The Best Baseball eBooks


Cover of the book Coach: Lessons in the Game of Life by Michael Lewis      Ball Four - Jim Bouton

Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic      Bang the Drum Slowly

I love baseball — but even if you’re just looking for a good novel, there’s still some great Kindle ebooks about the drama behind the sport. It seems to attract a special brand of optimism, and some surprisingly thoughtful commentary. Words like “triumph” and “hope” are just fancy ways of saying that people fight hard over the course of a lifetime, to try to realize their dreams. And with this year’s post-season about to begin, here’s my picks for the very best Kindle ebooks about baseball.



Ball Four - Jim Bouton

Ball Four: the Final Pitch by Jim Bouton

I’ve always loved this rollicking memoir by a baseball player, which in 1970 became the best-selling sports book of all-time for its wild and funny stories about the major leagues. And Amazon is now selling the Kindle edition of “Ball Four: The Final Pitch”, which includes a fascinating look back — more than 25 years later — by the book’s original author! Ball Four was extremely controversial when it was first published — simply because it was so shockingly candid. (Author Jim Bouton remembers when the San Diego Padres “burned the book and left the charred remains for me to find in the visitors clubhouse…” adding that “All that hollering and screaming sure sold books!”)

Bouton describes Ball Four as “the kinds of stories an observant next-door neighbor might come home and tell if he ever spent some time with a major-league team,” and one of his teammates described Bouton as “the first fan to make it to the major leagues”. Bouton went from pitching in the World Series with the New York Yankees to Seattle’s forgotten expansion team (the Seattle Pilots ) before being traded to the Houston Astros — but he collects together all the lore and the secret taboos of professional baseball in what Time magazine once called one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books ever published.


Cover of the book Coach: Lessons in the Game of Life by Michael Lewis

Coach by Michael Lewis

The author of Moneyball also wrote this heartfelt memoir about his own high school baseball coach, and what young Michael Lewis had learned when he took the pitcher’s mound in a crucial 9th inning… Lewis remembers coach Fitz as “a 6-foot-4-inch, 220-pound minor-league catcher with the face of a street fighter hollering at the top of his lungs for three straight hours.” The eighth grade students were afraid of him, and his intensity spawned legends about just how tough Coach Fitz really was. Yet when the pressure is finally on, “Fitz leaned down, put his hand on my shoulder and, thrusting his face right up to mine, became as calm as the eye of a storm. It was just him and me now; we were in this together… ” And by the end of the story, I was convinced that this 96-page book would make a wonderful gift for a teacher — or maybe even for anybody who’s a parent.

And again if you’re a subscriber to Kindle Unlimited, it’s free!


Bang the Drum Slowly

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

“From here on out, I rag on nobody…” It’s been called one of the greatest lines of dialogue in the movies, but it stems from a stunning 1956 novel. Author Mark Harris wrote four novels about the life of a major league catcher, but this is the novel that people always remember. Robert De Niro starred in the film adaptation — one of his first starring roles at the age of 30 — but the “voice” of the narrator in this novel is impossible to forget. There’s something about sports fiction that makes authors want to reach even further, and this novel follows the same path, describing a friendship between two men that grows slowly as they face an even bigger challenge beyond the baseball diamond.


Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic

Bill Veeck’s Crosstown Classic by Bill Veeck

This book contains one of my all-time favorite baseball stories, about the day that Eddie Gaedel stepped up to bat. Eddie Gaedel was 3′ 7″ — a midget — but the owner of the St. Louis Browns had snuck him onto the line-up card for the second game of a double-header. “Play ball!” the umpire roared, as the opposing team’s pitcher laughed and conferred with his catcher. (“Pitch him low,” the catcher joked — but the pitcher never could find the strike zone…) Eddie Gaedel walked to first base in his one and only game — giving him a lifetime perfect on-base percentage of 1.000. And decades later, the owner of that baseball team shared the full story — and dozen of others — with lots of humor and lots of insights drawn from a lifetime spent in professional baseball.

It’s a great way to look back on a century of great baseball stories — as the 2014 post-season begins!


Eddie Gaedel

Twitter and Amazon Create New Add-to-WishList Tweets!

Amazon joins Twitter for wish list hash tags!

Now you can link your Twitter account to your Amazon wish list, and request those special gifts with just a hashtag! Whenever there’s an Amazon URL in a tweet, now just include #AmazonWishList in your reply — and Twitter and Amazon will make sure the item gets added to your wish list!

