The Baseball 100

Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100. NY: Avid Reader, 2021.

Near the end of the book, I took an informal poll of coworkers: Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Satchel Paige got votes as the best ever; they rank 2, 1, 4, and 10 in Joe's estimation, suggesting that, Family Feud style, he's got a good list. But what is this really about?

The Baseball 100 isn't a history, in the usual sense, though it is Posnanski's story of the sport. It's a list, obviously, purportedly ranking players from all eras against one another (though that's admittedly subjective, almost intended to start arguments). What's it about?  The players -- each essay is a short biography and discussion of the career, a little bit of amazing. Yet each is so much more: the book is a discussion of greatness: what is it, what does it require? It's about relationships, fathers and sons, players and fans, social roles. It's about memory and myth, too, because too many of the best players were excluded from competition, so we have no way to really know how Negro Leaguers compared except what comes down as legend, and the very real loss this unjustified exclusion caused for us all.

And it is, before I've even finished, one of my favorite books.

Oral Histories

Lawrence Ritter, The Glory of Their Times. NY: Macmillan, 1966.
Danny Peary, We Played the Game. NY: Tess, 1994.
John Carmichael, My Greatest Day in Baseball. Lincoln: U.Nebraska, 1996.
Michael Fedo, One Shining Season. NY: Pharos, 1991.
Mike Bryan, Baseball Lives. NY: Pantheon, 1989.

Oral history is about collecting a record of events from the participants, about passing on the important stories, and about creating a shared tradition. Famous examples include Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey -- the “prehistoric” basis of Western literature. These titles don’t go back quite that far, but they are an important part of what creates baseball’s common memory.

The Glory of Their Times is one of my five most important baseball books (the entire list is below). Somehow it wasn’t baseball’s first collection of oral histories; that might have been Carmichael, originally published in 1945. Yet Ritter’s dedication to tracking down the stars of his youth and recording their stories -- largely transcribed as spoken -- struck a chord with the public. In sessions with twenty-two men, all of whom played between 1899, when Wahoo Sam Crawford’s big-league career began, and 1945, when Paul Waner’s ended, he captured stories spanning the game’s history, from before the American League existed through the replacement players of the Second World War. These are the memories of a life in the game, the great plays, players, games, and characters that make the sport so fascinating, as told by the players themselves. Even better, an audio edition is also available, collected from Ritter’s original reel-to-reel recordings, allowing us to actually hear Fred Snodgrass laugh while remembering Victory Faust.

We Played the Game picks up where Ritter left off, with sixty-five players from between 1947 and 1964. This was the period of racial integration and Westward expansion, featuring the Baby Boomers and their heroes: Brooks Robinson, Ralph Kiner, and Don Newcombe are among the stars Peary sought out for interviews.

The eleven men in One Shining Season, however, were not stars: each only had one season in the Major Leagues. Their stories are no less interesting for the short stays, though, and the men perhaps remember more vividly what they did see.

The speakers in Baseball Lives are even more obscure, providing the view from baseball’s back stage. Bryan talks to everyone from the owner to the bus driver; from pitching instructor to orthopedist; player agent, grounds crew, and bat factory employee. This book creates a deep and vibrant backdrop for the game by foregrounding the support that makes our on-field entertainment possible.

These books are My Greatest Day’s legacy. Published in 1945 by collecting columns from among the Chicago Daily News archives, it is full of Hall of Famers remembering their greatest exploits. This one has an “as told to” approach, so it is doubtless heavily edited, but Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Hans Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson -- the entire first Hall of Fame class -- are among the forty-seven stars sharing stories here, describing some of the most famous moments from the game’s early history.

What is most appealing about these books? Each is preserving an individual, personal piece of history and introducing us to a real human who took part in what is, for most of us, as foreign and fantastic an experience as ancient Greece. These stories bring us closer to the game and help us remember that history goes beyond the record of numbers.


Everett's five most important Baseball Books (in alphabetical order)
  Ball Four
  Baseball Before We Knew It
  Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
  The Glory of Their Times
  Maybe I'll Pitch Forever


Honorable Mentions to the Seymours, The Babe Ruth Story, and Moneyball

The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball

David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball. NY: Donald I Fine, 1997.

