12 Best Baseball Books That Hit It Out of the Park

When sports were still segregated by race, the only option available to professional Black baseball players was to join the Negro Leagues. In a demonstration of respect for the accomplishments of these players, the MLB recently announced that it would add Negro League records to their own official statistics. This book packed full of facts, photos, and anecdotes sheds new light on “baseball's unsung heroes” and the people who worked tirelessly to integrate professional sports.

If you’re looking for an incredible story about the life one of the most accomplished players in baseball written by an experienced author of important sports figures (including an acclaimed biography of Vince Lombardi) then Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero is a fantastic pick. Roberto Clemente played 18 incredible major league seasons, ending with four batting titles, 3,000 hits, and an immediate Hall of Fame induction following his death. 

Along with the artistry of his game, his dedication to an underdog team, and his determination to pave the way for future Latino baseball players in a time where people of color weren’t allowed to play baseball, Clemente had other ambitions. He was insistent that baseball wasn’t everything; if you had the means to help others and you didn’t, you were wasting your precious time on earth. 

He died a hero’s death on New Year’s Eve in 1972 in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua following a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss tells the story of his life, and finishes by using newly uncovered documents to reveal the corruption and negligence that ultimately led to Clemente’s untimely death. 

Cam Perron was a young, white, baseball fanatic from Boston when he first came across a set of Topps baseball cards featuring several players from the Negro Leagues. As his fascination grew, he began writing letters to former players in 2007, asking for autographs and a few words about their baseball careers. He was surprised by the detailed stories they told him; they ranged from their glory days, to run-ins with the KKK, to how racism prevailed and excluded them from the major leagues even after Jackie Robinson changed the game. 

The letters turned into phone calls, and Cam discovered that most of the players had fallen out of contact with their teammates, and that their incredible careers had been largely unrecognized. So with the help of some fellow researchers, Cam and his team arranged a week-long reunion in Alabama in 2010. But it doesn’t end there—their unlikely friendship became so strong that Cam aided in the complicated journey to get the players the pensions they were owed from the MLB, and helped open and stock a Negro League museum in Birmingham. 

A biography that is about much more than a legendary baseball career (though there is plenty of that too), Luckiest Man introduces us to Lou Gehrig’s life in a whole new light. The New York Yankee player was known for his first baseman capabilities, consecutive game streaks, and even for the fatal disease that now bears his name. But no one really knew how complicated his life was before Jonathan Eig wrote this biography. 

Drawing on previously unpublished letters to and from Gehrig as well as new interview footage, Eig introduces us to Gehrig’s shy and awkward NYC adolescent experience, his unlikely and eventually tragic friendship with Babe Ruth, and his incredible baseball career with the Yankees before revealing how the symptoms of his illness presented in 1938, much earlier than originally thought.  Aware that he was coming to the end of his short life, Gehrig lived with dignity and grace till the end—the same characteristics he exhibited when giving his famous “luckiest man” speech.

My Bat Boy Days is an unlikely and inspiring story of a man who actually got to live his dream. A young baseball card collector and aspiring Little League player, Steve Garvey’s dreams began to cement themselves on the evening of March 28, 1956, when his father, a Greyhound bus driver, asked him if he’d like to accompany him while driving the Brooklyn Dodgers to a spring training game. 

Garvey went on to be a bat boy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Yankees, and Tigers over a five year span before becoming a first baseman for the LA Dodgers. An incredible story from one of the best of his era, Garvey shares memories, profiles, and lessons learned from baseball heroes like Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, and Mickey Mantle.

Another Jonathan Eig classic, Opening Day uses interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, accompanied by newly discovered archival material to tell the story of Jackie Robinson in a whole new way. April 15, 1947 was a thrilling, postwar opening day; and perhaps the most important opening day in history. Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond, and the civil rights era instantly had a new hero. Combining baseball’s ultimate story with true facts and figures, readers get real insight into various legends surrounding Jackie Robinson.

An enthralling account of the 1983 finale of a four-game series between the New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals, The Pine Tar Game introduces the turning point from a game of talent and grit, to the modern world of soaring salaries, labor strikes, and performance-enhancing drugs. 

Acclaimed sports writer Filip Bondy includes fresh commentary from players and club officials like Goose Gossage, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry, Sparky Lyle, David Cone, and John Schuerholz that offer their takes on the postseason rivalry that came as a result of Yankees manager Billy Martin calling out George Brett’s illegal amount of pine tar on his bat, overturning a game-winning home run, causing chaos to ensue. 

Taking on the difficult job of debunking the myths to explain Ty Cobb’s true character, Charles Leerhsen traveled to Georgia and Detroit to retrace Cobb’s every step. Originally, Cobb was known for his record-holding lifetime batting average, 20-plus year dedication to the sport, and 90-plus record-holding career. But he was also known for being an overly aggressive fighter and fierce competitor. Somewhere along the way, this narrative transformed into a reputation of a violent racist who also hated women and children. So who was Ty Cobb really? Leerhsen is here to tell you.

An atmospheric memoir steeped in the culture of 1950’s New York baseball, Wait Till Next Year is a feisty yet uplifting memoir about a girl in a pre-feminist, postwar neighborhood whose coming-of-age experience is marked by her mother’s untimely death and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in 1957.

Former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent features ballplayers from the 50’s and 60’s, including Whitey Ford, Duke Snider, Carl Erskine, Bill Rigney, Robin Roberts, Lew Burdette, Harmon Killebrew, Billy Williams, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and Ralph Branca and their stories from playing the game in a time when players negotiated their own contracts and worked other jobs in the off-season. They share incredible stories about milestone events, like Jackie Robinson changing the game, teammates and opponents they admired, and the Dodgers and Giants moving to California. 

A thrilling representation of American roots in baseball, Eight Men Out is a story about the World Series fix of 1919. Eliot Asinof describes scene-by-scene the tense meetings, hold-ups in the plan, the actual plays that threw the Series, the grand jury indictment, and the 1921 trial that arose as a result of eight White Sox players teaming up with the nation’s leading gamblers to throw the Series. Readers get an inside look into the motives and backgrounds of the players, as well as the conditions that made the fix so easy. Far more than just another baseball story, this view of the American underbelly, in a time in between war and the roaring 20’s, shows that not even baseball was a safe space for a nation that desperately needed somewhere to turn.

Split Season 1981 is exactly as the title suggests: a detailed account of the split baseball season of 1981, the first time a season ever stopped in the middle, as MLB players went on strike for their right to free agency. 

The season was heating up right before the strike ensued. After a 712-game absence, Pete Rose's attempt to set a new National League hit record, Reggie Jackson’s reappearance, the rise of the Montreal Expos, Nolan Ryan’s no-hitter, and the final Yankee-Dodger World Series matchup made for an incredible season. Not only were there first and second-half champions that season, but the two teams with best overall record in the National League were not allowed play-off berths for the first time in modern history.