Guide to Baseball Novels: A
- Abrahams, Peter. The Fan. New York: Warner Books, 1995. A failing salesman vents his frustrations on the local major-league team's new free-agent superstar.
Mostly pure suspense, but draws intriguing connections among declining economies, threatened men, and images of athletes. Subtler than its subsequent film version.
Criticism: McGimpsey
- Amernic, Jerry. Gift of the Bambino. Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002. Repr. New York: St. Martin's, 2004. A boy bonds with his grandfather, who bonded with Babe Ruth himself decades before.
Nicely told, with humor and distinctive Toronto settings and characters. 
- Angell, Kate. Curveball. New York: Love Spell, 2007. Randy, belligerent ballplayers find true love on their way to the World Series.
- Angell, Kate. Squeeze Play. New York: Love Spell, 2006. Incorrigible ballplayer succumbs to love for a good woman.
- Ardizzone, Tony. Heart of the Order. New York: Henry Holt, 1986. A minor-league veteran tells his son of his amazing career--how, in the back alleys of Chicago in his youth, he killed a friend with a line drive, and how that friend haunted the rest of his baseball career.
Told in a style full of wordplay and deliberately overwritten; the central theme is violence and its impact on relations among men.
- Asinof, Eliot. Man on Spikes. New York: McGraw Hill, 1955. The frustrated career of a minor-league ballplayer is told in a series of episodes, each involving how the player relates to one of the people that he encounters in his playing days.
Early realistic fiction (the author was a minor-league player) that still engages its readers as a story. Its rhythm of inevitable failure risks melodramatics at times but rings true to the experience of sport. Man on Spikes is notable as a precursor of other adult baseball novels in deflating the effortless heroics so common in juvenile fiction.
- Asinof, Eliot. Strike Zone. See Bouton.
- [Auster, Paul] Benjamin, Paul. Squeeze Play. New York: Alpha/Omega, 1982. Repr. New York, Penguin, 1990, and as appendix to Hand to Mouth (New York: Holt, 1997). A New York private eye investigates the death of a baseball star.
Enjoyable pastiche of the hardboiled genre.
