Great Baseball Books
Discover the best baseball books ever written, from W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe to Philip Roth's The Great American Novel. Explore fiction classics, including Ball Four and The Universal Baseball Association, in this curated list of must-read baseball literature for true fans.
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Shoeless Joe
by W. P. Kinsella
Inspiration for the movie "Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe" is the ultimate baseball novel.
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The Great American Novel
by Philip Roth
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—a richly imagined novel featuring America’s only homeless big-league baseball team in history delivers “shameless comic extravagance…. Roth gleefully exploits our readiness to let baseball stand for America itself" (The New York Times). Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee.
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If I Never Get Back
by Darryl Brock
Journalist Sam Fowler steps off a train in Ohio and finds himself back in the year 1869, and he falls in with the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team, and accompanies on their first nationwide tour
