Grantland’s Bryan Curtis checks in with an entertaining piece on baseball books.

Curtis notes there is another huge offering of baseball books, including mine. He writes:

From the ’30s, there’s a new book about Babe Ruth’s called shot, because of course there is.

Thanks for the plug, Bryan.

Curtis documents the litany of baseball books that seem to have covered every possible topic.

The baseball book is a happy anachronism, summoned into our world like the ghosts in Field of Dreams. The question is this: Are there any good baseball books left to write?

“I think I was lucky in that I didn’t know better,” said Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man, a biography of Lou Gehrig. “I didn’t realize how used-up most of the subjects were. If it had occurred to me that every baseball biography had been done, I might have just avoided the subject entirely.”

A few years ago, Eig sat with authors Howard Bryant and Jane Leavy at a book fair and looked at a list of Baseball Hall of Famers on Bryant’s iPad. They were searching for a player without a biography who deserved one. They didn’t find any. Eig’s new book is about birth control.

Later, Curtis writes:

Is there a point at which all the good baseball books are written and all the patience for them has been worn out?” asked Eamon Dolan. “No, I don’t think so.”

Nor do Dolan’s fellow editors, who seem bent on proving there’s no collusion in publishing. Pedro Martinez is signed to write a “lively, raw” memoir. Yahoo’s Jeff Passan is writing a history of Tommy John surgery. Novelist Kevin Baker is writing a history of New York City baseball. The Washington Post’s talented Michael Leahy has sold a book about the Los Angeles Dodgers of the ’60s.

The old question is, why baseball books? Versus football, basketball, rowing, etc. George Plimpton proposed the Small Ball Theory of literature (the smaller the ball, the better the writing). A more obvious explanation is that baseball comes with a handy collection of “story beats” for writers. Every at-bat is a beat. Every inning is a beat. By the time we get to a game, it can yield a whole book (Dan Okrent’s 9 Innings, Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd). Ditto the three-game series (Bissinger’s 3 Nights in August).

And there’s much more.

As for me, I’m looking to do another baseball book. Any ideas?