I love baseball for a number of reasons.
First, I enjoyed playing back in the day. I was a solid high-school player — good enough to receive a few junior college offers, though not an elite prospect. Still, I loved the game no less for it. Playing home run derby with Wiffle balls in the front yard, riding my bike across town to the local batting cages, grinding out an at-bat and roping an opposite-field single, picking a ball at first base, listening to stories in the dugout — many of my fondest memories are connected to baseball.
Second, as an undergraduate student, I was invited to join a rotisserie league run by the husband of my roommate’s older sister. When I was informed that the league’s draft would be held at Hooters — a site that, to my self-confident 20-year-old mind, reeked of middle-aged desperation — I almost didn’t join out of embarrassment. But I’m glad I did, because just a year later (in those halcyon days of Y2K), Yahoo launched its online fantasy baseball platform, and I had already acquired the knowledge and skills needed to play. I’ve been a loyal customer ever since, though, alas, 2026 and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have not been kind to me.
Third, my life as a father has been deeply shaped by the game. I have three sons, and all three played as kids. My oldest son opted for basketball by the fourth grade, but he was bitten by the fantasy bug at a young age. Today, when he’s not dominating our fantasy league, he’s working towards a career in data analytics. My advice: don’t ever trade with him. My younger two sons have had a lot of success on the field. The older of the two was drafted in 2025, though he ultimately opted to play in college and is currently a two-way player (third base-first base-right-handed pitcher) at the University of Alabama. My youngest son is a senior in high school (shortstop-right-handed pitcher), and he’s committed to play at Alabama as well. Life on the amateur baseball circuit is not easy — the travel, the early-morning tournaments, and (frankly) the bullshit social-media pressure — but I wouldn’t trade the time that baseball has given me with my sons for anything. Some families go to the lake, some families go skiing. We’re a baseball family.
Which brings me to the final reason I love baseball: it’s just such a rich sport. There is so much to think about, from baseball’s massive influence on American culture to the artistry and strategy within the game itself. I have always appreciated that baseball has inspired a vibrant intellectual reception, and, in fact, I’m currently writing an academic book (under contract with Bloomsbury) entitled “Religion, Philosophy, and Baseball: Exploring the Relationship Between Baseball and the Meaning of Life.” It should be out in 2028.
Working on this project has encouraged me to reflect on the various baseball books that have shaped my thinking over the years, and I have decided to catalog a number of them here. To be sure, this list is not exhaustive. I left off Michael Lewis‘ “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” (2003) because, while I admire the book, I think the movie is even better. I left off Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues” (1970) because, while I acknowledge the book’s historical importance, it has had little influence on my own thoughts about baseball. Of course, many would make different selections or reshuffle the order. And that’s perfectly fine: this is just a provisional list, which, like the game itself, is ever subject to debate and interpretation.
10. George F. Will, “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” (1990)
Written by Will, a professor of political philosophy turned Reaganite pundit, “Men at Work” features a conservative, almost stolid premise. The book examines baseball through four disciplines: managing, pitching, hitting, and fielding. Will builds each section around what he considers to be an exemplary practitioner — Tony La Russa, Orel Hershiser, Tony Gwynn, and Cal Ripken Jr., respectively — using their reflections to uncover the dedication, diligence, and focus that underlie the game’s leisurely surface. In this sense, Will does not so much provide a conventional history of baseball as anatomize the labor required to play it well.
I was in middle school when “Men at Work” was released. Needless to say, the book’s sober thesis was not of particular interest at the time. What I did enjoy, however, was how “Saturday Night Live” mercilessly ribbed Will’s sacrosanct approach to the game:
Reading the book a few decades later, I have a greater appreciation for Will’s style and interests. Indeed, in an age of social media, where highlight reels and competing cycles of news and hype run 24/7, “Men at Work” reminds us that baseball excellence is often a byproduct of quiet, repetitive pursuits — film study, tee routines, and conditioning drills. In this sense, baseball is not just a sport, it’s training for a life of virtue. This conclusion may seem quaint. Yet, in 2026, is that such a bad thing?
9. Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik, “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players” (2019)
The “MVP Machine” starts from the premise that the age of sabermetrics is coming to an end. This is not because sabermetrics has failed — quite the opposite. The empirical analysis of baseball, which dates back to Henry Chadwick’s development of the box score in 1858, is now approaching its apex. As advanced metrics have both deepened and expanded, and as information has become increasingly accessible and orderable, the competitive advantage once conferred by data analysis has diminished. It’s not that teams don’t use it; it’s that they all use it. Therefore, if a given organization is going to get ahead, a new edge must be found. According to Lindbergh and Sawchik, the authors of “The MVP Machine,” that edge will come from player development.
Released in June 2019, “The MVP Machine” seemed prophetic at the time, featuring sections on Driveline Baseball and the rise of starting pitcher Trevor Bauer. Today, it reads like a snapshot of an era whose legacy remains unsettled. Bauer has not pitched in MLB since 2021, following multiple allegations of sexual assault and an ensuing MLB suspension, and Driveline founder Kyle Boddy has had mixed success as an adviser to multiple MLB clubs. Nevertheless, “The MVP Machine” captures how the technology-driven turn to player development has led to the creation of heroes and villains, gurus and dabblers, geniuses and fools. It’s a story that’s still being written, but “The MVP Machine” was there first.
8. Joe Posnanski, “The Baseball 100” (2021)
Longtime sportswriter Posnanski deserves no credit for the premise of “The Baseball 100” — a book that counts down the greatest players in baseball history. After all, “The Baseball 100” reflects a conversation that has played out innumerable times at kitchen tables, playgrounds, and pubs across America. No, what makes “The Baseball 100” an important work is that Posnanski exhibits the brains, not to mention the guts, needed to realize such a grandiose idea. Drawing on biographical detail, statistical analysis, historical context, and personal reflection, Posnanski makes a number of surprising cases in “The Baseball 100” — for example, that Negro Leagues outfielder Oscar Charleston (1896-1954) was a better player than Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams (1918-2002) or that Walter Johnson (1887-1946) is the greatest pitcher of all time. Other decisions are just plain odd, such as placing Joe DiMaggio (1914–99) at No. 56 — an obvious but gimmicky nod to the Yankee Clipper’s still-unmatched 56-game hitting streak from May to July 1941.
Yet, while people may quibble with Posnanski’s list, there’s no denying his achievement. Almost 900 pages in length, “The Baseball 100” has all the marks of a magnum opus. Posnanski’s reach exceeds his grasp at times, but ambition is hardly a fault in an author at the peak of his powers.
7. Tyler Kepner, “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches” (2019)
Kepner’s “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches” can be seen as a mirror image of “The Baseball 100.” The premise itself is innovative, bordering on precious. The book recounts the evolution of baseball through the development of ten principal pitches: fastball, curveball, spitball, slider, changeup, sinker, screwball, knuckleball, splitter, and cutter. Each chapter centers on a different offering, exploring its origins, mechanics, notable practitioners, and strategic uses.
On the surface, then, this is a book for specialists, particularly those who want to know more about the history of pitching. But Kepner, a Philadelphia native and longtime baseball writer for The New York Times and The Athletic, deftly manages to universalize the story. Pitching, it turns out, is more than just an art or a science. It is a window into the souls of those who practice it. For example, in the book’s eighth chapter, Kepner features longtime MLB relief pitcher Doug Jones (1957-2021), who, after a brief stint with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1982, found himself out of baseball at the age of 27. A few years later, he found work in the Cleveland organization, where he served as a bulk reliever in the minor leagues. It was then that he learned to rely on the changeup, a pitch that he’d previously toyed with but now needed to survive multiple innings out of the pen. Never an elite talent, Jones’ embrace of the changeup suited him — patient, brave, and a little crazy. Returning to the majors in 1986, Jones would become one of the best closers in baseball and end up making five All-Star teams.
“K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches” gathers dozens of stories like Jones’s and, in the process, bears out William Blake’s famous observation that we can see entire worlds in small things — even, apparently, in pitches.
