Six great books about baseball

MANY SPORTS can make plausible claims to be the world’s best pastime. But when it comes to spawning great literature, baseball stands alone. American libraries dedicate shelves upon shelves to the cerebral, languidly paced sport. The volumes they hold range from the earliest memoirs by players, like Christy Mathewson’s “Pitching in a Pinch” in 1912, to works by renowned novelists reporting on real games (John Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”) or reimagining them (Don DeLillo’s novel of 1997, “Underworld”). Baseball has also been a consistent harbinger of social changes. Its racial integration foreshadowed the civil-rights movement; the rise of multimillion-dollar salaries for free agents anticipated the “greed-is-good” economy of the 1980s. These six books about baseball not only provide an enjoyable immersion in the sport but also illuminate some broader aspects of societies—America is not the only one—enraptured by it.