Some super summer baseball reading

Here are some suggestions for great reads involving the national pastime that you might have missed or never heard of. Share your favorite baseball reads (fiction and non-fiction) in the comments below, and we'll make this a nice repository for everyone's favorites.

Great magazine articles

• "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" by Richard Ben Cramer (Esquire, June 1986)
• "The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch" by George Plimpton (Sports Illustrated, April 1985)
• "The Silent Season of a Hero" by Gay Talese (Esquire, July 1966)
• "Damned Yankee (the sad story of John Malangone)" by Gary Smith (Sports Illustrated, October 1997)
• "The Ripples From Little Lake Nellie" by Gary Smith (Sports Illustrated, July 1993)

Lesser-known great baseball books

• "The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg" by Nicholas Dawidoff¹
• "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover
• "Voices of the Game: The First Full-scale Overview of Baseball Broadcasting, 1921 to the Present" by Curt Smith (published 1987)
• "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" by W.P. Kinsella
• "This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones: Bill James Without the Numbers" by Bill James
• "The Umpire Strikes Back" by Ron Luciano
• "If They Only Knew" by Darren Daulton²

Other "Baseball Tuesdays" posts

• Slats Marion, baseball's best shortstop
• Collection of Phillies ticket stubs
• John Doll's 1929 baseball predictions
• Down memory lane with 1983 Topps Baseball Sticker Album
• An all-star lineup of Camel smokers from 1954
• 1973 Spartanburg Phillies program

Footnotes
1. I have no idea why the separate stories of Moe Berg, Tacks Latimer and Allan Travers haven't been made into amazing baseball movies by Hollywood.
2. I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. Here's a blog post I wrote in 2007 about Daulton's book, which is nothing if not interesting.