Encyclopedia (from the Greek for ‘general education’): a work that treats comprehensively all the various branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual articles arranged alphabetically (emphasis added); also, such a work treating only a particular branch of knowledge -- Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

This is an amazing book, but it is not a encyclopedia. While it presents a comprehensive view of Major League baseball -- that is, the National Association, National League, American Association, Union Association, and Players’ League -- from its founding to 1900, after which the American League gave the game its current shape, it is not arranged as a ready reference resource. It is, instead, arranged chronologically -- and instead of breaking its subject down to the atomic level and leaving us to reassemble the story from our choice of pieces, it presents a clear prose narrative.

Nemec, in a precise but personal voice, summarizes each season. These formative years are often discussed, but solid information -- even a basic as complete, team-by-team and season-by-season rosters -- was scattered among various sources or even uncollected before Nemec brought together rosters; team hitting, pitching, and fielding records; standings; and league leader boards compiled over a lifetime of research. It may be the best single volume for quick understanding of pro ball’s early development. But we can’t turn to “A” and find Cap Anson, so let’s call it The Great Book of 19th Century Major League Baseball.

Peter Morris, Base Ball Founders and Base Ball Pioneers

Peter Morris, et al, Base Ball Founders. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013.
                   _____, Base Ball Pioneers, 1850 - 1870. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Base Ball Founders is the second volume of a project exploring the early development and spread of baseball in the late nineteenth century, when it went form a New England variant of a traditional children’s game to the National Pastime in only fifty years.

The “et al” above is a top-notch team of baseball historians, led by Morris, an inaugural winner of the Henry Chadwick award for lifetime achievement. He and William Ryczek, Jan Finkel, Leonard Levin, and Richard Malatzky, with occasional others, take turns penning chapters about important teams of the time. In Founders, they focus on the Boston to Philadelphia corridor where the New York derivative of rounders developed into what we now call baseball. New York City, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts are each represented by six to ten teams. Each team record gives a club history, and some have player biographies or accounts of significant games. Each also includes a list of resources consulted.

Base Ball Pioneers, the companion volume, explores the game’s dispersal. Following the same format, Pioneers covers teams in ten outlying areas, from Maine and Connecticut, to San Francisco. Each volume is nicely indexed, and this set is a valuable reference. It works especially well when paired with David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It and John Thorn’s Base Ball in the Garden of Eden, by providing a human face for the history told in those titles.

Jackie Robinson & Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made

Jackie Robinson & Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972.

Robinson is good enough to credit his long-time ghost-writer conspicuously; otherwise, we might wonder why a twentieth-century Black activist sounds like an Edwardian gentleman.

Most people will pick up an autobiography from a Hall of Fame baseball star expecting to read about baseball. People picking up Robinson’s book are already familiar with his role as the first Black man in organized ball since the 1800s, and would also expect to read about is struggle to integrate the game. And we do get that, for 134 of 287 pages. It isn’t how Robinson defines himself, and he doesn’t dwell on what is already well documented.

No, Robinson is writing to point out that he was a civil rights leader even after, outside of, baseball. We get a bit about family--nothing in the book is more personal or more moving than a frank assessment of his relationship with Jackie Jr. We get business and politics, fields into which his fame allowed entry, where he did seem to work diligently to change the culture and create opportunity for the disenfranchised. We also see inside disagreements with Malcolm X and fundraising for Martin Luther King. Overall, the book is a reminder that life goes on after the game is over, and that what comes next can--and should--be even more important.

Percentage Baseball

Earnshaw Cook, Percentage Baseball. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.

Percentage Baseball is a landmark in baseball writing: by applying the methods of statistical analysis and probability to the corpus of Major League statistics, Cook opened a new field to research. Bill James and all who have followed can only be thankful. However, like the Ypsilanti watertower, this landmark has certain obvious faults.

