Total Baseball, launched to universal acclaim in 1989, has been the most compelling and exhaustive reference series ever devoted to America's pastime. With this eighth edition, Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia -- totally revised and completely updated through 2003 -- went under a significant makeover and introduced a more visual design plus several fresh narrative and statistical features. Longtime readers will be delighted by the addition of several new essays and classic reprints from SPORT magazine, plus more than 200 photographs, including, for the first time, color, as well as the inclusion of Bill James' revolutionary statistic, Win Shares, to baseball's most respected statistical Player and Pitcher Registers.

At 2,688 pages and seven pounds, this is the largest Total Baseball ever, and a worthy successor to the line of encyclopedias hailed by Baseball Weekly as "the ultimate source for baseball information." As always, Total Baseball's Player and Pitcher Registers carry detailed career records for all 16,000-plus players in major-league history. There are also exhaustive lists chronicling every possible aspect of the game, among them baseball's all-time and season leaders in dozens of categories, individual award winners, all-time standings, all-star results, Hall of Fame voting, line scores and composite box scores from every postseason game and series, and much more. And new to this edition are year-by-year reviews of the major leagues-in prose, pictures and statistics-that highlight the newsmakers, award winners, stats leaders, and champions from 1871 to 2003.

Returning to this edition are updated team histories and provocative essays that touch all the significant historical bases, supplemented by several new essays that are sure to spark debate. Noted baseball historian and Total Baseball editor John Thorn assesses Barry Bonds as possibly the greatest player ever, author Peter Wayner takes an insightful look at the "Moneyball" phenomenon, ESPN writer Rob Neyer makes his case for the Greatest 100 Teams in history, and Thorn teams up with noted journalist Alan Schwarz to select the 100 most important figures in baseball history.

Another exciting new addition is the inclusion of feature articles from the archives of the former SPORT magazine that recapture the life and times of such immortals as Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Lou Gehrig, Charlie Gehringer, and Lefty Grove. Other reprints from SPORT tell the colorful stories of some of baseball's all-time greatest teams.

But perhaps the most striking upgrade for Total Baseball's faithful followers-all 300,000 of them since 1989-is the inclusion of photographs, including dozens of classic color shots, that tell baseball's rich history in pictures.

It all adds up to make Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia a worthy successor in the reference family that Ken Burns called "a superb encyclopedia, a wonderful place, indeed, a whole world, to get lost in."

Look Inside (Click to download pdf)
Dust Jacket Table of Contents Introduction	Sample Page Sample Photos Endorsements
Press Releases Stephen Hawking Pays Off Bet with Total Baseball Total Baseball is Back!

John Thorn, one of the country's foremost baseball experts, wrote his first baseball book thirty years ago and since then has created a great many more, including Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame and The Armchair Books of Baseball. He co-founded Total Baseball in 1989, has written for several periodicals and was Senior Creative Consultant to the Ken Burns documentary Baseball.

Phil Birnbaum is editor of By the Numbers, the statistical analysis newsletter of the Society for American Baseball Research. A native of Toronto, he currently resides in Ottawa where he works as a software developer.

Bill Deane is a freelance baseball researcher and writer who spent eight years as senior research Associate for the National Baseball Library & Archive. He has published seven books and more than 200 articles for a variety of publications, and was a recipient of the 1989 SABR-Macmillan Baseball Research Award.

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