Baseball fever

I don't get much reading done in October because I'm busy watching post-season baseball. It means late night games and mornings spent devouring the sports section. To add to the excitement, our local team the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have new owners and hopes are hesitantly but joyfully higher for the 2006 season. (Read all about it here.)
Meanwhile, my spouse and I are deciding on a baseball book to read together when Spring Training starts.
Here are some of the books in contention:

• Three Nights in August, by Buzz Bissinger. A relatively new book. Bissinger had total access to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a Tampa native, by the way). Read an excerpt herehere.
• Ball 4, by Jim Bouton. A library colleague heartily recommends this one; it's one of baseball's first real insider's accounts. Bouton wrote a memoir about trying to resecitate his career with the elusive knuckleball pitch during the '69 season.
• The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton. It started as an April Fool's joke: Sports Illustrated "reports" on a Zen mystic with 100 mph+ pitch hiding out in the Mets' Spring Training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. (right across the bay from Tampa). The story was a prank, but it got so much attention it was later expanded into a book. I love the original article's lead (how a newspaper story starts). Here it is:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement.

Read the original magazine story here.