Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: Sports & Games

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Sports and Games

Posted on March 19, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles about sports. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. The well-read game: on playing thoughtfully
by Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber MIT, 2025

Fullerton (Univ. of Southern California) and Farber (Univ. of Northern Colorado) propose an alternative to “systems thinking”–based approaches to games, instead calling for self-reflection and metacognition in play. Situating their ideas across a wide range of literary and games studies approaches, they focus heavily on experiential journaling as a means of understanding how players make sense of games and their worlds. While the authors provide case studies based on their own experiences and journals, the “Pleasures of Reading Games” chapter expands this approach by including other players (colleagues, students, designers), whose examples demonstrate how unpredictable the experiences around video games can be. The “Playing against the Game” chapter is probably the best, in the sense that it shows how thoughtful playing can productively disrupt all manner of expectations and forced design decisions. Two examples show the range: Nicholas Lund’s experience of obsessive bird-watching in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2019), and Fullerton’s astonishing story about playing The Sims (2001) using X-Files assets, in what yielded an experience far stranger than almost anything on the show itself! While the mode of play suggested by the book may not suit all games at all times, the call for more social and more shared experiences is welcome. View on Amazon.

2. Baseball before we knew it: a search for the roots of the game
Block, David. Nebraska, 2025

First published in 2005, the University of Nebraska has now reissued Block’s remarkable book as one of its dedicated baseball histories. Not every book deserves a 20th anniversary reprint edition; this one does. Nearly half of the text is exclusively a bibliography, detailing, thanks to the author’s rigorous research, every reference to games of bat and ball going back to the 15th century. These references come almost exclusively from European documents in several languages, leaving no doubt that the American version of baseball’s origins was, to say the least, massively inaccurate. This edition is the final statement for baseball historians interested in the game’s earliest evolution. Along with Joel Zoss and John Bowman’s Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball (1989) and John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden (CH, Aug’11, 48-6974), Baseball before We Knew It definitively reveals the origin and earliest evolution of this iconic American game. Thorn, who is the official historian of baseball designated by both the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Major League Baseball, contributes a foreword to this new edition, along with the original foreword by Tim Wiles, Director of Research at the Cooperstown Museum.  View on Amazon.

3. The fast track: inside the surging business of women’s sports
McManus, Jane. Temple, 2025

From the historical perspective of women in the sports industry to contemporary leadership and participation issues, McManus, a sports journalist, founding Executive Director of the Center for Sports Media, and respected academic, provides a candid exploration of the impact women have had on the industry. Drawing on her research, leadership experiences, and her commitment to women in sports, she creates a unique and powerful portrait of the impact and significance that women have played in the sports industry. Throughout the book’s eleven chapters, she critically confronts the issues that will continue to shape the industry and women’s leadership roles. Topics covered include pay equity, media relationships, merchandising, racial and gender issues, women’s health needs, and sponsorship and investment in women’s leagues. As an excellent historical chronicle of women in sports or a realistic roadmap for the future of women as leaders in the sports industry, McManus skillfully integrates the cultural, social, financial, and leadership issues that are and will continue to be vital to the increasing demand for women’s leadership in the sports arena. View on Amazon.

4. The New York game: baseball and the rise of a new city
Baker, Kevin. Knopf, 2024

This book of extraordinary brilliance makes an important contribution to the history of American popular culture. A contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, Baker details how New York City and baseball came to mirror each other from the 19th century to the end of WW II. This riveting account details how the construction of New York City’s subway system, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Chrysler Building, as well as the arrival of the “new immigrants,” who arrived between 1870 and 1914, all contributed to the material growth of New York and the flowering of popular culture in the US. Baker argues that in the early 1920s, baseball became the nation’s most popular pastime. Soon after, the Big Apple’s three baseball teams would come to dominate the sport. The book not only details the life of some of the legendary personalities in the history of baseball—e.g., Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio—but also the pastime’s darker side—e.g., the color barrier. Baker has written one of the finest scholarly histories of baseball in an ever-growing genre. The book also contains an annotated bibliography that should be useful to scholars and lay readers alike. View on Amazon.

5. Regulating bodies: elite sport policies and their unintended consequences
Schultz, Jaime. Oxford, 2024

This book is a compelling overview of the regulation of elite sports and the success and failures to create safer and fairer playing spaces. Schultz (Pennsylvania State Univ.) concludes that the desire of athletes, fans, and sporting organizations for consistently improved performance (more records, more wins) has a price. The regulations, made and enforced by the sports themselves, do not always serve to protect the athletes from the negatives of becoming a winner and may themselves harm the athletes. The book explores the history of regulations and their real-world impacts in five areas. Schultz begins with weight regulations, particularly in horse racing and combat sports like wrestling and mixed martial arts, noting the athletes who have died while cutting weight. Sex testing and its concerning history are followed by the regulation and classification systems in paralympic sports; both chapters emphasize the dehumanizing impact of the regulations. The book also treats the history of doping regulations and the rise of gene doping. This is a well-documented, scholarly but accessible work with extensive notes, a bibliography, and some images. Thoughtful questions leave the reader wondering about the costs and benefits of elite sports and who really wins. View on Amazon.

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