For a shortcut to setup this new feature, go to
tinyurl.com/TwitterWishes

And Amazon’s also added more functionality to their Wish Lists. With its new “Save-A-Photo” feature, you can now take a picture — of anything — and then save it to your Amazon Wish List. In fact, now your Amazon wish list can even include items that you found on other shopping sites. There’s a new easy browser add-on that’s making it possible, which Amazon is calling “the Universal Wish List”.

But here’s my favorite feature: “Don’t Spoil My Surprises!” This lets you keep your Amazon wish list up-to-date for any friends who might shopping from it — but it won’t remove those items that were purchased when you’re looking at the list. That way, “every gift is truly a surprise,” Amazon explains in their press release. And you can even add a “Virtual Note” to your wish list, if you want to make general suggestions about what people should be buying you!

“Last year, one in three Amazon customers worldwide wished,” Amazon explains in a new press release, and the end result was more than 4.3 million “wish list” items being added every day. if Amazon maintained that pace for an entire year, it’d mean the addition of 1,576,800,000 wish list items in just one year!

Of course, Amazon’s gearing up for the big holiday shopping season. Just make sure you don’t add things to your wishlist by accident once you’ve connected it to your Twitter account. I can imagine someone sharing a ridiculous product’s URL on Twitter, like this giant Horse Head Mask. “#AmazonWishList ,” I might tweet back jokingly.

Only to discover that it’s actually been added to my Amazon Wish List!

Horse Head Mask from Amazon

Amazon Slashes Tablet Prices to $99!

Fire HD6

Amazon’s just introduced an adorable new high-definition tablet — for less than $99! Their new “Fire HD6” tablet comes with brilliant high-def color (252 pixels per inch) , and it’s available with a 6-inch or 7-inch screen, “in five fun color choices.”

For a shortcut to Amazon’s new Kindle, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/FireHD6

The six-inch edition is only $99, while the 7-inch version costs another $30 ($139). “Fire HD is the most powerful tablet under $100,” bragged Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos. “The new Fire HD features a stunning HD display, quad-core processor, Dolby Digital Audio, front and rear-facing cameras, incredible reliability, and Amazon’s unmatched content ecosystem – all supported by Amazon customer service.”

I’m stunned that it costs just $99 and comes with two cameras — both front- and rear-facing — for two-way video conversations. But then again, I recently bought a 15.6-inch laptop computer for just $250. I joked to a friend that electronic parts have gotten so cheap, now we’re just trying our different configurations. Do you want a larger screen with a physical keyboard, or just a medium-sized tablet device with a touchscreen keyboard. Or, or course, a phone-sized device…

Which seems to be Amazon’s grand master plan. At 6 inches, the FireHD6 is just half an inch larger than the iPhone 6 Plus which Apple just released this week — and it’s $300 cheaper. Amazon is already touting the ability of their FireHD6 to make Skype calls…with video! And when you look past its calling capabilities, “Fire HD delivers a world-class entertainment experience,” according to Amazon’s press release, “with over 33 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, and Android apps and games…”

What’s really happening may be the beginning of a smart long-term plan. Amazon’s making it cheap and easy for customers to try out the Amazon “ecosystem”. Once you start buying your music and apps from Amazon, the theory goes, you won’t want to switch to another company’s device. Amazon makes it profit from the thing you’ll purchase with the device — all the apps and the ebooks and digital music and video content. That could explain why the prices are so cheap for the FireHD6, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon was selling the devices “at cost”, or even at a small loss!

Because once you start spending your time with a FireHD6, they’re hoping that you’ll also start spending your money!

For a shortcut to Amazon’s new Kindles, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/FireHD6

Fire HD7 comes in magenta, cobalt, citron, black, and white

September Kindle eBook Discounts!

John Lennon - The Life by Philip Norman Easy Go by Michael Crichton

The Best American Short Stories 2013 - Eliabeth Strout Daredevil Volume 1


I love Amazon’s Kindle ebooks sales — but this month selection seems unusually exciting. There’s famous authors (and famous characters), with new discounts on fiction, non-fiction, and even comic books. Amazon’s discounted over 100 Kindle ebooks to just $3.99 or less — including science fiction, biographies, and thrillers.

