Four of My Favorite Baseball Novels

Of all the professional sports, baseball has been, and continues to be, the backdrop for some of the best sports-oriented novels in the English language. I love baseball, and I love books. Consequently, I have read a significant number of baseball novels. Here are four of my favorites, each very different from the others.

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

This is the second of four books that Harris wrote chronicling the career of his fictional pitcher, Henry W. Wiggen. The story, narrated by Wiggen, centers on one season and one player in particular: Bruce Pearson, a slow-witted catcher who receives incessant ridicule from his teammates. When tragedy befalls Pearson, the story turns, and the book ends with one of the most memorable lines in sports fiction.

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella

If you’ve seen the movie Field of Dreams, you have a sense of what this book is about. As is so often the case, however, there is much more to the novel than the movie shows or conveys. 

Kinsella developed the novel from a short story he had previously written and set the story in Iowa because he was, at the time, a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Using elements of the magical realism genre, he tells a story of dreams and redemption that warms the heart and inspires hope.

The Great American Novel by Philip Roth

Readers of Roth who have yet to discover this novel are probably mystified to learn that he wrote a baseball novel, which is understandable. But consider a couple of plot points. 

Set in 1943, the story follows the New Jersey–based Port Rupert Mundys baseball team, which – after its owners lease its home ballpark to the federal government as an embarkation spot for World War II soldiers – is forced to play the entire season as a road team. And then toss in the fact that the narrator is Word Smith, a retired sportswriter who travels with the team throughout the season. 

This is Roth at his sly, satirical, audacious – and, at times, hysterical – best.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

When I was in fifth grade, I used my baseball cards to create a dice game that I played incessantly, scoring each game, cataloging all the statistics, archiving seasons, etc. A few years later, with my league still going, my father told me about this book, but a decade probably passed before I actually sat down to read it.

J. Henry Waugh is an unhappy accountant during the weekdays, but in the evenings and on weekends, he goes home to run his Universal Baseball Association (UBA). Unlike in my modest game, every player in Waugh’s game is imagined, down to his appearance and character. He has imaginary owners, coaches, managers and commissioners, and he has dutifully archived and recorded 56 seasons of the UBA.

The novel opens with a young rookie – phenom Damon Rutherford, who happens to be the son of a former star player in the league – as he is pitching a perfect game. Waugh is thrilled until a freak outcome from the “Extraordinary Occurrences Chart” changes everything.

This is a book about much more than baseball, and it demonstrates all of Coover’s incredible talent.