First among these is an over-reliance on statistical method. This would seem an odd complaint about a book of statistical analysis, but Cook's inability to connect the dots must be real if he consistently confuses a Phi Beta Kappa. Part of this may be his relegation of reams to appendixes, but part is also his frequent, seemingly arbitrary, substitution of values in his various equations
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As an arts major, though, one becomes accustomed to skipping over impenetrable equations. Cook asserts that his numbers work, and we choose to believe him. When he fails to apply their results consistently, however, he immediately loses credibility. His constant ranting against the sacrifice bunt, when compared to his charts of scoring probability for each base and out situation, lead one to question whether he has read his own material.

In spite of these faults, and in spite of reading more like a textbook than the usual baseball fare, Cook's opus is worth the time necessary to quickly skim the text. His ideas are revolutionary, if not all sound, and his passion is apparent even through the turgid prose of a mid-century academic. Even if the only benefit is to provide context for Philip Roth and Rob Neyer, Percentage Baseball is a book every baseball fan should know (if not fully understand).

Hit by Pitch

Molly Lawless, Hit by Pitch.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

This graphic novelization tracks the weirdly parallel lives of Ray Chapman and Carl Mays from their childhoods in Kentucky, thought the fatal collision of Mays' pitch with Chapman's head, and--for Mays, at least, beyond.  The well-researched story is told though vignettes about the main characters, from varying perspectives, and illustrated with figures reminiscent of Eward Gory.  While the story is a bit dark, telling as it does of the only on-field death during a Major League baseball game, it isn't gruesome or violent, and is an important piece of baseball history, presented in a way that is appropriate and enjoyable for anyone eight or older.

Larry Lester, Rube Foster in His Time. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.


Not a standard biography, but a documentary history like Dean Sullivan’s Early-Middle-Late-Final Innings series, this portrait of the Negro National League’s founder is not an easy read. While material is presented in an orderly fashion and nicely tied together with clear narrative text, much of it still consists of stilted prose from over a hundred years ago—items transcribed as found in obscure newspapers, court documents, and the other historical source material from which biography is derived.

This approach, while not as easy to read as a pre-digested retelling of a life, has the advantage of showing Andrew Foster as he was seen by his contemporaries—as a truly great pitcher, who threw seven no-hitters (a number equaled by only Nolan Ryan at the Major League level), and an organizational genius who, during a period of intense racial inequality, built and controlled a nation-wide entertainment enterprise through sheer will and perseverance. Lester, editor of the scholarly Negro-Leagues journal Black Ball and CEO of NoirTech Research, has done both us and Foster a service by compiling this material and making possible a fuller understanding of this giant figure in baseball’s development.

The Neyer / James Guide to Pitchers

Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer / James Guide to Pitchers. NY: Fireside, 2004.
This volume fills a gaping hole in the baseball reference library. The bulk of it is an encyclopedic compendium of (almost) all Major League pitchers, listing not their statistical records, but, as can best be determined, what each actually threw—something that had never before been aggregated, or in some cases, even recorded.
Additionally, the authors provide detailed discussion of the various pitches, looking at the historical development, alternative names, and most successful practitioners of each; a debate about pitcher abuse; and short biographies of several outstanding but under-appreciated former stars.

John Tortes “Chief” Meyers: A Baseball Biography

William A. Young, John Tortes “Chief” Meyers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

“Chief” is the head man; it is a title of diffidence. As applied to John Tortes Meyers, All-Star catcher for John McGraw’s New York Giants, it is a fitting title: the Dartmouth-educated Meyers was an outstanding hitter and well-regarded field general who might have made the Hall of Fame if his career had been a bit longer. Yet during his playing days, “Chief” was used as an insult, not a compliment, because Meyers was a Native American, from the Cahuilla tribe.

This well-documented, yet readable, biography naturally focuses on Meyers’ playing career, but also explores his youth in California, the racial insensitivity he and other Natives faced, and his life and career after baseball. While the challenges Jackie Robinson faced in breaking baseball’s color line are well-known, Meyers (and other Natives, like Albert Bender, Jim Thorpe, and Allie Reynolds) faced similar abuse—yet were never excluded from the game, as Blacks were. This volume gives new appreciation for their struggle, while giving one of the Deadball-era’s best catchers much-overdue recognition.

