Skip to footer

10 new baseball books for summer reading

In North America, the baseball season is a marathon, stretching from April to late October, a full seven months. It lures many publishers to feed the public appetite for books about the sport, especially during the heart of the season. These selections are among the latest varied offerings.

6. 'Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty,' by Charles Leerhsen

  • By Ross Atkin

Not satisfied to accept the mythology that surrounds Ty Cobb, who reputedly was one of baseball’s most contentious characters, author Charles Leerhsen endeavors to set the record straight. While no angel, Cobb’s is not the racist nor thoroughly disliked athlete some made him out to be, especially after his death. The result is a revealing look at one of America’s first true superstars, a player who once set more than 90 major-league records before retiring in 1928, including for most career base hits.

Here’s an excerpt from Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty:

“To some infielders, Cobb was like a shape-shifter who didn’t approach but mysteriously appeared at the base they were charged with defending. Umpire Billy Evans said that Cobb was the only runner he ever saw who didn’t slow up even slightly while transitioning from a flat-out run to a slide. Cobb said that the key was to slide with a kind of glee, or at least the appearance of glee – ‘like you enjoyed the act of sliding.’ This was, he admitted, particularly hard to do in the early part of the season, when each slide scraped a swatch of skin from his legs – skin that would grow back tougher, he believed, and make sliding in the home stretch of the season less painful.”

6 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.