Baseball Books for Baseball Fans

09/09/2026

Thurman Munson learned to fly so he could get home to Ohio between games and see his kids. That is the entire reason he had the plane. ⚾

He was the Yankees captain, the first man given that title since Lou Gehrig, and by 1979 he was 32 and worn down. Rookie of the Year in 1970, Most Valuable Player in 1976, seven All-Star teams, three Gold Gloves, and a catcher's knees that had absorbed a decade of squatting. He hated the distance from his family in Canton and had started saying out loud that he would like to finish his career in Cleveland simply to be closer to them.

On August 2, 1979, an off day, he was practicing touch and go landings at the Akron Canton airport in the Cessna Citation he had bought that summer. He was on approach with his flight instructor and a friend aboard when the aircraft came down short of the runway, struck a stump and caught fire. Both passengers got out. Munson did not. 🕯️

The Yankees played the next night in the Bronx. They sent eight men onto the field and left the catcher's position empty, and the crowd stood and made noise for close to eight minutes while nobody on either club made any move to start the game. Four days later the entire roster flew to Canton for the funeral and flew back to play that evening. Bobby Murcer, who had been Munson's closest friend and had spoken at the service that morning, drove in all five runs in a 5 to 4 win, then gave the bat to Munson's widow and never used it again. His locker stayed empty in the Yankee clubhouse for as long as that building stood.

09/08/2026

This Day in the Old Ball Game: September 8

A catcher nobody feared, a farm kid nobody could hit, a stunt that turned real, and a manager who picked the wrong rookie.

The First Man in the Club (1916) Wally Schang hit seven home runs in 1916, and that led the entire Philadelphia club, which tells you what kind of year the Athletics were having on their way to 36-117. On September 8 at Shibe Park he homered off right-hander Allan Russell, then homered again off left-hander Slim Love, becoming the first switch hitter in major league history to go deep from both sides of the plate in one game. Plenty of sluggers have joined that club since. A light-hitting catcher on a last-place team got there first.

Twenty Wins at Twenty (1939) Bob Feller signed with Cleveland off an Iowa farm at seventeen and reached the majors before he finished high school. On this day he beat the Browns 12-1 at Sportsman's Park for his twentieth win, at 20 years and 10 months, the youngest 20-game winner the sport had yet produced. He closed at 24-9 with 246 strikeouts, both league highs. The mark stood forty-six years, until Dwight Gooden broke it in August 1985 by twenty-seven days.

All Nine, and a Collision (1965) Charlie Finley needed a crowd. His last-place Athletics had the worst attendance in the league, so he built a night around his shortstop and insured him for a million dollars. Bert Campaneris started at short and moved one position an inning, pitching the eighth ambidextrously and catching the ninth. Then Ed Kirkpatrick tried to score on a strikeout and ran him over. Campaneris held the ball for the out, hurt his shoulder and neck, and missed five games. The gimmick was real by then.

Pitch to the Rookie (1979) Bottom of the ninth in Oakland, tied 1-1, nobody out, runners on the corners. Chicago put Rob Picciolo on intentionally to load the bases and set up a force, the only intentional walk of Picciolo's nine-year career. Up came a rookie named Rickey Henderson. He never took the bat off his shoulder. Ball four, game over, 2-1 Oakland.

Ed. 09.08.26

09/08/2026

On August 19, 1951, a man three feet seven inches tall walked to the plate in a major league baseball game, and every bit of it was official. ⚾

Bill Veeck owned the St. Louis Browns, a team so bad and so thoroughly ignored that his only real asset was his own imagination. For a doubleheader against Detroit at Sportsman's Park he found a twenty six year old from Chicago named Eddie Gaedel through a booking agent, signed him to a standard major league contract, and filed it with the league office late on a Friday so that nobody would read it until Monday. Gaedel got a jersey with the number one eighth on the back and a pair of slippers with turned up toes.

Between games he popped out of a papier mache cake, and the crowd took that for the whole joke. Then in the bottom of the first inning of the second game, manager Zack Taylor sent him up to pinch hit for Frank Saucier. The umpire wanted to see a contract. Taylor had it in his pocket. Veeck had warned Gaedel that he would be up on the roof with a rifle if he so much as swung the bat, so Gaedel crouched down into a strike zone roughly the size of a shoebox, and Detroit pitcher Bob Cain, who was laughing too hard to aim, threw four straight balls. Gaedel walked to first, was replaced by a pinch runner, and left the field to the loudest sound that ballpark had made in years. 🎩

American League president Will Harridge voided the contract two days later and tried to strike Gaedel's name from the record book, which held until enough people objected that it went back in. His career line is one plate appearance, one walk, and an on base percentage of 1.000. The rest is not funny. Gaedel spent the next ten years taking small paid appearances, drank heavily, and was followed home from a Chicago bowling alley and beaten in June 1961. He died at home of a heart attack, and his mother found him in bed the next morning, at thirty six. Bob Cain, the pitcher who threw him those four pitches and never saw him again, was the only person from baseball at the funeral.

