When April rolls around, I know it’s time to highlight some of the best new baseball books for the year — now is the best time to do your baseball reading, before September arrives and your team blows a 3 game lead over the last 4 games. But it’s April and the Tigers are contending for the AL Central division lead, so baseball still makes me happy. Let’s move on to the books before I break into Terrance Mann’s speech from Field of Dreams (“It’s baseball, Ray”).
The Baseball Codes is a look at all the unwritten rules of baseball — all the little traditions that basically structure every part of the game not already dictated by the official rulebook. In a game where pitchers throw 95 mph fastballs within inches of (and sometimes directly at) hitters, it’s easy to understand how a complicated and subtle system of self-policing has developed — this book is your guide to that and more.
High Heat is a history of the most important pitch in baseball: the fastball. It’s the most thrown pitch in baseball, and even the guys who don’t have a great fastball use it to set up their better pitches. We can even track pitchers on a pitch by pitch basis, to know what pitcher has the fastest average fastball (the current 2010 leader is Detroit’s Joel Zumaya, who also led 3 out of the last 4 years), as well as the slowest average fastball (if we throw out knuckleball-outlier Tim Wakefield, then 47-year-old Jamie Moyer wins the “honor”, clocking in at 81.2 MPH). Accurate fastball data only goes back a few years, so author Tim Wendel has attempted to piece together through baseball folklore and first-hand accounts (when available) who was the ultimate flamethrower in baseball history.
If you’re tired of the modern TMZ/E! News/supermarket tabloid style of sports reporting, I’d recommend Jim Hawkins’ new biography of Al Kaline (and not just because I’m a Tigers fan). Kaline embodies everything great about baseball, and what his story lacks in the self-destructive tendencies so common in athlete-celebrities today, it makes up for in his exemplary dedication and hard work. Added bonus: not a single page devoted to steroid allegations, stolen girlfriends, or Congressional oversight panels.
Joe Posnanski’s The Machine actually came out last year, but it’s worth another look if you missed it. Posnanski is one of my favorite baseball writers, and he’s delivered arguably the definitive story of the 1975 Reds here. If you want to understand what Joe Morgan is rambling on about during ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball when he compares every team to his old Reds team (and every player to a Reds teammates of his), this is the book. I’d also like to thank Joe (Posnanski, not Morgan) for mentioning on his blog that you can buy his book at independent bookstores — we appreciate the support.
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