Skip to footer

8 new baseball books for Opening Day and beyond

Play ball! As the season begins, here are some baseball titles to check out.

6. "Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball," by John Feinstein

  • By Ross Atkin

John Feinstein, who has a number of bestselling sports books to his name, goes behind the scenes of Triple-A baseball, which is just one step from the majors but a far different universe. To tell the story, he follows a cross-section of protagonists trying to reach the next level, including players, managers, and umpires.

Here’s an excerpt from “Where’s Nobody Knows Your Name”:  

“It can be argued that no one enjoys spring training more than minor-league managers and coaches. Many have lived the big-league life, some for extended periods of time, some only briefly. Some have never been there and can only dream about what it must be like.

“They all get to live The Life in the spring – especially the Triple-A staff because they work side by side with the major-league staff until the very end of spring, when players are sent down to play for them and they have to start dealing with the disappointed looks on the faces of those who won’t be starting the season in the majors. 

“‘The first thing I say to my team, once I have a team, is, 'I know you guys don’t want to be here,' said Charlie Montoyo, who in 2012 began his sixth season as manager of the Durham Bulls, the Triple-A farm team of the Tampa Bay Rays."

6 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.