09/07/2026

Walter Johnson threw 110 shutouts. Second place on that list is 20 behind him, and no pitcher who has worked in the last sixty years is within forty. ⚾

He came off a Kansas farm by way of the California oil fields, and a traveling salesman wrote to the Washington Senators about him in 1907 while he was pitching semipro ball in Idaho. He was nineteen when he debuted, and he spent the next twenty one seasons pitching for a franchise that finished in the second division most of those years. That is the part people forget when they look at 417 wins. He also lost 279 games, more than every pitcher in history except Cy Young, Pud Galvin and Nolan Ryan, because Washington could not score. In 1909 he went 13 and 25 for a club that lost 110 games, and his earned run average that year was 2.22.

Nobody had ever seen an arm like it. The delivery was a long easy sidearm sweep that looked like a man skipping a stone across a pond, and out of it came a fastball hitters said they heard rather than saw. Ty Cobb, who spent twenty years trying to solve him, said the ball hissed. Johnson finished with 3,509 strikeouts, which stood as the record for more than fifty years, and a career earned run average of 2.17. 🔥

What the men who played with him talked about even more than the fastball was that he was frightened of it. Johnson lived in dread of what it might do to a man, and for the rest of his career he refused to pitch inside. Hitters knew it and crowded the plate on him, and he did all of the above anyway. He finally got a World Series in 1924, at thirty six, in his eighteenth season, and came out of the bullpen for four scoreless innings in Game Seven to win it. Washington met the train.

09/07/2026

Between 1915 and 1922, nobody in baseball drove in more runs than Bobby Veach. He is not in the Hall of Fame and most Tigers fans have never said his name out loud. ⚾

He played left field in Detroit from 1912 to 1923, which meant standing on the same grass as Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford and later Harry Heilmann, three men who went to Cooperstown. Veach was the fourth one, the one nobody wrote about. He led the American League in runs batted in three separate times, in 1915, 1917 and 1918, and finished in the top ten in that category ten times. He led the league in doubles twice and in triples once. He finished at .310 lifetime with 2,063 hits and 1,166 runs batted in.

The story that has followed him around is one Cobb set in motion. In 1921, with Cobb managing the club, he asked Heilmann to ride Veach from the bench, to insult him and question his nerve, on the theory that an angry Veach would be a better hitter. Cobb promised he would explain the whole thing afterward and clear it up. Then the season ended and Cobb never did. Veach hit .338 that year, and he also stopped speaking to Heilmann, and as far as anyone can tell he never started again. 😔

He went to Boston, then briefly to the Yankees and Washington, and finished up in the minors before retiring to Detroit. He died there in 1945 at 57. There is a stretch of eight seasons in there where he was one of the three or four most productive hitters in the American League, and the whole reason nobody knows it is that he happened to work next to the most famous outfielder who ever lived.

09/07/2026

The legendary Bob Uecker:

Bob Uecker batted .200 across six major league seasons, and then built a fifty year career out of telling people about it. ⚾

He was a Milwaukee kid who signed with the hometown Braves for a $3,000 bonus, which he always said his father drank up before he ever saw it. He caught for the Braves, the Cardinals and the Phillies, hit 14 home runs in 297 games, and picked up a World Series ring with St. Louis in 1964 while sitting on the bench for most of it. His account of the one grand slam he hit off Ron Herbel was that when the manager came out to take Herbel off the mound, he brought Herbel's suitcase with him.

The second act was bigger than anything he could have done as a player. Johnny Carson had him on more than a hundred times and started calling him Mr. Baseball, which began as a joke and quietly stopped being one. There were the beer commercials and the seat in the front row. There was Harry Doyle in Major League, calling a pitch just a bit outside. And running under all of it, starting in 1971 and never stopping, there was the Milwaukee Brewers radio booth. 🎙️

He called Brewers games for more than half a century and became the sound of summer for a couple of generations of Wisconsin. Cooperstown gave him the Ford Frick Award in 2003. He worked through his last season, in real pain and mostly not mentioning it, and died in January 2025 at 90. A man who genuinely could not hit turned out to be the most beloved figure his franchise has ever had, which is a career most .300 hitters never get near.

09/07/2026

The 1906 Chicago Cubs went 116 and 36. They lost the World Series to a team that batted .230. ⚾

Start with the record, because nothing has touched it. A winning percentage of .763 is still the best any club has posted since 1900, and the 2001 Seattle Mariners needed eight extra games on the schedule just to match the 116 wins. That Cubs pitching staff gave up 1.75 earned runs a game. Mordecai Brown, who had lost most of a finger in a farm machinery accident as a boy and turned the mangled hand into the best curveball in the league, finished at 1.04. The infield was Tinker, Evers and Chance, and Frank Chance managed the whole thing at 29 years old.

Across town the White Sox went 93 and 58, twenty-three wins shy of the Cubs, and won the American League by three. Their nickname around the league was the Hitless Wonders, and it was not affectionate. They batted .230 as a team, dead last in the American League, and hit seven home runs the entire season. Seven, for the whole club, over 154 games. Nobody gave them a chance and nobody was being unreasonable about it. 🐻

It was the first World Series ever played between two teams from the same city. They split the first four games, the South Siders winning theirs on pitching alone. Then the Hitless Wonders scored eight runs in Game Five and eight more in Game Six and it was over in six. The Cubs won the next two World Series and then went 108 years without another one. The finest regular season in the history of the sport is still remembered in Chicago mostly as the year the other team won.

09/06/2026

This Day in the Old Ball Game: September 6

A duel nobody could seat, a door opened seven years late, one home run in a whole career, and a broken bat that changed what catchers wear.

The Duel They Moved a Rotation For (1912) Walter Johnson had run off 16 straight wins that summer, an American League record. Then Smoky Joe Wood started a streak of his own, and fans demanded Johnson be the one to stop him. Boston moved Wood up a day so it could happen. Fenway could not seat the crowd, so they roped off the outfield and let people stand on the grass. Boston's only run landed in that roped-off crowd. Wood won 1 to 0. Nine days later he tied Johnson at 16 and never got past him.

The Card Topps Printed Too Soon (1954) Everyone expected Angel Scull to integrate the Washington Senators. Topps put him in its 1954 set at card 204. Scull never played a major league game. It was Carlos Paula, a Cuban outfielder his manager had dismissed as a rumor, who trotted out to left field at Griffith Stadium on this day, making Washington the 12th of 16 clubs to integrate. He doubled and singled in the opener. Only 4,865 people were there.

One Home Run, Start to Finish (1948) Emil Verban was a three-time All-Star second baseman. He also came to the plate 2,911 times and cleared a fence exactly once. It came at Cincinnati off Johnny Vander Meer, the only man ever to throw no-hitters in back-to-back starts. It tied the game. The Cubs lost anyway. In 1975 Cubs fans in Washington named a society after him, the patron saint of competence without glory. Reagan, Scalia and Bill Murray joined.

The Bat That Changed the Mask (1976) Steve Yeager was kneeling in the on-deck circle in San Diego when Bill Russell's bat shattered and sent a shard into his throat. Surgeons took the wood out that night. It had missed his artery. He was back behind the plate in under three weeks, and then he and Dodgers trainer Bill Buhler built a plastic flap to hang off the bottom of a catcher's mask. Look at any catcher or umpire in any ballpark tonight. That is Steve Yeager's worst afternoon, still doing its job.

Ed. 09.06.26

09/06/2026

Rogers Hornsby batted .424 in 1924. It is still the highest average any National or American League hitter has posted in the modern era, and it has now stood for 102 years. ⚾

The single season gets the attention, but the stretch around it is the harder thing to believe. From 1921 through 1925 Hornsby hit .402 combined. Five years. Not a hot summer, not a fluke April, five straight seasons averaging better than .400. He won two Triple Crowns in that span, in 1922 and 1925, and finished his career at .358, a number only Ty Cobb has ever bettered in the National or American League. He did all of it right handed, which almost nobody else near the top of that list can say.

He protected it like a man guarding a machine. Hornsby would not read anything but the sports pages and would not go to the movies, because he believed anything that strained his eyes would cost him at the plate. He did not drink or smoke. He stood as far back in the box and as far off the plate as the rules allowed, then strode into everything, which is the opposite of how you are taught to hit a curveball and worked anyway. 🎯

The rest of him was harder. He told owners exactly what he thought of their rosters and their intelligence, bet on horses more or less continuously, and got moved along from job to job for decades. St. Louis traded him in the winter after he managed the Cardinals to the 1926 World Series title as their player manager, which tells you most of what you need to know. Someone once asked him what he did during the offseason. He said he stared out the window and waited for spring.