping good read. If Spitterlives up to even one-tenth of this book’s brilliance, I would die a happy biographer.
A groundbreaking, breathtaking biography of one of the Century's great icons, the late Joe Dimaggio, from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning author of the bestseller WHAT IT TAKES. Few celebrities have captivated the sport's world for as long, or with such depth, as Joe DiMaggio. Here, for the first time, is the definitive story of his life, as told by the award-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer. In Cramer's hands, DiMaggio's complicated life, from the first game with the Yankees in the 1930's, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his rise to hero status, becomes a story of the media, the…
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.
In 1970, Jim Bouton blew the lid off baseball with this book.
A chronicling of one season of the author’s career in the major and minor leagues, the book told the truth about professional ballplayers: that they were not the heroes the newspapers made them out to be. On the contrary, they were just as greedy, selfish, and pervy as the rest of us.
At a time when America was going through a great disillusionment, Bouton did the same for America’s game. Years later, it still holds that power. I savored every word of it, experiencing the ups and downs of a season while gaining an insider’s view of the sport I fell in love with as a child.
50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION New York Public Library Book of the Century Selection Time Magazine “100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books” Selection New Foreword from Jim Bouton’s Wife, Paula Bouton When Ball Four was first published in 1970, it hit the sports world like a lightning bolt. Commissioners, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And serious critics called it an important social document. Following his death, Bouton’s landmark book has remained popular, and his legacy lives on…
I grew up a Yankee fan during the Mickey Mantle era, traveling to the Bronx in my uncle’s canary-yellow Chrysler Imperial. Those early experiences set me on a trajectory to want to play baseball every chance I got, starting with Little League and ending up on my high school’s varsity squad. Fortunately, my high school was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where my family had moved in 1962, the same year that the Yankees began playing their pre-season games in the city, which meant when I wasn’t playing baseball at school, I was hanging around Ft. Lauderdale Stadium watching the Yankees. Yes, the Pinstripe Nation was in my blood.
If you want a close-up look at the players who made up the early Yankee teams, this is the book for you. In Amore’s book you’ll learn about some key Yankees’ players: Wee Willie Keeler, Frank Chance (of Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance fame), Hal Chase, Roger Peckinpaugh, Frank “Home Run” Baker, and, of course, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, among many others who populated the early New York Yankee teams.
2018 marks 115 years since the inception of the New York Yankees--and what a 115-year period it's been! But how did the team that has since won a league-leading 27 world championships get started? In A Franchise on the Rise, veteran sportswriter Dom Amore takes readers back in time to the first twenty years of the team's existence, from 1903 to 1923, focusing on all the major players and events, including their first ten years as the Highlanders, their move to Yankee Stadium, and their subsequent first World Series in 1923. In doing so, Amore successfully finds the characters' own…
I’m an “Army brat” who attended five different middle and high schools, graduated from West Point (where I majored in international history), and later attended law school. The law is my profession, but writing is my avocation, and I’ve been fortunate to have several military histories published. I reside in Birmingham, Alabama, with my wife, our youngest son, and two untrained, incorrigible dogs. As far as my latest book is concerned, they like to say at West Point that “the history that we teach was made by people we taught.” In my case, I guess it was “the history I wrote about was made by people wearing the same uniform that I wore.”
In The Cloudbuster Nine, Anne Keene not only channels her father’s memories of his own dreams of baseball glory but also recounts the tale of a collection of fighter-pilot cadets—men like the legendary Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Swain—who, while preparing for flight training in the U.S. Navy’s V-5 pre-flight program during World War II. In doing so, she provides a fascinating overview (and reminder) of what World War II meant for many of America’s star athletes—and what those athletes meant for America’s war effort.
In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year's World Series, one of the nation's strongest baseball teams practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
As a child, Anne Keene's father, Jim Raugh, suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally,…
