Robert Birnbaum surveys newly-released baseball books at The Daily Beast – many of them in an historical vein, of course — and as usual I came across something unanticipated and refreshingly welcome.

In addition to Stuart Banner’s history of the antitrust exemption, Dennis D’Agostino’s salute to legendary baseball writers and Robert Weintraub’s examination of the immediate post-World War II game comes this gem from Edward Achorn: “The Summer of Beer and Whiskey.”

If that doesn’t grab your attention, the subtitle ought to stoke your thirst (pun intended): “How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game.”

It’s the story of how Chris Von der Ahe, a German-born saloon owner, founded the St. Louis Browns in 1883 — and later the American Association, which became the American League — as a way to sell more beer. Achorn, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, writes that Von der Ahe knew practically nothing about baseball. But his suds-selling scheme opened the game up to everyday working people, and in particular immigrants like himself.

Unlike the National League, which didn’t play on Sunday and didn’t sell alcoholic beverages at the ballpark, Von der Ahe did both, selling tickets for 25 cents for any and all comers to enjoy booze and ball on the Lord’s Day. From an excerpt on the NPR website:

With cheap tickets, Sunday ball, and beer, he grabbed control of the dying game in St. Louis and, in a turnaround at least as improbable and dramatic as the one engineered by the 2011 Cardinals, infused it with new life and popularity—while perhaps saving all of professional baseball in the bargain. Von der Ahe also played a role in founding a flamboyant new major league, whose influence echoes loudly through Major League Baseball to this day.

(Achorn, author of several baseball history titles, including Twitter star Old Hoss Radbourn, is interviewed by NPR’s Jacki Lyden here.)

The title of the book comes from how National League snobs regarded the maverick league, calling it the “beer and whiskey circuit.” But Von der Ahe’s entrepreneurial ruse changed the game during a time when the fate of what’s become the national pastime wasn’t always certain.

In addition to Birnbaum’s survey is a notable “project” by Los Angeles Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth, who recently embarked on a review of 30 baseball books in 30 days — it’s become an annual thing. Sports media writer Ed Sherman did this Q & A with Hoffarth last month:

I’m also huge on history-related books, but only if they’re written well, not like a college dissertation but with a writer’s flare to insert color and not just research. This year, another book by Robert Weintraub nails it with “The Victory Season.” The opposite is true with a bio on “Smoky Joe Wood.”

Hoffarth also references baseball book maven Ron Kaplan, proprietor of Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf and author of  the recently released “501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die.”

The book is organized into 15 chapters, detailing books according to categories, such as biography and memoir, the minor leagues and for young readers.

The meter’s running, folks. I say it’s time to get cracking with some of those.

On Wednesday I highlight a few noteworthy new sports books, with links to reviews, interviews and other information about the subject and/or author.

• The story of Mississippi State’s 1963 NCAA tournament game against Loyola of Chicago is a very familiar one, and not just to college basketball fans. Kyle Veazey, a sports reporter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, has expanded the tale into a full-length book, “Champions for Change,” chronicling how the Bulldogs ignored state laws against integrated competition months after James Meredith made history at Ole Miss.

Babe McCarthy’s team lost to Loyola, which later claimed the national championship. But it won so much more, including the full support of the school administration and the Starkville community. While upsetting segregationists like Gov. Ross Barnett, McCarthy’s defiant stand helped pave the way for eventual integration in Mississippi, and SEC athletics.

Veazey, formerly with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and who was a Mississippi State beat writer, talks to his old newspaper about how the book came to fruition.

• Goalkeepers are the odd ducks of soccer, semi-stationary hands-on specialists in a game filled with free-range aces of foot-curled wonder balls. Jonathan Wilson, the lauded soccer correspondent for The Guardian, examines the psychology of the men in the nets in “The Outsider.” Ranging far beyond the box of conventional labels about keepers as eccentric philosophers (think Camus) with occasionally bizarre stunts on the field (Rene Higuita’s scorpion kick), Wilson, according to The Independent:

” . . .explores the psychological pressures of being cast in the role of scapegoat, taking the blame for other defenders’ errors or forwards’ inability to score, and takes an in-depth look at the theories behind penalty-taking and saving, concluding that it is the one situation in which the keeper cannot lose – if he keeps the ball out, he is a hero; if he doesn’t, it was only to be expected.”

