Shelfies #48: Lonnie Shalton

The first baseball book I remember was a record book published annually by the Sporting News. I was about ten years old and fascinated by the numbers and their connections to the greats like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. My passion for baseball has continued for another seven decades, and my bookshelves provide the evidence.

Those books have now taken on a second life as research material for the baseball newsletter I began in the wake of the Kansas City Royals winning the 2015 World Series. Soon after that Series, my wife and I took a winter vacation to Puerto Vallarta, and to provide inspiration for my upcoming newsletter writing, I spent most days immersed in rereading Roger Angell.

And so that’s where I will start, with Roger Angell, on the left of the bottom shelf.

Roger Angell: If someone asked for an example of the best writing about the beauty of baseball, I would steer them to Roger Angell. Starting in 1962, Angell wrote baseball essays for the New Yorker, and his observational and writing skills matched perfectly with the pace and rhythms of baseball. Every few years, the essays were packaged as books, covering baseball from 1962 to 2002: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, Late Innings, Season Ticket and Game Time. A must read for baseball aficionados.

Negro Leagues Baseball: The rest of the lower shelf is devoted to baseball as splendidly played in the Negro Leagues. Growing up in Kansas City, I was aware of the Negro Leagues through our Kansas City Monarchs. After former Monarch Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, the Negro Leagues began to fade. But the stories of the skills of the players and their place in the civil rights movement lived on. The first book I read on the subject was aptly titled Only the Ball Was White (1970, by Robert Peterson). The biggest name in the Negro Leagues was Satchel Paige, and among several books about him, I recommend Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye.

Recognition of the Negro Leagues received a big boost in 1994 when Buck O’Neil charmed the American public during his appearances on Ken Burns’ PBS series on baseball. Buck was also instrumental in the creation and publicizing of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Buck’s charm and his relentless optimism were captured in print by Joe Posnanski in The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (next to the Buck O’Neil bobblehead).

Moving to the upper shelf.

Statistics/Sabermetrics: My childhood fascination with baseball stats went to an elevated level in 1977 when Bill James began publishing his “Baseball Abstract.” He also published several books, including the classic The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (2000) that to this day is a valuable resource of baseball history and statistics. James coined the term “Sabermetrics” for his advanced statistics, and teams began taking notice (as entertainingly conveyed in the book and movie “Moneyball”). Others developed variations of Sabermetrics, such as the composite metric of WAR (Wins Above Replacement). Using his own variation of WAR, Jay Jaffee wrote The Cooperstown Casebook, which has become the Bible for Hall of Fame eligibility.

Great Players: A big shoutout to Jane Leavy who has written the definitive biographies of two legends: Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood. Also shelved beneath the Bobby Witt Jr. bobblehead is George Vecsey’s Stan Musial: An American Life. Those players, along with the Babe, Ted, Clemente, Yogi, Willie and 92 others make for great stories in the 2021 best-seller, The Baseball 100, where Joe Posnanski counts down the best 100 players of all time. Joe’s excellent follow-up in 2023 was Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments.

Off-the-Field Greatest: The titles of these two books are spot on. Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character (Marty Appel) and Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick (Paul Dickson). Amazing baseball lives over several decades. Be prepared to laugh.

Great Teams: Luke Epplin’s Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball is the story of the 1948 World Champion Cleveland Indians told through the individual lives of owner Bill Veeck and players Bob Feller, Larry Doby and Satchel Paige. Postscript: The Indians (now the Guardians) have not won a World Series since then. In Wait Till Next Year, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who usually writes about presidential history, penned this wonderful memoir about her childhood love of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers. After decades of futility, the 1955 team won its first-ever World Series. It was bittersweet. The Dodgers left for Los Angeles three years later and broke her heart.

The rest of the books on this shelf relate to Kansas City baseball, with several on players who were part of the 1985 World Champion Kansas City Royals: Willie Wilson and Frank White (who also signed the baseballs) and George Brett (hard to believe, a whole book on George’s Pine Tar Game).

The item on top of the autographed baseballs is a replica of the 2015 World Series ring in honor of the Royals defeating the Mets.

This gets me back to Roger Angell. At the age of 95, Angell was covering the 2015 Series and delivering daily masterpieces in the online New Yorker. I loved how he captured the essence of those Royals and the thrill of the games. After the Series, Angell wrote that he wished he had no stake in the Series for his hometown Mets because he “fell in love with these Royals in their near-thing debut in the World Series last fall… there’s a collective elan to them, a bearded joy in their work that you want to be part of.”

More books are written about baseball than any other sport. Baseball is the best for statistics and nostalgia. We still talk about Babe Ruth and what he did a century ago. Almost everybody knows who broke the color line in baseball. The game has inherent narrative qualities – every at bat is a new one-on-one encounter. And it helps a lot that we get to read Roger Angell, Joe Posnanski and other authors who eloquently tell the stories of baseball.

Lonnie Shalton is a retired lawyer who lives in Kansas City and writes about baseball.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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