There’s nothing like watching the Olympics to remind you how much sports can unite us as people.
Every athlete has a story, whether they’re Olympians or weekend warriors on a club team. Maybe that’s why sports writing is such a bustling genre.
If you’re looking to learn more about your favorite sport or team, let these recommendations get you started.
Brian Coe, Senior Vice President, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins
Book: "Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood"
Authors: Dave Parker and Dave Jordan
Although I've worked in hockey for 30 years, I'm recommending a book to get you in the mood for baseball season.
"Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood" is a memoir of my favorite player, Hall-of-Famer Dave Parker, written by Parker along with Dave Jordan. The book follows his progression from multi-sport athlete growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, to his superstar status with the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he proved to be one of the game's most gifted players and one of its most polarizing personalities during the 1970s and early 1980s.
MVP awards, All Star appearances and the "We Are Family" World Series winning team all feature prominently. But it wasn't all glitz and glory for Parker. The book also chronicles behind-the-scenes struggles, personal demons, and his involvement with the infamous Pittsburgh drug trials, while touching on his later playing days when he served as a mentor and cautionary example for youngsters breaking into the game.
Parkinson's disease took Parker's life in June of 2025 just weeks before he was scheduled to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. But "Cobra" stands as a no-holds-barred, unapologetic remembrance of an incredible talent and charismatic star.
Patrick Abdalla, English teacher, Scranton
Book: "Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy"
Author: Jules Tygiel
I'm sitting in my office trying to pick a baseball book to recommend. I'm surrounded by baseballs, baseball figurines, baseball posters, baseball pennants and just everything baseball, and it's so hard to pick just one book. I look at the bookshelves and I see Jim Bouton's "Ball Four," the once controversial tell-all that is filled with brilliant insights and a deep love for the game. I look at Elliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out," which might be the best piece of narrative nonfiction ever written about baseball. It's about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and it reads like any great true crime book.
I think I'm going to settle on Jules Tygiel's, "Baseball's Great Experiment." It's the story of baseball's integration. Everyone knows the Robinson story, but this goes even deeper than the Larry Doby story. He's the guy who broke the American League color barrier.
[Editor's Note: You can read about some of Abdalla's other favorites in the expanded audio attached to this story.]
The author spent time with the players who integrated the other teams and even the minor leagues. Scranton and Wilkes-Barre get several mentions. Harry Simpson and Al Smith would go on to star in the major leagues, and they starred for the Wilkes-Barre Barons, while Piper Davis had a brief — if doomed — tenure with the Scranton Red Sox. You can learn all about them in this book.
"Baseball's Great Experiment" is a great history of an important part of the country's civil rights movement. That's the best thing about a good baseball book. They're always about something more than just the game.
Borys Krawczeniuk, WVIA News Reporter
Book: "The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball"
Author: Jeff Pearlman
Anyone who's known me for a long time knows I'm a huge New York Mets fan, and any Mets fan will tell you we suffer a lot. But twice during my lifetime, we won the World Series. The first in 1969 just weeks before my ninth birthday turned me into a Mets fan, and more than a dozen years of bad or mediocre teams later, the 1986 World Series team only solidified my faith, as misdirected as it might seem sometimes.
I just got done reading a great book about that 1986 team. It's titled "The Bad Guys Won: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team to ever put on a New York uniform, and Maybe the Best."
Jeff Pearlman wrote it. He used to cover the Mets for a New York newspaper. It's a really good look at baseball behind the scenes before the internet and cell phones made athletes scared to act like themselves. It's got all the background dirt on a team that my Mets fan friends and I adored, and other fans and teams hated — perfect training for being a journalist.
Sarah Scinto, WVIA Morning Edition Host and Reporter
Book: “Why We Swim”
Author: Bonnie Tsui
I guess it’s a good thing I’m recommending “Why We Swim” this week, if only to break up the baseball books.
I’ve never been a competitive swimmer. There aren’t many books about my chosen sport. But I have always loved the water. In the summer, my grandmother would frequently struggle to get me to leave the pool, and I was always the one reluctant to leave the ocean on beach trips.
“Why We Swim,” is a beautiful tribute to humans' love affair with the water and swimming. The author interviews Olympic athletes, scientists, swim clubs and more to find out why we, especially as a species who does not instinctively know how to swim, keep diving into the deep.
If you’ve ever marveled at the power of Olympic swimmers, been a part of a swim team or even just splashed around in the pool well after sunset, you will love this book.
That’s all for this edition of Bookmarks. Join us again on March 21. March is Women’s History month, so we’ll once again put the spotlight on women authors.
