Baseball is at its root a game of conversation. The long season, the timeless nature of the games themselves, leads inevitably to conversation. In the dugout, players and coaches tell stories about games and plays they have seen and players they have known. They talk about all the important and unimportant things in their lives in the way you can only talk to friends and people who share the very same histories, interests, passions, and skills as you do. In the stands, fans do the same. Many of the stories are the same. On the radio and on television people are paid to talk about the game.

While there are good and even a few great books written about basketball, football, and hockey. The reality is that in baseball there are so many more. But my love of baseball and of baseball books has not. Middle-aged men enjoy looking back at the glory of their youth. My youth and young adulthood coincided with some of the best baseball ever played. No doubt every generation has felt the same. You see it in the literature that surrounds the game. Men remembering their youth almost always feel that the best time has passed.

On ClimbingSky, I will be reviewing what I think are the best books I have read about baseball (non-fiction for the most part but a few fiction books all the same).

Here is a partial list of some of the many baseball books I have read over the past 35 years or so and that I hope to “review” here: