The best books about baseball pitchers

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. 

It’s hard not to relish a clever pun, especially when it involves an allusion to good literature, and it’s even harder not to relish an entire book of them. Tim Federle combines the Great Books and great drinks with cocktails such as Brave New Swirled, The Cooler Purple, Paradise Sauced, Moby-Drink, The Sound and the Slurry, and The Last of the Mojitos.

Are you a baseball fan who grumbles about modern players being overpaid and coddled? If so, this book will transport you to baseball’s roughest epoch, and reward you with a ballbag of “Who knew?”s as to how the game was played and fought in the late 1800s. Back then, a different species of men took the field, men who would not recognize our 21st-century diamond dancers, who slip on gloves for every occasion: catching, batting, even sliding.

A quick sampler of Who Knew?s. In 1884, an ump commanded, “Striker-up!” A pitcher could hit a batter as many times as he wanted, and the batter had to take it. The pitcher could be fined for such abuse, but the only way a batter got to first was by hitting the ball. A pitcher could “twirl the sphere” and baffle the hitter until the pitches “twisted his mental trolley.” A twisted mental… show more.

Let me sum it up for you real quick: Jordan writes some of the hottest sex scenes ever. Like ever. If you aren’t fanning yourself halfway through, then you need to check for a pulse! Joking aside – if you’re looking for unapologetic and unabashed sensuality with great writing and strong stories, the eight-book Renegades series fits the bill. The core cast is a group of Hollywood stunt doubles – so yes, they’re all muscular, gorgeous, and fit – and Jax is the company owner and hero of Reckless. Wary of L.A. gold-diggers who zero in on his money and fame, he’s open to an anonymous (and totally ‘in the dark’) encounter with Lexi – and is nothing but surprised when she’s completely into him just for himself.

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.

Coover’s prescient novel pre-dates the explosion of sports fantasy leagues by at least a decade, but places an imaginary league at the center of his story. Anyone who has ever played in fantasy leagues knows their power. The fantasy can take over your life, which is precisely what happens to J. Henry Waugh. The protagonist is a mild-mannered accountant by day, but the owner-operated-madman-in-charge of his self-created league at night. Eventually, it overwhelms his real life. This is a novel about the dangers of living inside your own head.

This is one of my absolute favorite books. It’s beautifully written, telling a compelling story about Molly Williams, who shared a love of baseball and a deep connection with her father through the long hours they spent talking while he taught her to pitch a knuckleball. When he dies in a car accident, Molly’s world falls apart. Her mother descends into depression, and communication between them stops. Molly slowly puts her life back together when she earns a place on a boys’ baseball team and builds friendships with her teammates. The power of this book lies in its central metaphor: the need for communication. Between pitcher and catcher, between base coach and runner, between parent and child, between friends. 

Warren Buffet cites Ted Williams’ plate discipline as his model for investment selection, and I keep a copy of this book on my shelf with its image of Williams’ strike zone prominently displayed.

Williams was the last major league baseball player to hit over .400 in a season and his insight was that not all strikes are created equal.

He identified the granular, baseball-sized quadrants within the strike zone that represented his “sweet spot” and he maintained supreme discipline to avoid all other pitches.

Of course, baseball is a team sport, not an individual sport, and Williams’ rigid plate discipline often set him at odds with teammates and fans.

But investing is all about picking, and Williams’ discipline and resolve against FOMO are models for astute investors.  

This is a minor work in Roth’s illustrious career, but it is pure Roth - hilarious and outrageous -  through and through. You can’t not love a novel that begins with an irreverent shot out to Moby Dick: Call me Smitty, is the novel’s first line, penned by a sportswriter and narrator Word Smith. Smitty’s story is the tragic career of the only Babylonian pitcher in major league history, a phenom named Gil Gamesh. (For those who are too far removed from your college classics courses, Gilgamesh is the great epic story of ancient Babylon.) Gil and his catcher concoct a plot to kill an umpire, Mike the Mouth, who never gives them an even break. The would-be murder weapon is a high fastball. Chaos ensues.

