Over the years, UNP has developed a national reputation for publishing award-winning books in baseball history. To help you clear the bases (and your wish list), we’ve compiled a list of some of our recently published titles and forever best sellers. Browse for something to read during the next rain delay to learn more about your favorite team or iconic figures from America’s favorite pastime.
Save 40% on these titles and more during our Baseball Sale. Enter coupon code 6BAB25 in the discount code field of your shopping cart and click “Apply.” Offer expires June 13, 2025 and is good for U.S. and Canadian shipments only.
Baseball’s First Superstar (Nebraska, 2025) by Alan D. Gaff. If there was a first face of baseball, it was arguably Christopher “Christy” Mathewson. At the opening of the twentieth century, baseball was considered an undignified game played by ruffians for gamblers’ benefit. Mathewson changed all that. When he signed with the Giants in 1900, his contract stated he wouldn’t pitch on Sundays, and he was known for his honesty, integrity, and good looks.
The Wax Pack (Nebraska, 2020) by Brad Balukjian. Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack.
1978 (Nebraska, 2025) by David Krell. With a month-by-month approach, David Krell breaks down major events in both baseball and American culture at large in 1978, chronicling in novelistic detail the notable achievements of some of the greatest players of the era, along with some of the national pastime’s quirkiest moments, to capture an extraordinary year in baseball.
Baseball’s Most Wanted (Potomac Books, 2002) by Floyd Conner. Baseball’s Most Wanted™ chronicles 700 of the most outlandish players, managers, and owners throughout baseball history. Its seventy lists describe in humorous detail baseball’s top-ten inept players, strange plays, bad practical jokes, bizarre nicknames, murderers, politicians, Don Juans, unusual contracts, notable nicknames, curses, worst trades, freak injuries, unsolved mysteries, least-known records, and more.
Perfect Eloquence (Nebraska, 2024) by Tom Hoffarth. When Vin Scully passed away in 2022, the city of Los Angeles lost its soundtrack. If you were able to deliver a eulogy for him, what might it include? What impact did he have on you? What do you carry forward from his legacy? Sixty-seven essayists—one representing each season of his career calling games for the Los Angeles Dodgers, from 1950 through 2016—reflect on the ways his professional and private life influenced them.
A Giant Among Giants (Nebraska, 2025) by Chris Haft. Willie McCovey, known as “Stretch,” played Major League Baseball from 1959 to 1980, most notably as a member of the San Francisco Giants for nineteen seasons. A fearsome left-handed power hitter, McCovey ranked second only to Babe Ruth in career home runs among left-handed batters and tied for eighth overall with Ted Williams at the time of his retirement. A Giant among Giants is the first biography of McCovey, who passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty.
Baseball Before We Knew It (Nebraska, 2025) by David Block. In this twentieth anniversary edition of his classic work, David Block fills in more of baseball’s origin story, including a new foreword by John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball; an expanded annotated bibliography of books relating to baseball’s origins from before the Civil War; and two new essays from the author. Baseball before We Knew It is a comprehensive, reliable, and readable account of baseball’s history before it became America’s national pastime.
The Summer Game (Bison Books, 2004) by Roger Angell. The Summer Game changed baseball writing forever. Thoughtful, funny, appreciative of the elegance of the game and the passions invested by players and fans, it goes beyond the usual sports reporter’s beat to examine baseball’s complex place in our American psyche.
Mike Donlin (Nebraska, 2024) by Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz. Mike Donlin was a brash, colorful, and complicated personality. He was the most popular athlete in New York and was a star on the powerful New York Giants teams of 1905 and 1908. At the dawn of the celebrity era of sports, Donlin was one of the nation’s first athletes to capture the public’s attention. This biography shows why.
Schoolboy (Nebraska, 2024) by Waite Hoyt and Tim Manners. Based on a trove of Hoyt’s writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend’s untold story, entirely in Hoyt’s own words. Schoolboy dives straight into early twentieth-century America and the birth of modern-day baseball, as well as Hoyt’s defining conflict: Should he have pursued something more respectable than being the best pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, arguably the greatest baseball team of all time?
Seasons in Hell (Bison Books, 2005) by Mike Shropshire. Seasons in Hell is a riotous, candid, irreverent behind-the-scenes account in the tradition of The Bronx Zoo and Ball Four, following the Texas Rangers from Whitey Herzog’s reign in 1973 through Billy Martin’s tumultuous tenure. Offering wonderful perspectives on dozens of unique (and likely never-to-be-seen-again) baseball personalities, Seasons in Hell recounts some of the most extreme characters ever to play the game and brings to life the no-holds-barred culture of major league baseball in the mid-seventies.
Baseball (Nebraska, 2023) by Steven P. Giestcher. Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Beginning with the Great Depression, Stephen P. Gietschier looks at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures whose stories figure prominently in baseball’s collective consciousness.
Daybreak at Chavez Ravine (Nebraska, 2023) by Erik Sherman. Fernando Valenzuela was only twenty years old when Tom Lasorda chose him as the Dodgers’ opening-day starting pitcher in 1981. Born in the remote Mexican town of Etchohuaquila, the left-hander had moved to the United States less than two years before. He became an instant icon, and his superlative rookie season produced Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards—and a World Series victory over the Yankees.
For further reading, check out our list of Home Run Reads or the latest issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.
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