(This article is entirely the work of Greg Spira...at least, he says so. :) This is a "survey" of the best baseball non-fiction readily available these days. I post this piece about every 2 months. There have been a few minor changes/corrections this time, and one or two books have been added to the list, but there haven't been any major alterations. I have not as of yet been able to add any of this season's new crop to the list, mostly because I haven't had much time to read this summer. I'll try to post some reviews by the end of September. Several of the listed books are now available on remainder in major bookstore chains. These include The Ballplayers (priced around $19.95), Our Game (priced around $7.95), and Prophet of the Sandlots (priced around $4.95). HISTORY: The most accessible general history of baseball that has been published can be found in David Voight's three volumes of American Baseball. Harold Seymour's Baseball - The Early Years and Baseball - The Golden Age provide a more scholarly and detailed history of baseball through the 1920s. Seymour's more recent Baseball: The People's Game provides an unparalleled account of the early history of the game outside Organized Baseball. Charles Alexander's Our Game is a solid one volume history of the game. Some excellent baseball history books which focus on more specific topics are: Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof - the story of the 1919 Black Sox The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn - a recollection of the 1952-3 Brooklyn Dodgers The Pitch that Killed by Mike Sowell - a fascinating study of the circumstances behind the only time a major leaguer was ever killed by a pitched ball. BIOGRAPHY: Charles Alexander's Ty Cobb and John McGraw are probably the two best baseball biographies ever written. Almost as good are Robert Creamer's Babe and Stengel - His Life and Times. Ed Linn co-authored the two most colorful baseball biographies ever written: he co-wrote Veeck as in Wreck with Bill Veeck and Nice Guys Finish Last with Leo Durocher. Other notable biographies include: The Long Season by Jim Brosnan - the first real baseball "diary" written by a ballplayer Ball Four by Jim Bouton - an honest, incisive look at the dynamics of a baseball team by a controversial player A False Spring by Pat Jordan - a memoir of a baseball player who failed to fulfill his dreams BASEBALL LABOR AND ECONOMICS: Lee Lowenfish's recently updated The Imperfect Diamond is far and away the best account of baseball's labor-management struggles. Marvin Miller's recent A Whole Different Ballgame, written with Allen Barra, is a fascinating though somewhat repetitive account of the success of the Players Association. Gerald Scully's The Business of Major League Baseball is a scholarly overview of the economics of MLB. James Miller's The Baseball Business: Pursuing Pennants & Profits in Baltimore is a fascinating look at the workings of one major league organization. I should also mention Bowie Kuhn's Hardball, which is well written but deeply flawed by Kuhn's distortion of reality. STATISTICAL AND SABERMETRIC ANALYSIS As is mentioned in rsb often, Pete Palmer and John Thorn's Hidden Game of Baseball and the Bill James Historical Abstract are clearly the two superior works of this category. Bill James' This Time Lets Not Eat The Bones is an uneven survey of James' work before 1988. The Diamond Appraised by Craig Wright is a fascinating work of applied sabermetrics (despite the small parts of the book written by Tom House). SCOUTING: Kevin Kerrane's Dollar Sign on the Muscle is an excellent overview of scouting. Mark Winegardner's Prophet of the Sandlots is a fascinating and extraordinarily well written look at Tony Lucadello, perhaps the most succesful scout in baseball history. THE MINOR LEAGUES: There is a paucity of good literature on the minor leagues. Robert Obojoski's Bush League is a solid if unspectacular history of the minors. Neil Sullivan's more recent The Minors is an uneven but interesting look at the same subject. Steve Fireovid's recent The 26th Man (written with Mark Winegardner) is an insightful look at the life of a mature minor leaguer. THE NEGRO LEAGUES AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF BLACKS INTO MLB: Jules Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy is a scholarly and highly readable treatment of the subject. Robert Peterson's Only The Ball Was White and John Holway's Voices from the Great Negro Leagues are the best books on the Negro Leagues. BASEBALL OUTSIDE AMERICA: Robert Whiting's You Gotta Have Wa is an enjoyable if somewhat lightweight study of Japanese baseball and the experience of Americans who play in the Japanese leagues. There have been several good books published in the last few years on Baseball in Latin America, but I am afraid I am not familiar with any of them. COLLECTIONS: Roger Angell may be America's greatest baseball writer. His occassional pieces in the New Yorker have been collected in The Summer Game, Season Ticket, Five Seasons, Late Innings, and Once More Around the Park. The last one contains pieces from throughout his career. Thomas Boswell's baseball columns have also been collected in many books; two of the finest are How Life Imitates the World Series and How Time Begins On Opening Day. The best general collection of baseball items can be found in the 3 Fireside Books of Baseball, which are unfortunately out of print. Editor Charles Einstein has recollected many of the pieces which originally appeared in the Fireside books along with new pieces in The Baseball Reader and The New Baseball Reader. The Armchair Book of baseball and the Armchair Book of Baseball II, both edited by John Thorn, are both solid collections. Also, Insiders Baseball, edited by Robert Davids, and The National Pasttime, edited by John Thorn, are both excellent collections of material which originally appeared in SABR publications. BROADCASTING: Curt Smith's Voices of the Games is a superb history of baseball broadcasting which has recently been updated and issued in paperback. Red Barber's The Broadcasters is a solid history of the pioneers of baseball broadcasting. ENCYCLOPEDIAS Total Baseball is the only true baseball encyclopedia. It not only features career statistics of every major league baseball player ever (using both familar statistics and sabermetric measures), but also features almost 1000 pages of text articles covering all the major aspects of the game. The more established Baseball Encyclopedia, published by Macmillan, also covers the career statistics of all major leaguers ever and features a wider variety of traditional statistical measures. The Sports Encyclopedia Baseball, a lower priced encyclopedia, features statistics of players since 1901 and is organized by team and year. The Ballplayers, edited by Mike Shatzkin, is a well done collection of 6000 mini-biographies of baseball people. OTHER: Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times is regarded by many as the best baseball book ever written. It is a fascinating oral history of the baseball players of the early part of this century. Mike Bryan's Baseball Lives is a wonderful collection of stories about the people who live baseball, from players and scouts to front office personnel. David Falkner's The Short Season is an excellent book about spring training. Paul Dickson has compiled two reference books that are integral parts of any collection of baseball books: The Dickson Baseball Dictionary is a complete dictionary of baseball terms and Baseball's Greatest Quotations is a very well selected collection of baseball wit and wisdom. Redefinition Inc. is publishing a series of uneven but often worthwhile baseball books in a series called The World Of Baseball. Titles so far include The Hurlers, The Sluggers, The Fielders, Low and Outside, The Explosive Sixties, October's Game, Speed, The New Professional, The Inside Game, and The Old Ball Game. Like most similar series, these titles are available only by mail. Bruce Kuklick's To Every Thing A Season: Shibe Park And Urban Philadelphia is an excellent study of the relationship between a community and its baseball park and teams.