Here are 100 books that If You Were Only White fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseball’s efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
Peterson was a magazine writer in the 1960s who became curious about those Black baseball teams he saw play in the Pennsylvania town where he grew up. He set out with his tape recorder to track down and interview many Negro League figures, and dove into library newspaper collections to find the facts to back up their reminiscences. First published in 1970 and still in print, this is the first comprehensive history of Black professional baseball, the history of which was in serious danger of being lost to modern memory when the Negro Leagues were put out of business in the 1950s following Major League integration. Many of us who write about Black ball read this book first.
Early in the 1920s, the New York Giants sent a scout to watch a young Cuban play for Foster's American Giants, a baseball club in the Negro Leagues. During one at-bat this talented slugger lined a ball so hard that the rightfielder was able to play it off the top of the fence and throw Christobel Torrienti out at first base. The scout liked what he saw, but was disappointed in the player's appearance. "He was a light brown," recalled one of Torrienti's teammates, "and would have gone up to the major leagues, but he had real rough hair." Such…
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.
Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed that without the breaking of the color line in baseball in the late 1940s, his work for civil rights in the 1960s would have been infinitely more difficult.
This book tells the story not only of Jackie Robinson breaking that barrier to integrate baseball in 1947, but its profound consequences for both white and black baseball and for the Negro Leagues and the black community.
This breakthrough, seven years before the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, emerged not merely from Robinson and his sponsor, Branch Rickey, but from a several-decades long social movement for baseball integration, and it began the process of breaking down racist barriers in U.S. society—a notable example of how sports can promote social progress.
In this gripping account of one of the most important steps in the history of American desegregation, Jules Tygiel tells the story of Jackie Robinson's crossing of baseball's color line. Examining the social and historical context of Robinson's introduction into white organized baseball, both on and off the field, Tygiel also tells the often neglected stories of other African-American players-such as Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron-who helped transform our national pastime into an integrated game. Drawing on dozens of interviews with players and front office executives, contemporary newspaper accounts, and personal papers, Tygiel provides the most…
I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseball’s efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
Charleston is one of the very best to ever play in the Negro Leagues. He entered Black baseball even before the first Negro League was started and played 27 seasons up to World War II. He managed in the Negro Leagues for 15 seasons, his gigs including the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s, one of the best professional teams of all time. Beer’s award-winning book tells the whole life of this Hall of Famer and straightens out historical misconceptions, for example showing that his reputation for dirty play and a terrible temper is ill-founded (“While he was happy to join fights in progress, he did not usually start them”).
Winner of the SABR Seymour Medal
Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine
Winner of SABR's Larry Ritter and Robert Peterson Awards Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one." Among experts he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.
In a long career spanning from 1915 to 1954, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, and…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseball’s efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
The Negro Leagues, like all organized sports leagues, were showcases for the stars of the game – Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and the like. But, like all the other leagues, they were businesses, too. Sports entrepreneurs, most of them African American, invested in all-Black teams that formed a “shadow” alternative to Major League Baseball where the players, and most of the owners, too, were not welcome due to segregation. Lanctot, a history professor comfortable with deep and extensive research, chronicles the successes and failures of the Black leagues, which were almost always existing on a financial knife’s edge, until the integration of pro ball in 1946 spelled their death.
The story of black professional baseball provides a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.
Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a…
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…
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.
Nathanson (like me) faced the dilemma of writing biography when the subject declines to be interviewed. His approach showed me the way. The availability of digital newspaper databases has opened up enormous possibilities for research, and Nathanson took advantage of them to provide color, detail, and analysis on a grand scale. The many dozens of reporters and newspaper writers who covered Dick Allen wrote game accounts, opinion columns, and feature stories that informed, inspired, and entertained contemporary readers. They watched the games from the vantage point of the press box, peppered the players and managers with questions in the clubhouse afterward, and often rode the buses and planes with the teams. They had a level of access that is the envy of historians, and Nathanson greatly profited from their work.
When the Philadelphia Phillies signed Dick Allen in 1960, fans of the franchise envisioned bearing witness to feats never before accomplished by a Phillies player. A half-century later, they're still trying to make sense of what they saw.
Carrying to the plate baseball's heaviest and loudest bat as well as the burden of being the club's first African American superstar, Allen found both hits and controversy with ease and regularity as he established himself as the premier individualist in a game that prided itself on conformity. As one of his managers observed, "I believe God Almighty hisself would have trouble…
Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink
by
Ethan Chorin,
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
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.
