Like any modern business, baseball utilizes increasingly sophisticated methods for assessing the abilities of its personnel and gauging the nature of success on the diamond. Statistical analysis as a baseball tool has grown primarily through the efforts of Bill James, whose series of published abstracts have examined player performance and plotted new paradigms for evaluating it. Newspaper editor and baseball researcher Bill Felber has the same interest, and with The Book on the Book: A Landmark Inquiry into Which Strategies in the Modern Game Actually Work he serves up a thoroughly credible deconstruction of the effects of the game’s strategies and the ultimate value of a player’s worth when it comes to winning and losing. Felber’s text gets unrelievedly technical sometimes, with almost every area of the game reduced to mathematical formulas. It’s hard to take issue with the conclusions, though, since Felber’s methodology is well supported. Full-blown fanatics will probably read the book straight through, but casual fans will find plenty of reward simply browsing through selected chapters, such as The Decline and Fall of the Starting Pitcher, Highly Paid Irrelevance and Rating the General Managers. Useful appendixes lay out the facts in all their numerical glory.

Perhaps no baseball player has been as lionized as Lou Gehrig, whose well-known battle with the disease that now bears his name was almost as prodigious as his hitting feats for the Yankees in the 1920s and ’30s. Jonathan Eig’s Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig is a major biography that benefits from excellent research, stylish writing and a fierce determination on the part of the author to get beyond mere legend. Playing in the shadow of Ruth, Gehrig nonetheless carved out his own place in the baseball record books. Eig doesn’t stint on the sporting anecdotes, and the era of the early Yankees dynasty comes fully alive. But equally interesting are his accounts of the battles between Gehrig’s doting mother, Christina, and his strong-willed, ex-flapper wife, Eleanor. Finally, there is the story of Gehrig’s illness, still riveting in its pathos, which Eig covers with revealing medical and personal details. A frailer, more human and less-iconic Gehrig emerges here, but one no less courageous.

Dan Shaughnessy’s Reversing the Curse: Inside the 2004 Boston Red Sox is a blow-by-blow account of the unlikely 2004 Sox triumph. Shaughnessy, a writer for the Boston Globe, profiles the colorful members of the team, including long-haired wildman center fielder Johnny Damon, stalwart fireballing right-hander Curt Schilling, and the Latin Mafia of Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, all instrumental in making history as the Sox snatched victory out of the jaws of certain defeat against the Yanks, and then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games in the World Series. Shaughnessy also runs down in detail the critical personnel changes enacted by youthful Sox general manager Theo Epstein in the wake of Boston’s gut-wrenching 2003 playoff loss to who else? the Yankees.