Wilson chatted recently with SB Nation’s Roker Report blog, admitting that he finds goalkeepers more interesting to interview: “They seem as though this real sense of tragedy follows them around.”

More reviews from The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph.

• The jokes, puns and kosher analogies have abounded since the October publication of “Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame,” edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy of The New Republic.

“It’s hard to imagine two words less likely to appear in the same sentence than ‘Jewish’ and ‘jocks,’ ” began a review in The New York Times, referencing a line in the satirical movie “Airplane” before pronouncing “that times have changed.”

The 50-essay anthology includes portraits of Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman, Dolph Schayes, Al Rosen, Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, Mark Spitz, Nancy Lieberman, Kerri Strug and Corey Pavin, among athletes and coaches. Also profiled are media figures Howard Cosell, Shirley Povich and Robert Lipsyte, owners Al Davis and Mark Cuban, baseball union leader Marvin Miller, chessmaster Bobby Fischer and Arnold Rothstein, the organized crime impresario behind the Black Sox scandal.

Foer, in an interview with Slate, proclaims: “This book has no anxieties!”

The Washington Post says the book is “full of tasty appetizers — a piece of gefilte fish, a slice of pickled herring. But there’s no chicken in the pot.”

More reviews from The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tablet, which kvetches in the headline: “Enough already with Koufax.”

Not when the world is about to come to an end.

Not only was the first sentence lame, I lied in the headline.

What I meant to write was that I’m not compiling any must-read or favorite lists. But plenty others in the sports world are.

Bruce Berglund at New Books in Sports has opted for what he calls a “year-end book list,” without any tedious numeration, which is probably the best way to go. Like last year, when he kindly invited me to ramble on, and like his regular posts, this is in podcast form:

“The episode features a strong starting nine.  Journalist and blogger Siddhartha Vaidyanathan (aka Sidvee) talks about Indian cricket and his favorite books on American football and baseball.  Two American writers, Jonathan Eig and Jason Coskrey, give their selections from the baseball library from two very different vantage points: Chicago and Tokyo.  We hear from Barry Nicholls, host of the Australian radio program 110%, about the differences in sports idioms used Down Under and in the US.  Mark Norman, editor of the blog Hockey in Society, discusses how Canadian fans are managing another discontented winter without hockey.  At the close of the year marking the 40th anniversary of Title IX, law professor, author, and former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar talks about the continued obstacles to equal opportunity in US sports.  We learn about women and sport in the Middle East, as well as the lingering effects of last February’s stadium violence in Port Said, Egypt, from journalist James M. Dorsey, author of the blog The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. At the close of a year that brought the word “Tebowing” into the sports lexicon, theologian Graham Tomlin discusses the connections of faith and sport.  And we close with Lisa Von Drasek, an expert in children’s literature, who gives her suggestions for some of the best sports books for young readers.”

I gave myself a little birthday present last month by downloading the electronic version of “Everything They Had: Sports Writing from David Halberstam.”

Published in 2009, two years after the author’s tragic death in an automobile accident, “Everything They Had” is a collection of Halberstam’s non-book sportswriting for newspapers, magazines and online publications, including ESPN.com’s discontinued Page 2 feature.

In the introduction, editor Glenn Stout — who’s behind the SB Nation Longform feature I’ve blogged about here before — explained how Halberstam:

“. . . recognized that sports are important because sports matter to people, and that sports, and how we relate to sports, say something of value about ourselves, our society, and our history and culture, one of the rare places where citizens of differing creeds, classes and races come together.”

