Major league baseball’s Opening Day was to have been … today. It’s not only not Opening Day, it’s Closed Day.

Or just Day.

No hot dogs. No organ music. No bunting: not the bat-on-ball kind but the red, white, and blue half circles you see hanging on Opening Day and Fourth of July.

No “taking infield.” No seventh inning stretches. No — my favorite — batting practice and coaches hitting fungos.

Fiddlesticks.

Today we’ll share some baseball book titles to help you recall a book you meant to read or want to re-read, and maybe you’ll see some titles new to you. Instead of a Top 10, we’ll share as many titles as we can recall reading.

All of them are baseball books but some of them are like Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa by W.P. Kinsella; the movie Field of Dreams is based on this book, built around baseball, but really about a father and son.

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by Kinsella. Here’s a brief description I found and loved: “Although the game starts normally enough it becomes increasingly surreal as it proceeds through its more than 2000 innings and weeks of play. Visitors to the game include the President of the USA and Leonardo da Vinci. Players die or disappear and the later stages of the game are played in the pouring rain that increasingly threatens the town. The statue of the Black Angel from the local cemetery ends up playing in right field and batting .300.” Fun book.

The Thrill of the Grass is a collection of Kinsella’s short stories, uplifting and magical. What an imagination — and love for the game.

Another book of short stories: Always Stand In Against the Curve by a favorite, Mississippian Willie Morris.

Rounding first now …

Pafko at the Wall by Don DeLillo, a novella about October 3, 1951 at the Polo Grounds in New York. The account of The Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff is real but he fictionalizes how different real-life famous and not famous people experienced the day.

Ball Four by big-league pitcher Jim Bouton, a groundbreaking diary of the 1969 Seattle Pilots and New York Yankees, remains the best-selling sports book of all time. Because I am not a mature person, I’ve read it four or five times. I Managed Good But Boy Did They Play Bad is another Bouton book, about Casey Stengel managing the expansion New York Mets (who were not going to be any good again this year and I’m sorry but that’s the truth; just ask Noah Syndergaard’s right arm). Finally, Bouton’s I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.

Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof. The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams.

By the late David Halberstam, a great historian and baseball fan, October 1964 (the all-white Yankees against the integrated Cardinals), Summer of’49 about the Red Sox-Yankees and more, and Teammates, a short and poignant look at Williams and three Red Sox teammates who visit him one last time.

Rounding second …

Biographies. The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy is a stand-up triple. Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life by Richard Ben Cramer. The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee Jr. Veeck … as in Wreck by Ed Linn and Cobb by Al Stump.

A False Spring by Pat Jordan is a fine memoir of a promising pitcher, a bonus baby who recounts minor league bus rides and small towns and a growing reality that he won’t make it to what ballplayers call The Show.

Rounding third …

For Love of the Game is a beautiful short novel, maybe 100 pages, The Old Man and the Sea of baseball novels. Written by Michael Shaara and turned into a movie starring Kevin Kostner and the fetching Kelly Preston. It’s about baseball — but it’s really not. Also Shaara won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1975 with Killer Angels, an historical fiction novel about Gettysburg. Have read it three times. Hope to read it again. One of my Top 10 Favorite Books.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis reads like a novel and changed the way baseball deals with statistics, and The Bronx Zoo by Sparky Lyle, the former New York Yankees left-handed reliever, reads like a screenplay in this account of the Yanks’ wild 1978 season. Soooo good.

We must now head for home …

If you’re looking for baseball essays and columns, we have to go back aways. But they’re worth it.

Why Time Begins on Opening Day and How Life Imitates the World Series and The Heart of the Order by Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post were good when I read them — but that was 30 years ago. They have a timeless quality though, if you love baseball. He writes about the people but what he captures is The Game.

And Late Innings and Five Seasons and anything else by Roger Angell, baseball’s best essayist. He’s a fan with a poet’s heart.

Finally, my favorite baseball novel/book: Last Days of Summer. A young boy begins writing to his hero, a third baseman, in the early 1940s. The ballplayer is drafted and leaves for World War II. It’s their letters to each other, and it’s one of those laugh/cry deals.

Postscript: If you haven’t read the essay The Green Fields of the Mind by the late Bart Giamatti, the former MLB commissioner, this would be a good time to do it, considering it’s about endings. You can find it online. If you miss baseball, you’ll feel like you have a friend who understands…

So, today is not Opening Day. It’s just Day. But days are good. And you can still celebrate Opening Day by opening — a baseball book.

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