Five Best Baseball Books

These baseball books belong in your reading lineup, says Peter Morris.

1. The Glory of Their Times. Lawrence S. Ritter. Macmillan, 1966. 796.357 R

Spurred by the death of baseball legend Ty Cobb in 1961, Lawrence Ritter, an economics professor, made it his mission to tape-record the memories of other players from Cobb's generation before these men were also gone. The result is an invaluable record of what it felt like to play big-league baseball in the early 20th century. Former New York Giants outfielder Fred Snodgrass, for instance, recalled what would happen when the umpire tossed out a new ball: Helpful infielders would throw the ball around a few times—until it came back to the pitcher "as black as the ace of spades. All the infielders were chewing tobacco or licorice, and spitting into their gloves, and they'd give that ball a good going over before it got to the pitcher." Eagle-eyed observers have detected some errors in the recollections, but that scarcely matters. Hundreds of baseball books get the minutiae right. None has ever captured the spirit of an era better than "The Glory of Their Times."

2. Baseball's Great Experiment. Jules Tygiel. Oxford, 1983.   796.3572 Robinson T

Jackie Robinson's re-integration of organized baseball after a half-century of tacit segregation remains the most remarkable chapter in the game's history. Yet the magnitude of Robinson's courage makes his story difficult to relate without rendering him a paragon of saintly virtue and the events of his life a pat melodrama. We are thus fortunate to have Jules Tygiel's thoughtful portrait of baseball's "great experiment." We see the disturbing broader context of racism in the sport, but we also encounter Robinson as a real person. Turning the other cheek did not come naturally to him: "With Jackie's temper being the way it was," recalled fellow Negro Leaguer Quincy Trouppe, "it didn't seem likely that a major league team would be willing to take a chance with him." Robinson emerges as an inspiring, entirely human hero whose triumph meant conquering his imperfections.

3. The End of Baseball as We Knew It. Charles Korr . University of Illinois, 2002.   331.8904 K
                                                                                                         [331 - Labor Economics]

Mining the archives of the Major League Baseball Players Association might sound like an unpromising research project, but Charles Korr turned his findings into a compulsively readable book about how a submissive "house union" was transformed during the 1970s into a union with extraordinary power. For some, that revolution gave ballplayers their long-overdue fair share of the pie. Others saw it as baseball's apocalypse, turning players into rootless guns-for-hire and spoiled millionaires. Korr's splendid study may not sway the true believers in either camp, but it will furnish any reader with a better understanding of the events that shaped the free-agent era.

4. Dollar Sign on the Muscle. Kevin Kerrane. Beaufort, 1984.  796.35702 K

A baseball scout, in Kevin Kerrane's unforgettable portrait of the profession, is part traveling salesman, part spymaster and part hunter for that mythical creature known as "the arm behind the barn." Most of all, it seems, scouts—after all those hours of hanging around ballparks—are consummate storytellers. Kerrane shares their love of a good tale, and the result is a lyrical study of the world of baseball scouting. The 1965 arrival of the amateur draft changed the profession forever, replacing cloak-and-dagger tactics with bureaucracies. But the scouts in "Dollar Sign on the Muscle" are exhilarating to read about: No matter how many disappointments they endure, these men remain steadfast in their belief that the next phenom is just waiting to be discovered.

5. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary. Paul Dickson. Norton, 2009 (3rd ed.)   R 796.357 D

Dictionaries aren't usually thought of as works of history, let alone as fun reads, yet "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary" manages against all odds to be both. With each new edition it evolves and expands—the recently released third edition includes more than 10,000 entries and sprawls to nearly a thousand pages. The authoritative entries make it a valuable guide to baseball terminology and history, but what really distinguishes this reference work is its sharp eye for telling anecdotes, apt quotations and succinct definitions. Lord Charles: "An appreciative name for a superb curveball, which elevates an Uncle Charlie to a regal level." The dictionary is itself royalty among baseball reference works.

—Mr. Morris is the author of "A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball."   796.357 M