Influenced by the work of sportswriting giants W.C. Heinz, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, as well as New Journalism pioneers Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and Tom Wolfe, Halberstam made the break from daily journalism to focus on book writing in the mid-1960s.

The pieces in this collection span nearly six decades, and reveal the astonishing range and deeply humane touch Halberstam demonstrated in so much of his work, sports and otherwise. They include “Horse Racing in Warsaw” for The New York Times in 1965, as he was preparing to leave the newspaper business, “Why Men Love Baseball,” from Parade in 1989, “How I Fell in Love with the NFL,” from ESPN.com in 2001 and “Ice Breakers,” about female hockey players in Condé Nast Sports for Women in 1998.

Stout was working at the Boston Public Library when he met Halberstam, who was researching “The Summer of ‘49,” and it became an acquaintanceship that led to other collaborations. This collection’s title stems from a project they talked about, a compendium of sportswriting about women athletes they tentatively called “Everything She Had.”

That idea never came to fruition, but Stout immediately adapted the title for this volume, which received the endorsement of Halberstam’s widow.

While I’ve found collections ideal for e-reading, a book of this magnitude can’t be absorbed properly only in the digital realm. With my level of interest in the subject, as well as the author, my Christmas present to myself will have to be the print edition.

In a new introduction to the 1992 update of “The Best and the Brightest,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of American foreign and military policy in Vietnam, Halberstam wrote that while he wasn’t sentimental about the newspaper world, it was a challenge to do without a regular byline:

“The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification — if not instant, then certainly relatively immediately. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist.”

He explained in the same paragraph that “I had replaced the need for immediacy with something far more powerful, an obsession” and that his book projects were “many universities I entered.”

But he clearly longed to inhabit that vast creative space between the daily journalist he no longer was and the author he had become. The work in “Everything They Had” demonstrates the renewed sustenance Halberstam found between books. Readers will be rewarded with the additional gifts of his immense talent that have been expertly brought together in one volume.

The University of Nebraska Press is a treasure trove of terrific books about sports and sports history, and a new issue about the early days of pro football by Washington Times sports columnist Dan Daly looks to be a real treat.

In the “National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years,” Daly comments that “it’s amazed me how little literary attention has been paid to pro football’s early days.”

In the days before the creation of NFL Films, and the arrival of Pete Rozelle and the television age, there was virtually no literature to speak of. Daly, a co-author of “The Pro Football Chronicle,” points to the lack of newspaper coverage. By the time the NFL was created in obscurity the early 1920s, baseball and college football already had enjoyed decades of flattering prose by some of the best stylists in sportswriting and beyond.

As George Halas once observed: “The history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”

This 424-page volume is Daly’s effort to rectify that, after two decades of painstaking research, including the discovery of hard-to-find newspaper articles and other materials on tucked-away microfilm reels: “Up to now, the game’s early days have been a silent movie. I’m trying to turn them into a talkie.”

Daly breaks down what he calls his “scrapbook” by decades, and ends promptly at 1969, and not just because that year winds up his 50-year survey:

“At that point, in my mind, the party was over. Pro football will never be as fascinating as it was from the ’20s to the ’60s. It’s all about maintaining success now, protecting everyone’s investment. And that breeds conservatism. The league moves so slowly these days that it took thirty-six years to fix the obviously flawed overtime rules (for the playoffs, at least). If the AFL were still around, prodding the NFL into being better, the correction would have come much sooner.”

An excerpt published on ESPN.com in October recounts the NFL saga of one Steve Belichick, who started the 1941 season as the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and wound up starring as a fullback. And later became the father of you know who.

I was really enjoying reading this recent post on A.V. Club about the “geekery” of baseball and literature, which — ahem — had been touching all the right bases in mentioning “The Natural,” “The Great American Novel” and “The Art of Fielding,” among others, as must reads.