6. Donn Rogosin, “Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues” (1983)
“Invisible Men” is one of two books on my list that has actually inspired me to write something. A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate class at Villanova University called “‘The Church of Baseball’: Exploring the Relationship between Baseball, Religion, and the Meaning of Life.” I couldn’t assume that students had prior knowledge of baseball history, so the first few weeks of class were set aside as a primer on the origins and evolution of the game. It was in this context that we covered the Negro Leagues and, by extension, Rogosin’s “Invisible Men.”
The book reconstructs the world of Black professional baseball from the founding of Rube Foster’s Negro National League in 1920 through the post-integration decline of the Negro Leagues. Drawing largely upon the recollections of former players, Rogosin is less interested in baseball as such than in the culture of the Negro Leagues — the travel, business practices, racial discrimination, and sense of professionalism that defined life in the Negro Leagues. While there has been a tendency to condescend to the Negro Leagues, as if they were mere way stations created by segregation, Rogosin shows that they were actually vital institutions within Black America. In fact, he suggests, there is a profound and bitter irony in the fact that integration created long-denied opportunities for individual players at the expense of the organizations that had sustained them.
When my course was over, I was inspired to write a pilot episode for a series called “Smoketown,” which was to center on the rivalry between Cumberland Posey and Gus Greenlee in Pittsburgh during the 1930s. It was more of an experiment than an actual project, though I did finish a draft — and, frankly, remain rather pleased with my “Boardwalk Empire“-like portrait of the era. The point, however, is that “Invisible Men” is that kind of book. It reveals a lost world to the reader and, in doing so, renders visible what was invisible.
5. Lawrence Ritter, “The Glory of Their Times” (1966)
Including Ritter’s “The Glory of Their Times” in this list is hardly a bold choice. It is frequently cited as one of the best books ever written about the game — one that “set a standard” for such projects in the future. One might assume, then, that Ritter was a trained historian or a grizzled journalist — a baseball lifer who had deep connections in the game. In fact, he was a longtime professor of economics and finance at New York University, who, in 1974, would coauthor a popular college textbook on finance.
Paradoxically, this may explain Ritter’s achievement. Drawing on his academic background (Ritter received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1951) and inspired by the fieldwork of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Ritter traveled more than 70,000 miles to conduct interviews with players who thrived during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Presented largely in the players’ own voices, the book recalls the dead-ball era and its aftermath through stories about legendary figures, obscure teammates, primitive travel, low salaries, rough playing conditions, and life off the field.
Thus “The Glory of Their Times” is not a continuous chronological history; it’s more like a field recording that preserves the personalities, language, and lived experience of a generation that was already rapidly disappearing. And while the book itself cannot be improved upon, there’s an added bonus for people in the internet era: you can now listen to some of Ritter’s interviews on YouTube. Here is his conversation with Hall of Fame left-handed pitcher Rube Marquard (1886-1980):
4. John Thorn, “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game” (2011)
Like a baseball version of a Thucydides (ca. 460-400 BC) or a Tacitus (ca. 56-120), Thorn conceives of history (including baseball history) as an analytical inquiry into past events, scrutinizing reports, privileging eyewitness evidence, and endeavoring to reconstruct events as accurately as possible. In March 2011, he was named official baseball historian for MLB, succeeding the late Jerome Holtzman (1926-2008). In that same month, Thorn published “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” the culmination of a writing career (and historical quest) that began with 1974’s “A Century of Baseball Lore.”
“Baseball in the Garden of Eden” is best known for dismantling the familiar creation myths that credit Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright with inventing baseball. Drawing on extensive original research, Thorn traces the game’s gradual evolution from earlier bat-and-ball sports and explains how the New York version of baseball displaced rival forms. Thorn’s goal, however, is not to say what baseball isn’t. It is to show, rather, that baseball is woven into the fabric of American life writ large, from commercial ambition and illegal gambling to patriotic mythmaking and religious devotion. For Thorn, this is a far more interesting (and true!) story than many of the tall tales that have circulated about baseball’s origins. On this point, he is no doubt right, though I would add that the meaning of those tall tales is an important question in its own right.
3. Alva Noë, “Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark” (2019)
We have all heard the complaint before: “Baseball is boring.” Perhaps this observation is a little less common since the advent of pitch clocks, but let’s face it: there are many American sports fans who would rather watch a Thursday night New York Jets-Cleveland Browns matchup on Amazon Prime than a top-flight baseball game on the grounds that “baseball is boring.” If you know such a person, and if they are capable of reading an entire book, I suggest that you give him a copy of Noë’s “Infinite Baseball.”
