Skip to footer

8 new baseball books to carry you through spring training

Check out these recent books about America's pastime.

4. '‘The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager’s Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life,’ by Mike Matheny with Jerry B. Jenkins

  • By Ross Atkin

Mike Matheny, who spent 13 years as a major-league catcher and now manages the St. Louis Cardinals, strongly advocates for living by one’s core principles. A letter he once wrote to a group of parents of a youth baseball team became the basis of the “manifesto.” This forms the basis of his book.

Here's an excerpt from "The Matheny Manifesto":

“Three of my four sons asked to quit baseball at one point or another. Two took a year off and the other came back begging to play again that same season. I shudder to think what would’ve happened if I had made them keep playing no matter what. My fear is, of course, that they could have soured on the game they now love as much as I do and would have given it up for good – because of me. Imagine. 

“Naturally, a lot of kids see the yelling as their parents taking their frustration out on them. Regardless how young they are, they know a lack of self-control when they see it.”

4 of 8
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.