Here are 100 books that The Official Baseball Guide 1991 fans have personally recommended if you like
The Official Baseball Guide 1991.
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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.
Since 2001, when Baseball America first expanded their prospect lists from 10 players per team to 30, this book has been required reading for fantasy league and Strat-o-matic draft prep.
BA writers have access to scouting directors, managers, coaches, and rival scouts, and the scouting reports are compiled from talking to numerous sources inside the game. Having written several team lists for them myself over the years, I know how much work they put into this book.
The 2023 Prospect Handbook is your guide to the next wave of MLB stars
The 2023 Prospect Handbook is your guide to the next wave of MLB stars. With complete scouting reports on more than 900 prospects, the Prospect Handbook is a must-have for superfans as well as fantasy players. Dominate your dynasty league and be the first to know about the stars of the 2020s and early 2030s.
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.
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.
There is so much information in this book, which gets thicker every year. I’m not going to pretend I understand it all, but I’m learning a little more every time.
The player writeups are lighthearted but insightful. Sometimes it’s almost scary looking back and seeing some of the things they projected that were so spot on. My only complaint is that everyone else in my Strat-o-matic league reads it now. It used to be an advantage.
For more than thirty years, the very best in baseball predictions and statistics.
The industry's longest-running publication for baseball analysts and fantasy leaguers, Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster, published annually since 1986, is the first book to approach prognostication by breaking performance down into its component parts. Rather than predicting batting average, for instance, this resource looks at the elements of skill that make up any given batter's ability to distinguish between balls and strikes, his propensity to make contact with the ball, and what happens when he makes contact-reverse engineering those skills back into batting average. The result is an…
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.
Another now classic annual that dates back into the 1990s, Baseball Prospectus is chock full of informative essays and player and team breakdowns.
Their PECOTA projections are another handy tool for ferreting out which players to target for the upcoming season. Many of the writers have changed over the years, but the book is always a must to keep ahead of the competition.
Futures Guide 2023 features:
Detailed reports on top 10 prospects for every major-league team.
Condensed reports on many additional key prospects for each team.
Top talents 25 years old and younger for each team.
Baseball Prospectus’ 2023 organizational rankings.
Top 101 real-life and fantasy prospects.
Top 50 players who entered pro baseball in 2023.
Additional essays on various prospect and scouting related topics.
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.
Scott Longert has his M.A. in American History from Cleveland State University. He has written five books on baseball history with a sixth on the way. His most recent work was Cy Young: An American BaseballHero designed specifically for children. The book was a selection of the Junior Library Guild. Scott has made numerous appearances on radio and television along with being interviewed for several baseball documentaries. Scott served nine years as a Park Ranger for the National Park Service, stationed at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. Currently, he faithfully attends baseball games in Cleveland, waiting for the home team to capture their first World Series win since 1948.
The year 1920 marked the first pennant ever won by the Cleveland Indians. Author Mike Sowell recalls that time with his outstanding work, The Pitch ThatKilled. Sowell describes in great detail the tragic story of Ray Chapman and Carl Mays, the two participants in one of the most heartbreaking stories in baseball history. Sowell recounts in vivid detail an overcast day in New York when Mays threw an inside fastball that struck Chapman on the left temple. The Cleveland shortstop would pass away the next morning, leading to an unprecedented display of grief throughout the country. This book is a most compelling read.
Since major league baseball began in 1871, there have been roughly thirty million pitches thrown to batters. Only one of them killed a man. This is the story of Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians, a popular player struck in the head and killed in August 1920 by a pitch thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees. Was it, as most baseball observers thought at the time, a tragic but unavoidable accident? Mike Sowell's brilliant book investigates the incident and probes deep into the backgrounds of the players involved and the events that led to one of baseball's…
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.
Scott Longert has his M.A. in American History from Cleveland State University. He has written five books on baseball history with a sixth on the way. His most recent work was Cy Young: An American BaseballHero designed specifically for children. The book was a selection of the Junior Library Guild. Scott has made numerous appearances on radio and television along with being interviewed for several baseball documentaries. Scott served nine years as a Park Ranger for the National Park Service, stationed at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site. Currently, he faithfully attends baseball games in Cleveland, waiting for the home team to capture their first World Series win since 1948.
Author Voigt produced three volumes of work, detailing the history of the game from its roots in the early nineteenth century, through the latter part of the twentieth. Volume One begins with a debunking of the myth that Abner Doubleday created the game in the green fields of Cooperstown, New York. Voigt in using a tremendous amount of research material, traces the modernization of baseball from a gentleman’s game played for amusement and relaxation to a professional organization built to win.
Readers interested in learning how the game evolved from underhand pitching to a mound sixty feet six inches and three outs to a side would benefit from studying this work.
How did "America's National Game" evolve from a gentlemen's pastime in the 1850s to a national obsession in the Roaring Twenties? What really happened at Cooperstown in 1839, and why does the "Doubleday legend" persist? How did the commissioner system develop, and what was the impact of the "Black Sox" scandal? These questions and many others are answered in this book, with colorful details about early big league stars such as Mike "King" Kelly and pious Billy Sunday, Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie and "Cy" (Cyclone) Young.
The author explores historically the four major periods of transformation of…
Before he became a bestselling author with his debut novel, Before We Ever Spoke, Dan Largent spent the better part of two decades as a high school baseball coach. In 2010, he guided Olmsted Falls High School to its first-ever State Final Four and was subsequently named Greater Cleveland Division I Coach of the Year. Dan stepped away from his duties as a baseball coach in 2017 to spend more time with his wife, April, and their three children Brooke, Grace, and Luke. He has, however, remained close to the game he loves by turning doubles into singles as a member of Cleveland’s finest 35 and over baseball league.
Keith Olberman said that The Bullpen Gospels, "Might be one of the best baseball books written in forty years."
I would like to go a step further and say that it is THE best baseball book that has been written. Ever. Even better than Ball Four, to me, because it takes place during the modern era of baseball and was written by Hayhurst as he played professionally.
Hayhurst gives readers a realistic view into what it is really like to be like the majority of minor league players, “Bonus Babies” aside, as he pulls the veil back on professional baseball.
Upon its release, The Bullpen Gospels was a direct hit to the New York Times bestseller list. With comparisons to Jim Boutons's Ball Four, The Bullpen Gospels is slated to be a classic of the genre.
From the humble heights of a Class-A pitcher's mound to the deflating lows of sleeping on his gun-toting grandmother's air mattress, veteran reliever Dirk Hayhurst steps out of the bullpen to deliver the best pitch of his career--a raw and unflinching account of his life in the minors.
Whether training tarantulas to protect his room from thieving employees in a backwater hotel or absorbing…
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…