Noë is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, specializing in analytic philosophy in general, with particular interests in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. He is also a native New Yorker and a lifelong New York Mets fan. “Infinite Baseball” is Noë’s attempt to bring these passions (philosophy and baseball) into conversation. The book itself is a collection of short meditations treating baseball as not just a sport but a distinctive form of thought — one that forces us to examine broader questions about language, judgment, responsibility, culture, and human action. This premise could easily drift into abstract theory, but Noë roots his reflections in a number of concrete aspects of the game — umpiring, instant replay, scorekeeping, the strike zone, performance-enhancing drugs, and injuries.
Ultimately, Noë’s contention is that baseball’s apparent slowness is not an absence of activity but an invitation for players, coaches, scouts, fans, etc. to interpret events and participate in the construction of meaning. In other words, baseball is not just a “spectator sport;” it is a way of life that invites, or even demands, our cooperation. So put down the remote, grab a scorecard (and a beer!), and join in.
2. Bill James, “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” (2001)
“The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” came out in 2001, Lewis’ “Moneyball” came out in 2003. This chronology reminds us of something that is easy to forget: there was a time when James was just a writer — and a damn good one at that. Lewis’ best-selling book, later made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Brad Pitt, changed the discourse around James. He was no longer the “Father of Sabermetrics,” whose early forays into baseball analysis were penned while he worked as a security guard at the Stokely-Van Camp pork-and-beans cannery in Lawrence, Kan. Now he was a cultural icon, named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time in 2006 and invoked on the silver screen in 2011:
How delightful, then, to pick up a copy of “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract,” flip through its pages, and realize it’s merely a baseball book. An updated edition of “The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” (1985), James’ new and (ostensibly) final abstract is a sprawling combination of narrative history and statistical analysis — part argument, part reference guide. Its first major section surveys baseball decade by decade, examining how, where, and by whom the game was played. Its second section ranks the hundred greatest players at each position and assesses their careers. James supports his rankings with historical context and his win shares system, which attempts to quantify each player’s total offensive and defensive contribution to team victories.
To be sure, “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” is a bold book. But it is also a lot of fun. Every baseball fan should own a copy, regardless of whether or not one thinks James’ post-“Moneyball” influence on the sport has proven detrimental.
1. John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1960; standalone book edition, 2010)
Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” recounts Ted Williams’ final game at Fenway Park on September 28, 1960, which Updike attended as a twenty-eight-year-old spectator. It’s a game that continues to be remembered today for two main reasons. First, Williams — arguably the greatest hitter in MLB history — homered in his last at-bat in the big leagues. Second, in a characteristically stubborn gesture, Williams refused to return from the dugout to acknowledge the prolonged ovation given to him by the Fenway Park faithful:
Updike, one of the great prose stylists in American literature and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1982, 1991), presents Williams’ final home run, and its controversial aftermath, as a profound moment of graceful restraint — a fitting end to a turbulent but truly first-rate career. Indeed, for Updike, it’s not just that Williams was a great player, set apart by his unique combination of physical skill and mental acuity. Rather, Williams stands as an eternal archetype of how to play the game. “To those of us who saw (Williams) at the plate,” Updike writes, “he seemed the concentrated essence of baseball.” Williams’ refusal to occupy himself with pleasing fans or demanding bigger paychecks meant that the only thing that mattered to him was the “cherished task” of the hitter — to merit safe passage around the bases and to return home. Thus his intensity, often mistaken for contempt, was actually a sign of focus: “Williams’ body language declared that he wanted to be the best, that this was more than a game or a livelihood for him.”
In one key passage, Updike’s portrayal of Williams evolves into a stunning paean to baseball itself — so beautiful yet provocative that it alone merits the top spot in this countdown. I will give Updike the final word, not least because he illuminates what may be baseball’s deepest paradox: the game that has drawn my family together, as it has so many others, remains “essentially lonely” at the point of performance:
“Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance — since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical — always threatens its interest, which can be maintained by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. … Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game.”
