- Best coffee table book: Baseball's Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon.
There may be a finer collection available, but I certainly haven't seen it.
- Funniest baseball book: Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, by
Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris. It actually has nothing to do with flipping or trading
cards; it contains short, usually wicked, commentaries on players of the 50s and
early 60s and their baseball cards.
- Best book on memorabilia: the Sotheby's catalog for the Barry Halper collection (Barry Halper Collection of Baseball Memorabilia). It's especially interesting to browse through it with a list of the prices the items fetched.
- Book is better than the movie:
Cobb: A Biography by Al Stump. Great book. Tommy Lee Jones is a talented
actor but there was something vaguely humorous about his depiction of Cobb, and
there was NOTHING humorous about Cobb.
- Movie is better than the book: Eight Men Out. Eliot Asinof
just isn't much of a storyteller, and you had to take notes to keep track of all
the characters -- and who wants to take notes when reading about baseball. The
film was really good, even if they should have used a homlier actor for Cicotte.
- Most overrated recent baseball book: Koufax by Jane Leavy is a
piece of dreck. I got a lot more out of the unauthorized profile in Sports
Illustrated, "The Left Arm of God," than this whole book.
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Library of Congress collection
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