Take Me Out to The Library Book List

Little League Books

Fiction

Adler, David A. The Babe and I. Harcourt Brace, 1999. A young boy meets his hero, the great Babe Ruth, while selling papers during the Great Depression to help support his family. (Grades K–3)

Bowen, Fred. T.J.’s Secret Pitch. Peachtree Publishers, 1996. T.J. desperately wants to be a pitcher, but he’s small and his pitches don’t pack any power. Then he discovers a crazy pitch used by a real-life major leaguer in the 1940s. When he tries it out, his teammates laugh, but T.J. perseveres. (Grades 3–6)

Cosby, Bill. Hooray for the Dandelion Warriors! Scholastic, 1999. Little Bill and his teammates can’t agree on a name for their baseball team. (Grades 1–3)

Cristaldi, Kathryn. Baseball Ballerina. Random House, 1992. A young girl who loves baseball finds that teamwork and helping friends can extend beyond the diamond—but she still likes baseball best! (Grades K–2)

Curtis, Gavin. The Bat Boy & His Violin. Simon & Schuster, 1998. Reginald’s father recognizes the value of his son’s music when it inspires his baseball team, which has the worst record in the Negro Leagues, to begin winning games. (Grades 1–3)

Day, Alexandra. Frank and Ernest Play Ball. Scholastic, 1990. When asked to manage a baseball team, Frank and Ernest rely on a baseball dictionary to learn the necessary language. (Grades 1–3)

Hall, Donald. When Willard Met Babe Ruth. Harcourt Brace, 1996. Barry Moser’s beautiful and evocative watercolor illustrations enhance this story of a family’s encounters with Babe Ruth. (Grades 3–6)

Konigsburg, E. L. About The B’nai Bagels. Atheneum, 1969. Mark Setzer is embarrassed when his mother agrees to manage his Little League baseball team. (Grades 4–6)

McCully, Emily Arnold. Grandmas At Bat. Harper Collins, 1993. Pip’s two grandmas are coaching her team and nothing’s going right! (Grades 1–2)

Mochizuki, Ken. Baseball Saved Us. Lee & Low, 1993. A young boy’s father recounts his years playing baseball while living in the U. S. Japanese concentration camps during WWII. Also available in Spanish. (Grades 3–5)

Sharmat, Marjorie Weinman. Nate the Great and the Stolen Base. Coward McCann, 1992. Detective Nate is on the trail of the missing second base! (Grades 1–2)

Slote, Alfred. Finding Buck McHenry. HarperCollins, 1991. Jason is convinced that Mack Henry, the school’s janitor who is very knowledgeable about playing the game of baseball, is really the elusive player from the days of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Buck McHenry. (Grades 4–6)

Strasser, Todd. Close Call. Putnam, 1999 In order to continue playing baseball, a group of fifth and sixth graders must find a solution to the number of problems facing them. (Grades 4–6)

Wolff, Virginia Euwer. Bat 6. Scholastic. 1998. Shortly after World War II, 21 sixth grade girls are prepared to participate in the annual softball game that is a symbol of the small Oregon town’s unity. The day is marred by one girl’s bigotry toward an Asian American player. (Grades 4–6)

Nonfiction

Cline-Ransome, Lesa. Satchel Paige. Illustrated by James Ransome. Simon & Schuster, 2000. A biography of the first African-American to pitch during a Major League World Series game, with striking paintings by the author’s husband. (Grades 3-6)

Gibbons, Gail. My Baseball Book. HarperCollins, 2000. Introduces basic concepts of baseball: equipment, playing field, rules, players and the game process. (Grades K-3)

Golenbock, Peter. Teammates. Harcourt Brace, 1990. Absorbing account of Jackie Robinson’s first days playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first African-American to play in the Major Leagues, Robinson’s courage is matched by his teammate’s, Pee Wee Reese, and the Dodgers’ owner, Branch Rickey. (Grades 2-5)

Kramer, S.A. Baseball’s Greatest Hitters. Random Library, 2000. Five of baseball’s greatest hitters are discussed, including their stats and greatest feats. Six others are mentioned. (Grades 1-2)

Rappaport, Doreen. Dirt On Their Skirts: the Story of the young Women Who Won the World Championship. Dial, 2000. A spectator describes the excitement as the final game of the 1946 championship game of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League goes into extra innings.

Thayer, Ernest Lawrence. Casey at the Bat: a Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888. Illustrated by Christopher Bing. Handprint Books, 2000. This popular poem captures all the excitement and thrill of a baseball game. Casey warms up and the crowd is at fever pitch, but Casey strikes out and the game is won…by the other side. A Caldecott Honor Book. (Grades 2-5)

Major League Books

Fiction

Brock, Darryl. Havana Heat. Total Sports, 2000. Luther Taylor, a deaf-mute pitcher who hopes to win a spot on the New York Giants in 1911, finds himself in Cuba coaching a team of Cubans set to play the Giants in a big-money exhibition game. Fascinating social history, believable characters, and terrific ambience.

Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh. Prop, 1968. J. Henry Waugh is a lonely accountant whose life is consumed by the Universal Baseball Association, a board game of his own creation. Is this a baseball novel or a parable about God? For anyone who has ever hunched over a baseball board game or participated in a rotisserie league, the question may be moot.

Duncan, David James. The Brothers K. Doubleday, 1992. Baseball, Vietnam and Seventh Day Adventism form the three corners of this moving, wide-ranging epic of the Chance family in rural Washington State.

Fromm, Pete. How All This Started. Picador, 2000. Manic depressive Abeline, obsessed with Nolan Ryan, sets out to turn her brother, Austin, into a great pitcher. A desolate Texas landscape, a family in near-total collapse and, somehow, the game of baseball serving as both catalyst for tragedy and a means of survival.