Then Kevin McFarland stumbled badly and missed home plate entirely in dismissing “You Know Me Al,” an episolatory work by sports columnist Ring Lardner Sr. published in 1916, and as vital as any of the novels he mentions in understanding the literature of the game. The book, McFarland concluded:

” . . . represents a slice of baseball history that’s too far in the past to serve as an introduction.”

Come again? Too far in the past? This is baseball, not jousting. A book that’s not quite 100 years old, and that sums up the then-brief history of the game, is regarded as ancient? If you sift through the comments you’ll see that quite a few of McFarland’s readers are well-versed in the literary — and real — history of the game, and shouldn’t find Lardner’s work too outdated.

Even more puzzling is McFarland’s inclusion of “Eight Men Out,” W.P. Kinsella’s account of the Black Sox scandal that took place only a few years after Lardner’s book was published. “Eight Men Out” also was the basis for a popular movie with the same name directed by John Sayles, who pulls off a very good rendering of Lardner, then a baseball writer in Chicago.

So where is the cutoff point between “too far in the past” and the modern present? Is the former reserved for books that aren’t made into films? We are never offered an explanation from McFarland, who appeared to be looking for a quick way to wrap up his post.

I realize A.V. Club is geared toward young men — McFarland is a contributing editor who graduated from Northwestern in 2011 — but to pan “You Know Me Al” this way is to disrespect the game’s past.

Lardner’s “busher” chronicles tell us much about the game before and through the turn of the 20th century, through the conceited, crass persona of Jack Keefe. This wasn’t romanticizing the “pastime,” but incisive satire that skewered the common mythology that had already grown around the sport.

The Brothers Judd show the proper appreciation for Lardner’s work. Before most anyone else, and not long before the throwing of the 1919 World Series threatened to bring down the sport, Lardner demolished the pastoral odes of baseball’s earliest poets.

Read this excerpt from “You Know Me Al” and tell me this particular letter from Keefe to “Al” isn’t prophetic about what was to come with the White Sox and their cheapskate owner, Charlie Comiskey:

“Speaking of money I won’t sign no contract unless I get the salary you and I talked of, three thousand dollars. You know what I was getting in Terre Haute, a hundred and fifty a month, and I know it’s going to cost me a lot more to live here. I made inquiries round here and find I can get board and room for eight dollars a week but I will be out of town half the time and will have to pay for my room when I am away or look up a new one when I come back. Then I will have to buy cloths to wear on the road in places like New York. When Comiskey comes back I will name him three thousand dollars as my lowest figure and I guess he will come through when he sees I am in ernest. I heard that Walsh was getting twice as much as that.

“The papers says Comiskey will be back here sometime to-morrow. He has been hunting with the president of the league so he ought to feel pretty good. But I don’t care how he feels. I am going to get a contract for three thousand and if he don’t want to give it to me he can do the other thing. You know me Al.”

It’s not graceful Kinsellian prose, but Lardner’s savagery of the Jack Keefe character and the Lords of Baseball — greed meeting greed — went to the heart of what the author thought ailed the game, and he would be proven horrifically right. Lardner’s own short life was troubled by alcoholism and ill health, and he died long before his son and namesake, Ring Lardner Jr., made the Hollywood blacklist.

“You Know Me Al” isn’t hard to find — it’s in print, and readily available. If you’ve got a dollar in your bank account, you can even buy an e-book version in a flash.

Pardon me for being a bit parochial here, both in subject matter and regarding the author.

Drew Jubera, a former features writer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (my former employer) is the author of “Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team.”

It’s the story of high school football in Valdosta, Ga., three hours south of Atlanta on Interstate 75 and one of the storied names in the game. In 2008, ESPN ran a month-long feature on “TitleTown USA,” alluding to the 23 state titles and more than 800 wins in the team’s history.

But a year later, Valdosta lost its noticeable swagger when it was defeated by crosstown rival Lowndes. The result was the mid-season firing of the third Valdosta head coach in seven seasons, which caused heads to turn all around Georgia and beyond.

