Five best books on baseball

Peter Morris, author of A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball, named a five best list of books on baseball for the Wall Street Journal.

One title on the list:

Baseball's Great Experiment
by Jules Tygiel
Oxford, 1983

Jackie Robinson's re-integration of organized baseball after a half-century of tacit segregation remains the most remarkable chapter in the game's history. Yet the magnitude of Robinson's courage makes his story difficult to relate without rendering him a paragon of saintly virtue and the events of his life a pat melodrama. We are thus fortunate to have Jules Tygiel's thoughtful portrait of baseball's "great experiment." We see the disturbing broader context of racism in the sport, but we also encounter Robinson as a real person. Turning the other cheek did not come naturally to him: "With Jackie's temper being the way it was," recalled fellow Negro Leaguer Quincy Trouppe, "it didn't seem likely that a major league team would be willing to take a chance with him." Robinson emerges as an inspiring, entirely human hero whose triumph meant conquering his imperfections.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see Doug Glanville's best books on baseball, Richard J. Tofel's list of the five best books on baseball as a business, Tom Werner's six favorite baseball books, Fay Vincent's five best list of baseball books, Tim McCarver's five best list of baseball books, and Nicholas Dawidoff's five best list of baseball novels.

--Marshal Zeringue