100 books like The Official Baseball Guide 1991

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.

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.

Come for the stats, get lost in everything else.

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.

Now I have to read it just to keep up.

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.

I love baseball romances. Pair one with a solid Theology of the Body romance (something I’ve done myself), and I’m there for it!

This debut novel is part women’s fiction, part romance, part mystery, and like any great love story, is anchored by God. I’m partial to the Presque Isle setting on the shores of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, and I quickly became partial to easygoing, steady minor leaguer Ketch Devine.

In Dominican Baseball, Alan Klein continues his essential work to document the country’s relationship to American professional baseball. As he says, Major League teams have come to view the Dominican Republic as “a renewable resource” of baseball talent, a resource they not only consume but produce, through sophisticated recruitment strategies and the highly regimented academies many teams run in the country. Rather than offering easy answers, he shows that the system is one of American power, but also of Dominican agency, of local pride in Dominican success, but also of anxiety about the loss of national sovereignty. He thus provides an invaluable illustration of how Latin American sports help us understand the region’s position in the global commodity chain.

A book about pencil-and-paper baseball scorekeeping might seem like an odd one to include on a list about technology! But that’s precisely the point: even though by-hand scoring seems like an unnecessary relic in the digital age, this book so beautifully explains why people do it anyway, and how much richness and storytelling and personality there can be in a practice that, at first glance, seems like it might just be rote transcription. Recording data isn’t a science—it can be an art, a tradition, and a joy unto itself.

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 the San 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 off the 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.

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.

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 Spitter lives up to even one-tenth of this book’s brilliance, I would die a happy biographer.