Lowell L Blaisdell, Carl Hubbell: A biography of the Screwball King. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

This is an overdue biography of the National League’s best left-handed pitcher of the 1930s—only his American League contemporary Lefty Grove matched his 200 wins in ten years, and Hubbell was elected to the Hall of Fame for his 253 wins over a fifteen year career. Unfortunately, it is also an arm-chair history, based entirely on previously published material. The author did make an effort to contact Hubbell’s descendants, he was unable to speak with anyone from the family, and apparently did not try contacting others who may have known Hubbell personally. While the extensive references Blaisdell provides are appreciated, this leaves him with a one-dimensional portrait of the pitcher; combined with the academic tone of a former history professor, the result is less than easily readable. The book does, however, reminder the aspiring author that passive voice is to be avoided.

Jim Abbott and Tim Brown, Imperfect: An improbable life. NY: Ballantine, 2012.

Jim Abbott spent ten years as a left-handed pitcher in the Major Leagues, earning nearly $13,000,000 (and an Olympic gold medal), in spite of being born without a right hand.

Interspersing inning-by-inning reports of the no-hitter he threw in 1993, and drawing parallels between that game and him personal development, gives this memoir focus and momentum generally lacking in sports (auto)biographies. Very thoughtful and well-written, this volume will be inspirational for any audience.

Clifton Blue Parker, Bucketfoot Al: The Baseball Life of Al Simmons. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011.

Al Simmons, the cleanup hitter for Connie Mack’s great Athletics clubs of the early 1930s, may be most analogous to more contemporary stars like Dick Allen or Albert Belle: a ferocious hitting talent who achieved greatness—but less of it than expected. In Simmons’ case this is because injuries only let him play as many as 140 games in one season during the second half of his career, though afterwards Simmons admitted that he could have played more and, given how close he got to 3,000 hits, wished that he had.

Parker’s biography is well-documented and easy to read, with a total focus on Simmons as ballplayer. Major personal and world events such as marriage, divorce, and war are mentioned, but mostly to provide context. This emphasis shows us how Simmons was viewed in his era (as the best center fielder in the game) and how he got there, but leaves a much weaker impression of him as a person than last year’s portrait of another Pole in the Hall of Fame, Stan Musial: An American Life. To be fair, though, Simmons died before he was sixty, and Parker give us a solid picture of a worthy and under-appreciated subject as well as a welcome light on an A’s team that, with Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove, may have been better than Babe Ruth’s Yankees.

Craig Robinson, Flip Flop Fly Ball. 2011, Bloomsbury USA, New York.


Flip Flop Fly Ball is the story of one man’s baseball fandom. Usually, that would not be very interesting (e.g. discovers baseball card trading in schoolyard: 1983. attends first MLB game, hometown team wins world series: 1984. chasing the dragon ever since). But Robinson isn’t a usual fan. An English artist, he first noticed baseball in 2000, upon moving to Germany. Robinson describes the experience in straightforward, enjoyable essays detailing his discovering the sport and his trip Stateside to experience it, including stops in Seattle and Toronto. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to the infographics that first made Flip Flop Fly Ball an internet sensation.

Hailed as a “mat[ing of] Edward Tufte and Bill James" by Deadspin, Robinson’s twofold gift is asking interesting questions from an outside perspective and showing us their answers in simple, often brilliant, amusing graphical form. The cover, for instance, illustrates the percentage of baseball books (among Amazon’s top 100 results for the term on a given date) which have a baseball on the cover—by turning the pitcher’s mound into a pie chart.

And while Robinson is a Yankees fan, that comes across less as something to hate than as inevitable—he also counted, and charted, the number of different caps encountered in British and German towns during his travel from mid-2009 through 2010. The Yankees had 328. The Dodgers ran second—at 37. If a European is going to follow a team, exposure dictates it will be New York. Don’t hold it against him; be glad, instead, that he has discovered the game and given us this delightful book.

