Recommended Reading

I mainly read non-fiction and, as you can probably imagine, mostly history.  I’ve also always enjoyed reading about sports, especially baseball, particularly if the books feature superlative writing. Before mentioning books that I discovered while writing Baseball As It Was, here are some of my all-time favorites. Anything written by fabled sportswriter Red Smith is worthwhile, but I especially liked Red Smith on Baseball: The Game’s Greatest Writer on the Game’s Greatest Years (2000), a compilation of his best columns. Over four decades Roger Angell wrote discerning essays about baseball for The New Yorker. Those pieces have been assembled in numerous volumes, starting with The Summer Game (1973), which expounds on baseball in the 1960s and culminates with the Mets improbable championship in 1969. Sportswriter Roger Kahn was a masterful stylist who gained national attention with The Boys of Summer and went on to write about baseball for a variety of popular magazines. Many of Kahn’s best pieces are available in anthologies.  All are worth a look, but my favorites are The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (1993) and The Roger Kahn Reader: Six Decades of Sportswriting (2018).  Journalist and historian David Halberstam wrote two books on baseball that I love so much I often reread portions of them, especially of cold winter nights when I’m longing for baseball. The Summer of ’49 (1989) deals with the tense pennant battle between Casey Stengel’s Yankees and Joe McCarthy’s Red Sox. October 1964 (1994) covers the Phillies collapse, the Cardinals unexpected rise in a dizzy swirl of events, and Yogi Berra’s year as manager of the Yankees. You might think that a book on one season would be tedious reading, but not in the hands of a good writer like Halberstam or David Kaiser, whose Epic Season: The 1948 American League Pennant Race (1998) chronicles and analyzes the nail-biting clash between three clubs, Boston, New York, and Cleveland. Jane Leavy wrote insightful biographies of Babe Ruth, Sandy Koufax, and Mickey Mantle. You will learn as much about baseball in her books as about the complex characters of her subjects.

I discovered a treasure trove of good books while working on Baseball As It Was. The list is too long for inclusion here, but let me mention five books that I found especially illuminating. William Marshall’s Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 (1999) treats pennant races and the threats to management posed the Mexican League and Robert Murphy’s American Baseball Guild. Marshall portrays baseball at the pinnacle of its popularity, and laments the slippage in fandom that followed thereafter due to imprudent leadership. J. Ronald Oakley’s Baseball’s Last Golden Age, 1946-1960 (1994) treats a longer period, a time – the last time, he argues – when baseball was still the national pastime and “other sports were played in its shadow.”

Around 1950, John Rossi was told by a librarian that nothing worthwhile had been written about the history of baseball. Half a century later Rossi was a professional historian who wrote about British politics, but decided to write about baseball. His book The National Game: Baseball and American Culture (2000) was the result and we are the richer for it. He demonstrates the interrelationship between professional baseball and American history from the 19^th century origins of the game through the 1990s. His book is instructive and clarifying, and the writing is graceful and lucid. 

Milwaukee’s loss of the Braves in 1965 was a personal blow for me. The Milwaukee Braves in the 1950s had been among the most lucrative of all major league clubs, annually setting attendance records and outdrawing teams in much larger markets. In Patrick W. Steele’s Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee (2018), I found ground breaking answers to why Milwaukee lost the Braves as well as a gripping analysis of how the city fought to prevent the team’s move to Atlanta. It is a sad story of greed and injudiciousness that Steele, a professional historian, unravels in his ground breaking book.

I was a pitcher – sadly not a very good one – on my high school team and in summer leagues, so it might not be surprising that one of my boyhood heroes was a major league hurler. Sal Maglie, who had several exceptional seasons with the Giants and Dodgers, and hurled in a number of unforgettable games, was the pitcher I sought without success to emulate. While working on Baseball As It Was, I ran into Judith Testa’s Sal Maglie: Baseball’s Demon Barber (2007), a marvelously insightful biography that brings to light his character and the secrets of his success, while also providing a sweeping chronicle of baseball in Maglie’s era. It is a fine baseball book and a good work of history.