I read this when it first appeared in 1979, long before I started taking history seriously. Much more than a generic “life and times” offering, Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein, a former columnist for theSan Francisco Chronicle, still stands tall as a sweeping biography of Willie Mays. It foreshadowed the approach pioneered by Jules Tygiel of “taking one’s eye offthe ball”—paying as much attention to the broad and wide-ranging historical context of the game as to the game on the field itself. Einstein also embraces essayist Roger Angell’s deeply held belief that the power of baseball lies in its daily details. Both are necessary to understand Willie Mays and his place in history. Written with verve and vibrato, this book outshines James Hirsch’s dense and less captivating 2010 biography of Mays.
This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Willie's Time: Baseball's Golden Age restores to print Charles Einstein's vivid biography of one of baseball's foremost legends. With a new preface from the author, this volume replays the most dramatic moments of the Say Hey Kid's career - from the 1951 Miracle Giants to the Amazing Mets of 1973 - and takes us inside the lives of Ruth, DiMaggio, Aaron, Durocher, and others along the way. Einstein offers a compelling and complete look at Mays: as a youth in racist Birmingham, a triumphant symbol of African American success, a sports hero lionized by fans,…
Race has always been a primary issue in American life—and a test of how well our ideals as a nation sync up with reality. Because sports are a national passion, they have long put questions of inclusion on full display. It’s a fascinating, illuminating clash: the meritocracy of sports vs. the injustice of racism.
Satchel Paige was a pitcher with the skill and showmanship to draw thousands of baseball fans of all races to ballparks across the country. When the Cleveland Indians signed him in 1948 at the age of 42, some sportswriters called it a gimmick. But Paige’s arm helped Cleveland reach the World Series. In 1965, he threw his final pitch in a pro baseball game at the incredible age of 59.
It was hard not to crack a smile when Paige offered his stories and wisdom. He gave a young pitcher this amusing advice: “Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.”
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige
“Among the rare biographies of an athlete that transcend sports . . . gives us the man as well as the myth.”—The Boston Globe
Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories…
No one really knows who invented baseball. Games involving balls hit with sticks, runners, and bases are as old as time. By the middle of the 1800s, everybody in America was playing baseball. And I mean everybody—girls, boys, women, and men from all walks of life and heritage. While researching baseball history for The House That Ruth Built, I read stacks of baseball books about baseball legends—for the most part, White players like Babe Ruth or Black players like Jackie Robinson who broke the color barrier. I was surprised and delighted when I came across books about baseball players who represented the rest of everybody—hence this list.
Mamie Peanut Johnson loved baseball, and she was a good player. Really good. A pitcher.
Regardless of how good she was, because she was Black, Mamie was barred from playing on the All-American Girls’ Pro Baseball League. That might have stopped other players, but not Mamie! She didn’t let adversity, or the color of her skin, or gender stop her.
Instead, when a chance to pitch for the Negro Leagues’ Indianapolis Clowns, a men’s professional team, came her way, Mamie stepped right up, thus becoming the first female pitcher to play professional baseball.
Mamie "Peanut" Johnson had one dream: to play professional baseball. She was a talented player, but she wasn't welcome in the segregated All-American Girls Pro Baseball League due to the color of her skin. However, a greater opportunity came her way in 1953 when Johnson signed to play ball for the Negro Leagues' Indianapolis Clowns, becoming the first female pitcher to play on a men's professional team. During the three years she pitched for the Clowns, her record was an impressive 33-8. But more importantly, she broke ground for other female athletes and for women everywhere.
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
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.
This one has been a staple since back in the early 1990s, when it was produced by STATS, Inc.
There are still the basics, such as career statistics for every major leaguer, lefty-righty breakdowns, leaders, fielding stats, and projections, but every year they add something new. There are essays on various topics—sabermetric and otherwise, breakdowns of pitchers’ repertoires, Fielding Bible Awards, injury risk projections, and so much more.
Analysis of how every single player in the majors performed last year and over their career and what we can expect from these vets in the future and the rookies projected to join them soon. Here is just some of what the 34th annual edition of The Bill James Handbook has to offer going into next season: More Original Research on Cool Topics; The Annual Fielding Bible Awards; Home Run Robberies; Hits Lost/Gained to the Shift; Manufactured Runs and RBI Percentages; Hitter and Pitcher Projections for next season.