George Vecsey, Stan Musial: An American Life. New York: Ballantine, 2011.

Stan Musial is easy to overlook. Easy-going, unassuming, and terribly consistent, Musial put together a first-ballot Hall of Fame career over twenty-two years with the St. Louis Cardinals and held seventeen major league records when he retired. But on his special day, a nationally-televised tribute at the 2009 All-Star game in St. Louis, he was over-shadowed by the President, who had come to throw out the first pitch, just as he had been over-shadowed by the flashier greatness of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams while they were playing.

President Obama made amends, though, by awarding Musial the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, making him just the third ballplayer so honored. George Vecsey, the long-time New York Times sports writer, takes another step toward restoring Musial’s prominence with this thoroughly researched and documented official biography, which finally provides Musial a similar literary treatment to his peers.

Almost conversationally readable, Vecsey presents Musial in short, episodic vignettes relating key moments, propelled by an undercurrent of the respect, even awe, for Musial Vecsey developed as a young Dodgers’ fan watching Musial regularly beat his hometown team. Easily readable, this biography is appropriate for readers of any age and stands beside Musial’s memoir The Man’s Own Story as essential reading on one of baseball’s great gentlemen.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2011.

Bart Giamatti was baseball’s philosopher-king, a professor of English and then President of Yale University before serving as National League President (in spite of being a Red Sox fan) and then Commissioner before his death in 1989. Paradise, based on his Cook Lectures at the University of Michigan Law School, is his final work, published just days after his death, and it provides a fitting epitaph.

Drawing heavily on the work of Allen Guttman and Michael O’Laughlin, Giamatti begins by explicating the concept of leisure. He then argues that “Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious....” Finally, he deconstructs the elements of baseball to reveal its fundamental underlying epic narrative: the universal desire to go home.

Giamatti delivers these meditations in a lyrical prose that conveys both baseball’s leisurely pace and exacting precision, with subtle insights that will stop a thoughtful reader for minutes. For instance, Charlie Sheen could benefit from this definition: “Winning” for player or spectator is not simply outscoring; it is a way of talking about betterment, about making one-self, one’s fellows, one’s city, one’s adherents, more noble because of a temporary engagement of a higher human plane of existence.” By this definition, Paradise is certainly a winner.

Jonah Keri, The Extra 2%. New York: Ballantine, 2011.

Neal Huntington, Chris Antonetti, and Dayton Moore can safely ignore this book. It will not tell them how to turn around their teams, no matter what the title says. In fact, The Extra 2% says almost nothing about the actual Wall Street analytic strategies employed by the Rays in their rise from worst to first; while the new management group responsible for the move has a financial, rather than baseball, background, that is their only significant difference from many other well-run franchises.

The most obvious comparable title is Michael Lewis's now-classic Moneyball, about the Oakland Athletics. That book is, in essence, a lesson in contrarian investing, or purchase of undervalued assets--in the A's case, on-base percentage--even though it is generally seen as an endorsement of advanced statistical analysis. The Extra 2%, on the other hand, has at its core a description of relentless arbitrage, or chruning assets in hopes of extracting surplus value from the transactions. This is especially apparent in the small-budget Rays's standard practice of trading star players for prospects as the stars become expensive: the Rays invest time in a player's development, enjoy his early years of price-controlled service, and begin again with another talented kid while someone else pays the big money for a star's decline phase.

Another baseball book, though? No, Keri, a former financial reporter who has also applied his analytic skills to baseball for numberous websites, ESPN and the Wall Street Journal, has instead written a primer on managing cultural change. Based on interviews with over 150 current and former Tampa players, past and current management, and other experts on baseball or economics, he provides a conversational, non-scholarly book which is easy to read and reinforces the notion that brains can, at least sometimes, be more important than money.

Dirk Hayhurst, The Bullpen Gospels. New York: Citadel Press, 2010.

Dirk Hayhurst is a Major League pitcher--because, like the President, once one attains the title 'Major Leaguer', it sticks no matter what may follow. Hayhurst was drafted out of Kent State University by the San Diego Padres, and this book is his memoir of one season in the Padres' minor league development system.