Jubera reported on the matter for The New York Times, and it led to the book, which was published on Sept. 4. One of the primary voices of the story is former Valdosta and University of Georgia quarterback Buck Belue, now a sports radio talk show host in Atlanta, who recalled that “playing for Valdosta on Friday night was as big as the dream got” but that “there’s a bad vibe going on.”

The story, and the book that has followed, delves into the pressures levied by well-heeled football boosters and the politics of race and shifting demographics in a small Southern town.

Valdosta’s last state title came in 1998, and constant reclassification of high school sports in Georgia has divided the state athletically like never before. The largest classification includes eight regions: seven comprised of schools in metro Atlanta and its exurbs, and just one in south Georgia, including Valdosta, stretching from southwest Georgia to Atlantic Ocean coastal communities.

If you’re familiar with the vast geography of Georgia, this is a lot of ground to cover, and over state highways that aren’t easy to traverse.

Having grown up around high school football in this state, south Georgia absolutely ruled. My suburban Atlanta high school reached the state championship game once, in 1973, losing to Thomasville High School and future Atlanta Falcons running back William Andrews.

When a nearby high school reached the state finals last year, it was routed by another suburban school that opened 12 years ago. That’s how much the prep football landscape has changed around here, and judging from what Jubera has put together, it’s hard to see Valdosta ever retaining its former dominance.

Here’s a review by Phil Kloer, another former features writer for the AJC, on the ArtsATL site.

If you’re in Atlanta, Jubera will be having a book signing tonight starting at 7 p.m. at Manuel’s Tavern, my favorite watering hole in town.

Rounding up some of the most intriguing reads I’ve come across this week, posted on Sports Biblio, my experimental Tumblr companion to this site, or that I have Tweeted and collected elsewhere:

• Pigskin Progessivism — George Will’s war on football, American-style, now seems to blame the political movement popularized by (an unnamed) Teddy Roosevelt for the rise and dominance of college football. Just the way the union-loving, high-tax, government-giveaway liberal majority down South likes it.
• Death Spiral — Online journalism guru and New York Mets blogger Jason Fry thinks his team’s lack of money to improve might be the last straw for his fandom.
• Stage Struck — The art of the sports profile, with an emphasis on top tennis stars, gets the profile treatment in The Paris Review from Scott Korb, who leans John McPhee’s way in identifying the master of the form.
• The Death of the Anna Kournikova Era — Was there one? Jay Caspian Kang says so at Grantland, where he wonders whether we’ve finally overcome our objectification of female athletes this summer. This is such a facile hot mess I don’t know where to start, so I’ll stop.
• Writing the Olympics — Nicolas Lezard agreed to write a thousand or so words a day every day during the London Olympics, which he wasn’t interested in. His words have become a book, “Nolympics,” just published by Penguin.
• Ajax, the Dutch, the War — Simon Kuper explains the difficulties getting information about and talking to Holocaust survivors while reporting his book, just now published in the U.S.: “Since finishing the book, I have found myself almost unable to read or hear anything about the Holocaust.”

So I’m about to push the “send order” button to Amazon/Santa for the sports book wish list I blogged about here last week, and “Wonder Girl,” Don Van Natta’s recent biography of Babe Didrickson Zaharias, is one of the three I’m treating myself to read over the holidays and into the new year.

The other two are Harvey Araton’s “When the Garden Was Eden” and “Fenway 1912″ by Glenn Stout.

These are the ones I’ve decided I just have to read right away. That they’re books about sports history isn’t a coincidence. I earned my bachelor’s degree in history and over the years have blended sports and history into my regular reading like a fiend. They’re unquenchable passions, and I’m thrilled to get reintroduced to the life of the Babe, whose feisty, pre-Title IX, pre-feminist personality is sorely missing in today’s women’s sports world.

But that’s a blog post for another time.

Van Natta, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times, is joining ESPN.com in January. Not long before the announcement, his soon-to-be-former-employer declined to review the Babe book. Coincidence?

