5 Books About Baseball
Feature image (Turner Field, Atlanta, GA) by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash
’Tis the season!
In honor of opening day, here are five books (2 novels and 3 works of nonfiction) about the boys of summer and the game they play.
What books would you add to this list?
Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball by John Feinstein
“An inside look at the world of major league baseball draws on interviews with the players, umpires, managers and coaches, owners, and others to discuss behind-the-scenes intrigues, financial manipulations, controversies, and personalities.” (Goodreads)
Feinstein, a prolific sports journalist and broadcaster, died on March 13, 2025.
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
This novel is “a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist.” (Goodreads)
![Book cover. Background: a yellow sky with a small strip of green grass and a tiny white house along the bottom edge. Text: The Brothers K [by] David James Duncan.](https://www.notesinthemargin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/brothers-K.jpg)
Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam
“The year was 1949, and a war-weary nation turned from the battlefields to the ball fields in search of new heroes. It was a summer that marked the beginning of a sports rivalry unequaled in the annals of athletic competition. The awesome New York Yankees and the indomitable Boston Red Sox were fighting for supremacy of baseball’s American League, and an aging Joe DiMaggio and a brash, headstrong hitting phenomenon named Ted Williams led their respective teams in a classic pennant duel of almost mythic proportions—one that would be decided in an explosive head-to-head confrontation on the last day of the season.” (Goodreads)
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The main character of this novel is Henry Skrimshander, a player on the baseball team of a small liberal arts college on the shore of Lake Michigan. Henry, who dreams of a big-league career, carries around a beat-up book called “The Art of Fielding” that offers a philosophy of how to succeed on the baseball diamond as well as in life. Yes, baseball as a metaphor for life.
![Book cover. Dark blue background with white lettering: The Art of Fielding [by] Chad Harbach](https://www.notesinthemargin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/art-of-fielding-676x1024.jpg)
![Book cover. Background: photo of the thigh of a player in a white uniform holding a baseball in his right hand; the baseball says "Moneyball." Text: The #1 National Bestseller [by] Michael Lewis.](https://www.notesinthemargin.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/moneyball.jpg)
Moneyball by Michael Lewis
“Billy Beane, general manager of MLB’s Oakland A’s and protagonist of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that’s smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.” (Goodreads)
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