Greenberg, Eric Rolphe. The Celebrant. Everest House, 1982. Greenberg mixes and fact and fiction in this story of New York Giant pitching star Christy Mathewson and the jeweler who made the great Matty’s World Series rings. A profoundly moving story of hero worship and the importance of baseball to immigrants in the early 20th century.

Henry, April. Be the One. Knopf, 2000. In this baseball thriller, the game’s only female scout, Cassidy Sanderson, goes to the Dominican Republic in pursuit of Alberto Cruz, a centerfielder who invokes comparisons to Willie Mays. A look at what scouts do and a sensitive account of a woman trying to succeed in a man's game.

Honig, Donald. The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson. Dutton, 1992. Suspended reporter Joe Tinker is an eyewitness to a murder in Greenwich Village in 1947. He gets interested in the case when it seems to connect to a possible plot to kill Jackie Robinson before his upcoming major-league debut. An atmospheric hard-boiled period piece by a veteran baseball writer.

Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe. Houghton, 1982. The movie Field of Dreams was based on this enchanting fantasy about an Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him that if he builds a ballpark, “they will come.” They did, and they have for the last 20 years, in print and on screen.

Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. Farrar, 1952. Malamud’s novel about Roy Hobbs and his pursuit of baseball excellence is considerably darker than the Robert Redford movie based on it. Chasing the Holy Grail, Malamud reminds us, extracts a terrible toll on the would-be hero.

Stein, Harry. Hoopla. Knopf, 1983. This boisterous retelling of the Chicago Black Sox story turns the familiar facts of the 1919 scandal into a compelling mix of rollicking comedy and hard-hitting drama.

Wendell, Tim. Castro’s Curveball. Ballantine, 1999. Journeyman catcher Billy Bryan is playing winter ball in Cuba in 1948 when another career option appears: help a Washington Senators agent sign a young Cuban lefthander with a wicked curve ball. The Cuban, Fidel Castro, has another interest: politics. A mix of history and baseball, awash in prerevolutionary Havana ambience.

Winegardner, Mark. The Veracruz Blues. Viking, 1996. Based on real events, this superb novel tells the story of the Mexican League, a baseball league founded in 1946 when the Pasquel brothers attempted to buy off American major leaguers and mix them with Negro League and Central American stars. Great baseball history and a riveting story.

Nonfiction

Dawidoff, Nicholas, ed. Baseball: A Literary Anthology. Library of America, 2002. With this volume in the high-toned Library of America series, baseball literature has officially arrived. It’s a fine anthology, too, ranging from “Casey at the Bat” through John Updike on Ted Williams to Stephen King on his son’s little-league team.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait till Next Year: Recollections of a ’50s Girlhood. Simon & Schuster, 1997. Goodwin’s memoir covers the same ground as Kahn’s classic Boys of Summer (see below), but from an entirely different perspective: the classic Brooklyn Dodger teams of the 1950s as seen through the eyes of young girl, devoted to her heroes.

Halberstam, David. Summer of ’49. Morrow, 1989.Pulitzer Prize-winner Halberstam captures all the drama of one of baseball’s greatest pennant races: Yankees versus Red Sox, Joe DiMaggio versus Ted Williams.

Hall, Donald. Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball). North Point, 1985. “Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growing age and death. The diamond encloses what we are.”

Higgins, George V. The Progress of the Seasons: Forty Years of Baseball in Our Town. Holt, 1989. The late crime novelist, who was a devoted Red Sox fan, remembers four decades of baseball in Boston.

James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. Rev. ed. Free Press, 2001. Statistics have always been crucial to baseball, but James took analyzing the numbers to an altogether new level, first in his Baseball Abstract and then in this successor, which applies his signature techniques to the game’s history.

Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. Harper, 1971. The great Brooklyn Dodger teams on the 1950s—Robinson, Snider, Reese, Campanella, Hodges—lovingly recalled by a reporter who covered the team for the New York Herald Tribune. A classic of baseball literature.

Morris, Jim and Engel, Joel. The Oldest Rookie: Big League Dreams from a Small-Town Guy. Little, Brown & Co., 2001. Morris, high-school coach and former minor leaguer, makes a deal with the kids on his team: if they make the play-offs, he’ll try for the majors one last time. They do, and he does.

Okrent, Daniel. Nine Innings. Ticknor & Fields, 1985. The anatomy of baseball as seen through the playing of a single game.

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White. Prentice Hall, 1970. The history of black baseball from the Civil War through 1947, when Jackie Robinson was signed to a major-league contract. A vital historical document.

Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. Knopf, 1997. Written to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson's breaking baseball’s color line, this definitive biography combines exhaustive research with vivid prose and notable objectivity. The best book available on Robinson.

Ribowsky, Mark. Don't Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball. Simon & Schuster, 1994. Ribowsky separates fact from legend in the life and career of Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, but he also recognizes that Paige was a genuine American hero—part Babe Ruth, part Will Rogers, but, finally, beyond comparison.

Ritter, Lawrence S. The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. Macmillan, 1966. One of the first—and still perhaps the best—baseball oral histories, this
delightful volume gathers the first-person accounts of ball players from the first decades of the twentieth century.

Smith, Curt. Storied Stadiums: Baseball’s History through Its Ballparks. Carroll & Graf, 2001. Smith conducts a virtual-reality tour of baseball's great ballparks, musing along the way about such mystical issues as the design of the diamond and the number of feet between the bases.

Stump, Al. Cobb. Algonquin, 1994. Combining the best and worst of American individualism in one ferocious package, Detroit Tiger Hall of Famer Ty Cobb defies our attempts to make sense of him. Stump comes close in this chilling tale of athletic excellence and personal chaos.

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