OK, we’re coming to the big finish now: I’m announcing my new book on Wednesday. I’m announcing it on a very special PosCast, coming out at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning. I’m announcing it here on JoeBlogs (with the full cover reveal!). I’m so excited about this; it’s unlike any book I’ve written before (for a variety of reasons), and I cannot wait to start sharing it with you.
And as part of it, I’ve been counting down the 10 greatest sports books ever written … based entirely on how dog-eared and beaten up my particular copy is. The list so far:
No. 10: Levels of the Game, John McPhee
No. 9: The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated, Michael MacCambridge
No. 8 (tie): The City Game, Pete Axthelm; Heaven is a Playground; Rick Telander.
No. 7: When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss.
No. 6: Season on the Brink, John Feinstein
No. 5: Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
So now we’re down to the nitty-gritty. I have to do two books today because I totally miscounted the number of days before my big book announcement, but I think it’s OK. They are both baseball books, and though they are obviously very different, they were both groundbreaking in their own ways.
Oh, and I’m paired each book with a fountain pen from my collection because that seemed like a good idea to me … I don’t know if any Brilliant Readers feel that way, but it’s certainly easy to skip the fountain pen boxes at the bottom.
No. 4: Ball Four
Author: Jim Bouton
Signs of wear: Torn up throughout; ketchup stains? Really?
Just beat out: The Long Season, Jum Brosnan; False Spring, Pat Jordan; The Game, Ken Dryden.
A special word about The Game because the great Ken Dryden passed away on Saturday: I came late to this book. I haven’t covered a lot of hockey in my career; it wasn’t until about a decade ago, when I worked at NBC Sports, that I got the chance to spend some time in the hockey world, and that’s when I finally picked up The Game. It felt so fresh and alive to me, as if it had been written that very year. Among the greatest athletes, I’d put Dryden, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Arthur Ashe as the greatest writers.
No. 3: The Bill James Historical Abstract
Author: Bill James
Signs of wear: Page 367 is the only page that isn’t completely torn up.
Just beat out: A Game of Inches, Peter Morris. The Bill James Guide to Managers, Bill James. Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame, Bill James; A Guide to Pitchers, Bill James and Rob Neyer.
A Game of Inches is an incredible book that traces the origins of virtually everything in baseball. My copy is in remarkably good shape considering that I reference it all the time.
I’ve often said that it’s the shape of baseball — its relaxed rhythms (“If I go get a hot dog now, I’ll be back before Judge is up!”), Its mathematical bent (the great Roberto Clemente died with exactly 3,000 hits!*) and its particular sense of time (in outs rather than minutes) — that makes it America’s best writing sport.
*Sort of! If you don’t count his 34 postseason hits! And if you don’t think too much about the 192 times an official scorekeeper decided his hit was actually an error!
Ball Four and the Bill James Historical Abstract could not be more different. The former is the ultimate insider — 20-game winner and World Series star Jim Bouton — letting us in on what really happens behind the curtain.
The latter is the ultimate outsider — a baseball fan who thought about the game more deeply and clearly than anyone before or since — telling us the history of this game without the grey film of romanticism and moony-eyed nostalgia.
What I love about those books, perhaps more than anything, is how much love Jim Bouton and Bill James feel for baseball itself. Both men were heavily criticized by baseball powers. Bowie Kuhn called Ball Four “detrimental to baseball,” which kept alive Kuhn’s DiMaggio-like streak of being wrong and ridiculous. Bill James was constantly belittled and disparaged by baseball men, most famously Sparky Anderson, who called Bill “a little fat guy with a beard who knows nothing about baseball.”
To which Bill wrote: “Actually, I’m seven inches taller than Sparky is, but what the heck, three out of four ain’t bad.”
Both of those books are joyful celebrations of this great game we love. Baseball would be so much poorer without them. Someone pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago that I’m quoted in the Wikipedia entry about Ball Four, and that makes me so happy. There probably isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t think about how the legendary last line of Ball Four — it’s the “Louis, I believe this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” of nonfiction writing.
You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out, that it was the other way around all the time
The Fountain Pens: Matte Black Pilot Vanishing Point; Amber Pilot Custom 823, Lamy 2000. If there were a Fountain Pen Hall of Fame — and you better believe I’m starting one — these three pens would be in the first class. The Vanishing Point (next to Ball Four) is a clickable fountain pen that writes like a dream. The Pilot 823 might simply be the best writing fountain pen ever. And the Lamy 2000 is the all-time classic; it has remained virtually unchanged since 1966.
Reminder: During the countdown, we’re offering 10% off at the JoeBlogs Store. Simply enter PENNANT10 as your discount code at checkout.