I’m working up an e-mail to send to the North Pole, asking very kindly for three recently released sports books that I’d like to read through the holidays into the new year.

But which ones?

I am torn by my limitations, self-imposed due to budget and time considerations. Usually I wait until books come out in paperback, but there are so many compelling reads I’ve been jotting down that I cannot resist. As you can see, my tastes and these topics are wide-ranging, and I’m a big fan of serendipity.

So help me, please. Surprise me. Fascinate me. Tell me which of these are an immediate must-read, and why. I’ll be collecting responses and will post my final decisions this time next week.

If you’re buying sports books for someone you know, what would you tell them they can’t live without?

Better yet, tell me.

In no particular order, here’s my working list. Keep in mind these books have all been released very recently, generally in the second half of the year.

1. When the Garden Was Eden, by Harvey Araton. These great Knicks teams of the early 1970s helped me fall in love with basketball. One of my favorite sports books, Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, is all about them too.

2. Fenway 1912, by Glenn Stout. I’m not a Red Sox fan, but I am a hopeless sucker for well-written sports history. I also like reading about baseball in the dead cold of winter.

3. Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand, John Schulian. A new collection by a legendary sports columnist-turned Hollywood screenwriter. Alex Belth’s recent interview with him had me nearly in tears. Schulian’s comments on the state of journalism are spot-on. I love reading about the blend of this stuff so much. (And Alex Belth has been a splendid new discovery for me, as I blogged here yesterday.)

4. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach. A novel that’s about baseball but not really about baseball. Or so I’m told. The New Yorker thought enough of it for a full review. So did NPR. Somebody else thinks it struck out. I’ve got to get cracking with a long-neglected regimen of fiction reading. Might this rekindle that fire?

5. America’s QB: Bart Starr and the Rise of the NFL, Keith Dunnavant. I’ve enjoyed this Birmingham-based college football writer’s work before, including The Fifty Year Seduction, an excellent history of the role of television since the early 1950s and that explains much of the current mess with record contracts and massive conference realignment.

6. Jewball, Neal Pollack. A novel set in the 1930s when Jews ruled basketball and those storm clouds were gathering over Europe. Bethlehem Shoals (aka Free Darko) wrote this review, I retweeted it and Neal Pollack tweeted me to say the book has a chapter on the All-American Redheads women’s barnstorming team. How he worked that in here I guess I won’t figure out until I read it. It’s self-published and digital only; and as I’m finally in the market for a tablet, I can’t automatically cross this off the list anymore.

7. Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrickson Zaharias, Don Van Natta, Jr. The New York Times journalist is the latest to try his hand at capturing the life of the greatest female athlete. The last book I read on the subject by Susan Cayleff was drenched in all the wrong kind of cultural feminist complaining and hand-wringing. Everything I’ve read about Van Natta’s account is one that treats her as a more fully human creature, and not just a helpless victim of a sexism of another time.

8. Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth and the Transformation of American Sports, by Mark Ribowsky. David Remnick’s review in The New Yorker thinks this treatment has its flaws, but fleshes out all the controversies and complications of Cosell and his unforgettable career in sports journalism.

9. Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton, by Jeff Pearlman. The author has come under a lot of fire for his look at the dark side of the life of the late Chicago Bears great (and he responds here). I’ve always had mixed feelings about books like this, designed to tell the “truth” about the “real” man behind the legend. Pearlman’s style elsewhere is generally blunt; I fear this might be the case here but hope he is driven to show the full human being as much as he attempts to demystify.

10. Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, by Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. The original version was published in May and the paperback has just come out. I was a bit surprised this was more of an oral history; was hoping it would be more of a narrative. Everyone I know who’s read it says it’s a must because of ESPN’s dominance in sports media and its influence in the sports world. I know I need to read this but I’m not feeling a rush right now.

Some more on holiday sports books from Grantland. Dan Shanoff of Quickish lists his best sports books of 2011 and looks ahead to 2012.

So what am I missing here? Which three books should I choose? Please let me know.