Every year, these guys put out a giant book of forecasts, commentary, and essays on baseball. It’s replaced Bill James’ baseball abstracts as the best source for insightful commentary on baseball, and it’s a fun read. (How could you not like a baseball book that references the Simpsons?)

If you have Luddite friends who want a gigantic, hardbound, phonebook-size reference book on baseball statistics, this is the one you should recommend. It was produced with help from Pete Palmer and John Thorn, two of the best baseball thinkers, and it includes some modern sabermetric measurements (mostly from linear weights). Even if you don’t care about the vast collection of printed statistics, it is worth buying for the essays.

Daniel Okrent is famous (infamous?) for creating and popularizing Rotisserie baseball. He also wrote this wonderful book describing a single baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles in 1982. This is one of the best stories ever written about the game.

This is one of the greatest books ever written about baseball, by the creators of modern baseball analysis. Unfortunately, this book is out of print, so you will probably be stuck searching your library or buying a used copy. Because there’s still a lot of demand for this book, used copies can be expensive.

This massive book of baseball statistics (more than 1,700 pages) was written by my favorite baseball writers, Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer.

If you’re really interested in how baseball statistics have developed over time (both data collection and thinking), this is a wonderful history.

I am kind of shocked that none of the 2005 World Series coverage talked about the 1919 World Series scandal. They wasted hours talking about the silly “Red Sox Curse” in 2003 and 2004, and in 2005, they didn’t mention this story. In 1919, gamblers bribed eight players on the White Sox (the best team in baseball at the time) to lose the World Series. This is one of the best books ever written about baseball; highly recommended.

In 1958, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, breaking the heart of everyone in Brooklyn. This is the story of the 1956 Dodgers: the team, the management, and the fans. Incidentally, there are probably more good books about the Brooklyn Dodgers than about any other baseball team.

Bob Neyer and Bill James wrote this book to fill a specific void in baseball books: there was no guide explaining which pitches each pitcher threw. If you’re wondering whether a certain pitcher from the 1950s threw a forkball, this is probably the best reference book. It also has some interesting essays on pitching.

If you’ve never read anything by Bill James, this is a great place to start. It’s a good, opinionated book on baseball history.

This might be the most important book written about baseball in the past 20 years. Michael Lewis is a terrific writer and baseball fan who tried to discover how the Oakland Athletics have performed almost as well on the field as the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and Los Angeles Angels, but with a significantly smaller payroll. (This past year, it was less than one-third the size of the Yankees’ payroll.) It’s a story about the A’s general manager Billy Beane, about sabermetrics father Bill James, and about baseball players such as Scott Hatteberg.

If you want to see what happens when a couple of statistics professors start thinking seriously about baseball, buy this book. I especially liked their discussion of streakiness, strategy, and measuring offense.

One of the best books ever written about baseball, from a player’s perspective.

If you go to minor league baseball games, you’ll find this book really useful. I like to know something about the players that I’m watching: where they’re from, how they did last year, the size of their signing bonus, etc.