For a shortcut to Amazon’s discounts, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/399KindleEbooks


Here’s some of the most interesting selections…


John Lennon - The Life by Philip Norman

John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman ($1.99)

This 800-page biography seems like it’s full of everything you want to know about the music legend — both before and after The Beatles. After three years of research, author Philip Norman apparently interviewed everyone who really knew John Lennon, according to the book’s description at Amazon, including Lennon’s own son Sean “whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never before.” Norman also obtained rare interviews with Paul McCartney, George Martin, and Yoko Ono, “who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.” And I have to admit that this book’s description is intriguing, calling it “Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish…the whole man in all his endless contradictions…”



Easy Go by Michael Crichton

Easy Go by Michael Crichton ($1.99)

It’s a fun and fascinating novel from one of this century’s greatest literary careers. Just two years after making his debut at the age of 27, Michael Crichton imagined a fantastic story set in Egypt about an archaeologist who discovers ancient tomb filled with vast riches. There’s just one problem, according to Amazon. “He doesn’t just want to dig it up. He wants to steal it.” Soon our hero has teamed up with a smuggler, a thief, and an English lord to attempt history’s greatest heist — and of course, they’re walking right into a novel filled with danger. “Part Heist caper with some Indiana Jones mixed in,” writes one reviewer at Amazon, adding ” It would have made a great action movie….”


The Best American Short Stories 2013 - Eliabeth Strout

The Best American Short Stories 2013 by Elizabeth Strout ($2.99)

This collection is “wildly divergent and entertaining,” according to Booklist, “and each story is cultivated with a keen eye for voice and character…” I’ve always loved these collections of short fiction, and this year’s may be the best one yet (already becoming one of Amazon’s top 500 best-selling Kindle ebooks). “As our vision becomes more global,” explains this year’s guest editor, “our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might.” That’s Elizabeth Strout, who also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the editor of this series simply describes this collection as “twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences….”


Daredevil Volume 1

Daredevil, Vol. 1 by Mark Waid ($3.99)

Marvel Comic books are hard to find in Amazon’s Kindle Store — but they do have a great selection of graphic novels. And with new interest in The Avengers and The Guardians of the Galaxy, let’s not forget one of Marvel’s classic and most inspiring superheroes. Matt Murdock is “the man without fear,” and one comic book fan on Amazon describes this collection of six 2011 issues as “an incredible read, one of the best today!” (“If you like the fun of Spider-Man, but get a little tired of the self-deprecating humor or you love Batman, but don’t want to be bogged down by loads of continuity or maybe you just want to find something that’s both fun and thrilling all in the same place, do yourself a favor and pick this up!”)

And if you’re looking for more Marvel graphic novels, Amazon’s also discounted Ultimate X-Men Vol. 1: The Tomorrow People to just $3.99!

Ultimate X Men - Tomorrow People


Remember, for a shortcut to Amazon’s ebook discounts, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/399KindleEbooks

Can the iPhone 6 Beat Amazon’s Kindle Fire?

Steve Jobs on an iPhone

The war is on — which smartphone will win? Or is Apple really trying to fight Amazon’s Kindle Fire? It’s fun to watch two giant tech companies trying to out-do each other by creating even more exciting new gadgets. But at some point you have to ask: which fight are we really watching? Did Apple just release a new phone, or a new tablet?!

But my response would be that it doesn’t matter. I always think of the long-term war between Apple and Microsoft. Actually, I remember the way it was acted out in the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”. It ends with Steve Jobs confronting Bill Gates over Microsoft’s plans to take over the market for personal computers. Microsoft succeeded, but I like to think that Steve Jobs personally calculated the strategy that would one day help Apple reclaim the lead.

The storyline looks like this. Steve Jobs knows that computers will get smaller and smaller, and eventually “computing” will be mostly practiced on tiny devices that we’d hold in our hands. So back in 2001, Apple releases their first iPod, and quickly carves out a niche in “fresh territory”. The iPod gets better and better, and within 6 years, Apple adds the ability to make phone calls to their handheld devices — and also the ability to run apps. And what was the iPad, really, but a big iPhone, for running apps on a giant screen?

There’s debate now about whether you can really replace a personal computer with a handheld device, but it’s undeniable that people love owning a tablet. Amazon, of course, has been selling Kindles for the last 7 years, and they introduced their own line of multimedia tablets in 2011. But the Kindle Fire may just have been a defensive move by Amazon — to make sure Apple didn’t lure away everyone who wanted to read ebooks on a handheld device.

