Batter up! 9 baseball books to kick off the season

Although I have walked to Dodger Stadium to attend a baseball game, although more than once I sat in the stands with my then-boyfriend to see Barry Bonds hit a home run, although I know that the Red Sox are the good guys and the Yankees are the bad guys, I don't really know baseball. I've never kept track of stats, I don't know seminal years, and though, like any decent American, I enjoy watching the playoffs, I won't remember later which players admitted to using steroids and which didn't.

Which is why book critic David L. Ulin is a far better person than I am to come up with the nine best baseball books, which he does in Thursday's Times. We've got his complete list below, conceived in 2006, with an addendum -- extra innings? -- that follows. Is your favorite missing? Leave it in the comments.

David L. Ulin's nine best baseball books:

1. "You Know Me Al" by Ring Lardner (1916). Lardner's deftly satiric novel, originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, comes constructed as a series of letters from a rookie pitcher to his best friend back home, offering a rare contemporaneous -- and utterly unsentimental -- glimpse of baseball in the dead-ball era before 1920.

2. "The Natural" by Bernard Malamud (1952). Inspired by the 1949 shooting of Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus, Malamud's first novel tells the story of Roy Hobbs, a player whose chance at redemption falls prey to corruption and greed. Forget the movie with its happy ending; this is an anti-myth about the dark side of the American dream.

3. "The Long Season" by Jim Brosnan (1960). Ten years before "Ball Four," Brosnan published the first (and still best) baseball diary, a candid, smart and slyly funny look at his experiences during the 1959 season as a relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds.

4. "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" by Jimmy Breslin (1963). The 1962 New York Mets were the most woeful team in baseball history, losing 120 games. In his second book, Breslin tells the often-ridiculous story of that season, from the on-the-field misadventures of Marvelous Marv Throneberry to the off-the-field ramblings of the Old Professor, Casey Stengel.

5. "The Glory of Their Times" by Lawrence S. Ritter (1966). Ritter essentially invented the field of baseball scholarship with this oral history, gathering the memories of early major leaguers such as Rube Marquard, Edd Roush and Goose Goslin in their own words to develop a comprehensive group portrait of the first half-century of the game.

6. "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover (1968). Less a book about baseball than an inquiry into obsession and imagination, Coover’s densely lyrical novel involves a man who uses dice to play out the seasons of his own fantasy league -- until the fantasy takes over, blurring the lines between his inner and outer worlds.

7. "Five Seasons" by Roger Angell (1977). Angell is best known for "The Summer Game," in which he revolutionized baseball writing by bringing an essayist's eye to the ballpark.

Time for the seventh inning stretch! See the rest after the break.

... bottom of No. 7. This collection, ["Five Seasons"], is even better, tracking the sport through the mid-1970s and opening with one of Angell's signature efforts — an evocative meditation on the ball itself.

8. "The Celebrant" by Eric Rolfe Greenberg (1983). Greenberg's only novel is a historical pastiche about a young Jewish immigrant in turn-of-the-20th-century New York and his devotion to Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson, a dedication that borders on the religious, framing fanhood as an act of faith.

9. "Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy" by Jules Tygiel (1983). An extensively researched work of social history, Tygiel's book puts the integration of major league baseball in context, using the broader lens of American culture to portray Robinson as a civil rights pioneer.

Ulin also writes:

Such a list was not meant to be definitive (how could it be?), but since then I've looked back at it periodically and thought about the books that are there and the books that are not. What would I change? What would I add or subtract?

But what about Arnold Hano’s "A Day in the Bleachers," a pitch-by-pitch account of Game One of the 1954 World Series, the game in which Willie Mays made his miraculous catch? Or onetime White Sox, Browns and Indians owner Bill Veeck's "Veeck — As in Wreck," still the greatest, and most revealing, of all baseball memoirs? These are as fine as anything on my list, as is G.H. Fleming's "The Unforgettable Season," which tells the story of the 1908 National League pennant race (the year of Merkle's blunder and the last Chicago Cubs World Series championship) through a collage of contemporaneous news reports. Then, of course, there's Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams' "Game of Shadows," which blew the lid off Barry Bonds and baseball's steroid scandal and has been in the news again as the Bonds case goes to court.

He notes that he finds Roger Kahn's "Boys of Summer" "too sentimental, too sugary," but some readers might include it on their best-baseball-books list.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Dodger Stadium in 2009. Credit: Chris Erskine / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Dory Adams]

Anyone who experienced the 1970s (as an adult or as a child) will love Josh Wilker's CARDBOARD GODS: An American Tale.

[Linton Robinson]

You missed a good one.... note the reviews of this Mexican politics thriller in which the main character was a national slugging star, played a season with the Angels.

[Mufon]

Good list! I'd also suggest A False Spring, by Pat Jordan.

[Vincent]

The Red Sox "the good guys"? You've been watching too many Ken Burns documentaries. They are Evil Empire II, in some ways more obnoxious than the Yankees, because at least the Yanks aren't self-righteous about it.

[Roth fan]

Philip Roth's The Great American Novel. More a book about our fascination with telling stories about baseball, but hilarious for fans who are historians of the game. And don't forget Bang the Drum Slowly, which isn't as maudlin a book as the movie was.

[Andrew Broadbent]

I like the addition of the Coover book, however, any list of baseball books remains incomplete, in my opinion, without Jim Bouton's 'Ball Four'.

[spinelli]

"The Celebrant," "You Know Me Al," "Universal Baseball Association," and "Baseball's Great Experiment" are all great books (and I had the privilege of taking a class on the history and lit of baseball co-taught by "Baseball's Great Experiment" author Jules Tygiel at SFSU back in the '80s). I would add John Sayles' "The Anarchist's Collection," Daryl Brock's "If I Never Get Back," and Elliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out." And I second Roth fan on "Great American Novel."

[mark haskell smith]

My vote goes to "Champagne and Baloney: The rise and fall of Finley's A's" by Tom Clark. Not just a great baseball book, it's a fantastic look inside the mind of a madman.

[renrose]

an unlikely baseball book, but don delillo's UNDERWORLD got me interested in the sport.