Baseball more than any sport inspires wonderful writing, says Tim Wiles, former director of research and the public services librarian for the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

“There are dozens of great baseball novels, if not hundreds,” Wiles says, and the game also has inspired a mountain of short fiction, poetry and essays. Baseball contributes in Ruthian ways to many non-baseball novels, including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Salinger even appears in the W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe.

Justin McGuire, host of the Baseball by the Book podcast, agrees that good baseball fiction abounds and cites authors Robert Coover, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo.

“It’s noteworthy that in 2020, two women published excellent baseball novels,” McGuire says and he recommends The Cactus League, by Emily Nemens and The Resisters,” by Gish Jen, a novel that examines baseball in a dystopian future when most baseball novels travel to the past. McGuire’s favorite is The Southpaw, which takes a more grounded approach than books that mythologize the game, such as The Natural and Shoeless Joe. The Southpaw is funny, filled with drama, and treats baseball as a sport rather than a symbol, McGuire says.

“Baseball is the literary sport,” Wiles says. “Beats the heck out of all the other team sports combined.”

One dedicated reader begs to differ. There have been 15 unassisted triple plays in Major League Baseball but Brina Gonzalez, voted the No. 44 best book reviewer by the 20 million members of the Goodreads website, suggests that great baseball novels may be more rare.

“Why craft fictional stories when you have the myth of Babe Ruth’s called shot?” says Gonzalez, who has loved baseball since she was a child. She has reviewed 116 baseball books on Goodreads, mostly nonfiction. “The 1951 shot heard round the world was either heart breaking or euphoric depending on which team you rooted for.”

Baseball novels have often been noticed by Hollywood. Bang The Drum Slowly, published in 1956, was made into a TV show starring Paul Newman, then into a 1973 movie starring Robert De Niro. The Natural, published in 1952, became a Robert Redford film success in 1984.

That inspired Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams in 1989 from the 1980 novel Shoeless Joe. John Grisham’s 2012 novel Calico Joe is in development with George Clooney expected to direct. Critically acclaimed The Art of Fielding is also being adapted into a movie.

There are 112 books on the Goodreads list of best baseball novels. The latest addition to the Top 10 is At The Bat: The Strikeout That Shamed America, a story I wrote that is built upon the 1888 poem Casey At The Bat. The novel’s appeal is an unlikely narrator, the umpire the fans want so badly to kill. As with baseball novel The Celebrant, At The Bat is an examination of the fall of the proud hero and the rise of the unexpectedly humble.

Among Wiles’ favorite baseball novels are The Brothers K, Heart of the Order, Season of the Owl, The Natural, and Man on Spikes. His most favorite is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, by the Canadian W.P. Kinsella. “It’s a novel of magical realism, and everything I love about baseball is in it,” Wiles says.

Shoeless Joe is the favorite baseball novel of Gonzalez, but she says it is the rare author who can compete with the true stories of baseball.

Hopefully, that won’t stop novelists from trying. So far, two of the Top 10 have been written in the 21^st century.

“Even as baseball recedes in the national imagination, authors are finding new ways to explore the topic,” McGuire says.

Here are the best baseball novels of all time as ranked by Goodreads readers.