This is not, however, a book about baseball; as Hayhurst notes, "for all the great things baseball is, there are some things it is absolutely not. And that is what this story is all about." That may be counter-intuitive, since Hayhurst writes about learning to play the game and about some of the games he played, but the story really isn't about becomeing a ballplayer. Honus Wagner, Hall of Fame shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, said "There ain't much to being a ballplayer, if you're a ballplayer"; Hayhurst, who can throw a ball near ninety miles an hour, is already a ballplayer when the story opens. But he is also a recent college graduate, single, living on an air mattress at his grandmother's house and doubting his prospects. This story isn't about becoming a ballplayer; it is about becoming a man.

Every story needs a setting, though, and the trials of a minor-league season provide Hayhurst innumerable opprotunities for fun. While names have been changed and some characters are composites, everything is based on real incidents, allowing reader entry into a heavily-guarded world many have wished to experience. It isn't an expose or game-by-game recap, but Hayhurst does share some locker-room discussions (if terrorists put a gun to your head, which team-mate(s) would you sleep with?), bus-trip high-jinks (Midnight Express might not be a good entertainment choice), and the general anxiety of young men who have never really felt failure but now struggle against great odds. It is very enjoyable, a quick and engaging read appropriate for any post-adolecent audience (it IS full of locker-room language), and an especially good choice for high-school boys.

Tim Green, Baseball Great. NY: HarperCollins Children's Books, 2009. Josh LeBlanc is twelve years old and getting ready for his school team tryouts when his father's minor league baseball career ends unexpectedly. But when his father takes a sales job for the coach of a local travel team, Josh joins that squad instead. His dream is to do what his father couldn't: get to the big leagues and be a baseball great. He has the talent, but he needs to get stronger to compete against older boys. One of his teammates offers him some gym candy to help him through their weightlifting workouts. With friendships and his future on the line, what will Josh do? This well-paced, exciting story, targeted at eight to twelve year olds, will have even recalcitrant readers anxiously turning pages to find out what happens next.

Joe Posnanski, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip through Buck O’Neil’s America. NY: Wm. Morrow, 2007.

Buck O’Neil was the most graceful man I’ve ever met. Not physically, mind you—it’s hard for a ninety-year old man, even a professional athlete, to move gracefully. No, O’Neil’s grace was internal, a peace, an all-encompassing agape love that let this man, denied so much—a chance to play, or to manage, in the Major Leagues—because of his ‘beautiful tan’, nonetheless call his autobiography I Was Right on Time. “Don’t feel sorry for us,” he said in it. “We had a great time”. That book tells of America’s impact on Buck O’Neil, longtime first baseman and manager of the Negro National League, founder of the Negro Leagues Museum, and star of Ken Burn’s miniseries Baseball. The Soul of Baseball is something else.

In this book, Kansas City sportswriter Posnanski chronicles a year of traveling with O’Neil as he moves across the country telling stories and keeping memories of the Negro Leagues alive during a year when the Hall of Fame held a special election and inducted seventeen neglected players from the Negro Leagues—but not O’Neil [O'Neil was later honored by the HoF when they created a Lifetime Achievement award bearing his name]. This isn’t a biography, though we learn plenty about O’Neil. It isn’t what O’Neil asked for, either, when he approached Posnanski looking for someone to “tell it like it was”. Instead, it is a deeply personal account in which Posnanski is able to capture—or at least reflect—some of the joy that seemed to radiate from O’Neil, some of the stories that otherwise would have been lost. We see an old man refusing to be bitter, spreading an infectious love. O’Neil makes it clear that baseball was great in his day—and is still great, in spite of millionaires, steroids, and the rest of the game’s ills: “The game hasn’t changed,” he would say, “We have”. Like baseball, O’Neil never changed; America did. Calling Buck O’Neil the Soul of Baseball is an incredible complement, but it may still be understated. As presented by Posnanski, O’Neil represented not just the best of baseball, but of all humanity.