This is a wonderfully readable and innovatively structured biography of one of the two greatest Jewish major leaguers in history (along with Hank Greenberg). The famously reclusive Koufax, who like Luckman grew up in Brooklyn, declined to cooperate, but Leavy alternates her second-hand chronicle of Koufax’s life with chapters recounting, inning-by-inning, the night he no-hit the Chicago Cubs in 1965. These chapters are full of fascinating tangents and “inside baseball.” Despite Koufax’s reticence, the book feels intimate, taking you inside one of the sport’s most unlikely success stories.

Spivey and I share the same goal—to reach a broad audience, both scholarly and general. His book is for readers who love baseball and love history—those with a passion for the game who are not scared off by complex arguments or endnotes. Baseball intellectuals—the huge group of readers embodied by George Will, Ken Burns, and Doris Kearns Goodwin—constitute the central audience. But baseball buffs also care about the history of the game and will want to read this book. Spivey, a history professor, writes accessibly and avoids “insider history”—even in the sections and chapters focused primarily on the sordid past of American race relations. It is a deftly-executed, balanced treatment of Paige and one of the most meticulously researched biographies ever written about an athlete.

Kelly Oram writes great YA romances. You sort of feel like you’re back in high school, but without the pressure of finishing your homework and remembering your locker combination. Everything embarrasses teens, so of course, there are some embarrassing moments in her books too. 

I liked this one because the heroine loved sports but had a hard time getting her teammates to see her for who she was. Sometimes we all just want people to see who we are and not what we do.

This 2008 biography of a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher follows Charles Albert Bender from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to his heyday with the Philadelphia Athletics in the early-1900s. While fans know about Minnesota baseball stars like Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, and Jack Morris, Bender’s amazing life has been all but forgotten. Swift breathes new life into a man with a foot in both his Indian and white worlds.

This is the fourth and last of Mark Harris’s Henry Wiggen novels. All four novels are narrated in a charming colloquial voice by Wiggen, a star lefthanded starting pitcher for the New York Mammoths. The books trace the all-star career of Wiggin, from his rookie year through to the end of a long career. The time frame of the novels is the 1950s through the 1960s, moving beyond the innocence of the beginning (when players still had off-season jobs to pay the rent – Wiggen sold insurance) to a kind of melancholy at the end. The novel chronicles the end of Wiggen’s excellent career, an end Wiggen, as the wistful title suggests, never saw coming until too late. It’s funny, sad, and heartfelt.

I was working as a flak at Simon & Schuster when this book came out, and I helped to write the flap copy, so it feels to me like I had a hand in it. As an aspiring writer, I remember admiring the hell out of this novel. On a recent re-read, as a grizzled, wizened veteran writer, I still do. Hays gives us a collection of memorable characters, and a wild, vagabonding tale that offers a glimpse at minor league life in the deep South. There’s humor and heartache and all that good stuff. 

This anthology is full of heart and features a wide field of sports and experiences and identities. The poems are a mix of serious, moving, and funny moments, but most of all they’re relatable and accessible. I’ve read many of the poems several times, making new discoveries with each read, and other poems beg to be read aloud in a spoken word performance. This is a great collection for teens to enjoy by themselves, or for teachers to share in the classroom. It might even inspire you to write your own sports poem.

How’s this for a challenge? Write a humorous book during World War One that can still make readers laugh 100 years later. That’s exactly what Lardner does here, when he turns his famous character Jack Keefe, the semi-literate, big-talking baseball pitcher into a soldier and sends him boasting and bragging to “Nobody’s Land,” where he hilariously ducks every dangerous situation he’s put in.

Once again, King proves he is the king by thrusting a nine-year-old girl into the harsh Appalachian Mountains and leaving her to fight for her own survival. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon follows Trisha, a spunky kid who loses her way while hiking with her mom and brother. To stay alive, she must conserve what little food she has and maintains her sanity by listening to her Walkman and following baseball news about her favorite player, Tom Gordon. But little does she realize that something fierce and hungry is following her every step. As an avid hiker, I understand the harsh realities of getting lost in unfamiliar terrain—it’s [bleeping] terrifying. One of Stephen King’s best!

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.