PHILADELPHIA — My home office is jammed with baseball books.
Some of them, such as David Maraniss’s “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” David Halberstam’s “October 1964,” and anything written by Roger Angell, are splendid works of literature that tell compelling stories about America’s greatest game.
My office shelves are also filled with countless reference books, biographies and volumes of “baseball’s greatest this … or baseball’s greatest that.” A lot of mediocre books — often sent to me by PR folks in hopes of a good review — get a cursory flip-through before they land on the shelf.