And then Amazon launched an offensive move — releasing a smartphone of their own. The Fire Phone was even discounted massively this week, from $199 apiece to just 99 cents (with a two-year service contract). But I’m still wondering if we’re missing the real battle that Amazon is fighting here. The Fire Phone comes with a “Firefly” feature which makes it easy to instantly purchase items (using your Amazon account to automatically handle all the billing). Maybe Amazon isn’t worried about losing customer’s who’d buy ebooks, digital readers, or even handheld tablets.

Maybe Amazon’s worried about losing ground in the war for all commerce — the ability to handle every payment that gets made on a mobile device.

OKCupid Founder Unleashes “Dataclysm”

Dataclysm by OkCupid found Christian Rudder

One of the founders of the dating site “OK Cupid” just released a new book — and it reveals some stunning insights about how people live today. (And Amazon’s discounting the Kindle edition to just $6.99.) After 10 years of running OKCupid, Christian Rudder has crunched the data to uncover some surprisingly clear patterns about what people really want. The title of his book? Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)

For a shortcut, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/Dataclysm

“Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid,” Rudder writes in the book’s introduction. “Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids.” It seems like just one out of every 150 dates will end in marriage, I thought at first. But then I realized: that’s happening every night — so 73,000 marriages each year are beginning with OKCupid dates!

“There are children alive and pouting today,” jokes the site’s founder, “grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on right now, who would never have existed but for the whims of our HTML.” And Rudder used to maintain a blog on their dating site that was called “OKTrends” — interesting observations about what patterns they were observing — according to Wikipedia. Rudder only stopped writing the blog in order to collect the same kind of information into this book. And according to one reviewer at Amazon, “This book may be to Data Science…what Freakonomics was to Economics…”

So what did he learn? Rudder revealed one fascinating experiment in July. OKCupid tried blatantly lying about the compatability of online dates, telling customers they’d discovered someone who matched 90% of their dating criteria…when they’d actually only matched 30%. (And to test the opposite, OKCupid told some customers that they’d also found people matching a mere 30% of their criteria — when, secretly, those people were actually a 90% match!) The results? Users sent more messages –at least “a conversation” of four — when they believed there was compatibility. Their own interactions weren’t always enough to convince them to keep those conversations going….and they put more faith in the numbers from the web site!

And surprisingly, people were much more likely to take a chance on e-mailing a person when there were no pictures available to judge how attractive they were….

Christian Rudder graduated from Harvard with a degree in math, according to The New York Times, calling Rudder the “Unblushing Analyst of Attraction” for OKCupid. And there is a stunningly geeky frankness in the infographics he’s released in advance of the book. For example, Rudder reports that the most sexually-aggressive states in America are Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, and Wyoming. Meanwhile, Ohio and New Hampshire are the states least interested in sex and most interested in finding love…

Of course, there’s also a startling confession in Rudder’s book. “I’ve never been on an online date in my life and neither have any of the other founders…” So he’s not trying to push people to their web site, “and if it’s not for you, believe me, I get that.

“Tech evangelism is one of my least favorite things!”

Remember, for a shortcut, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/Dataclysm

A 35% Discount on a Kindle Fire HD!

Amazon discounts the Kindle Fire HD with a red gift bow for the Christmas holiday

“Today Only,” read the special announcement on Amazon. Friday they’d slashed the prices on the Kindle Fire HD to just $129!

For a shortcut, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/SeptemberKindleFire

But a more interesting question is why is Amazon offering massive discounts on their high-definition tablet?

First, it’s a refurbished version, but that doesn’t explain everything. And the second clue is that Amazon seems to running out of their basic $69 Kindle. “Expected to ship in 1 to 2 weeks,” reads the text Amazon quietly slipped onto their web page. Why the sudden dramatic shifting in Amazon’s inventory of Kindles?

Of course, one theory is that Amazon’s about to announce a new Kindle. They usually schedule these announcements in September, to build up anticipation for the devices they’ll be releasing right before the big shopping season after Thanksgiving. So Amazon, the theory goes, is making room for all these new Kindles. Which they’re going to have to store someplace while they wait for new customers to order them…

What will Amazon announce? They’ll want to upgrade their tablets to keep up with their new competition. Maybe Amazon will add the Firefly button, and the other cool new features that they introduced with their Fire Phone. Besides being fun to play with, those features also made it easier to buy more things from Amazon.

So my guess is Amazon will include it on as many devices as possible!

Remember, for a shortcut to Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD page, point your browser to
tinyurl.com/SeptemberKindleFire