In the opinion of this reporter, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is the best baseball book published in 2001, but of course it wasn't the only good baseball book published this year. Granted, it wasn't really a great year for baseball books; better than some, perhaps, but not as good as others.

Last spring, the cover of the May 6 edition of The New York Times Book Review featured no fewer than three "Yankee books," their subjects being Orlando Hernandez, Don Zimmer and David Cone.

I regret to admit that I haven't read The Duke of Havana, by Steve Fainaru and Ray Sanchez, but I can tell you that it comes with Jim Caple's highest recommendation.

I regret to report that I was a bit disappointed with Zim, which Don Zimmer dictated to Bill Madden. It's not a bad book, in fact it's a pretty good book. But the truth is that Zimmer's been telling his best stories for so many years that I already knew most of them. And every time you feel like you might be close to seeing something of Don Zimmer the man, the authors pull back in favor of another old story.

Here's one example ... Zimmer was perhaps best-known in the 1970s for his feud with Bill Lee, when Zimmer was managing the Red Sox and Lee was pitching for them. Lee famously called Zimmer a gerbil, and theirs may have been the most famous baseball feud of the time. Zimmer devotes less than half a page to his "relationship" with Lee. It's obvious that Zimmer simply doesn't want to dignify Lee with much attention, but the book would be more entertaining if Zimmer had really ripped Lee, as Leo Durocher ripped Ernie Banks in Nice Guys Finish Last. Perhaps the message here is that nice guys don't "write" interesting books.

I regret writing that I was also a bit disappointed by the other big event: Roger Angell's A Pitcher's Story. The idea was that Angell, who's been writing about baseball in The New Yorker for 35 years, and writing brilliantly for most of those years, would follow David Cone around during the 2000 season. Cone, certainly one of the most intelligent and articulate pitchers of our time, agreed to give Angell plenty of access. But Cone suffered through a nightmarish season, and too much of the book is devoted to what happens when a great pitcher suddenly can't throw strikes, and what happens to an author who suddenly has to write about a great pitcher who's not so eager to talk about not being great any more. Like Zim, A Pitcher's Story is entertaining but leaves one (or at least me) wondering what might have been, if things had been a little different.

Oddly enough, the year's best "New York baseball book" is one that you might not have seen: Now Pitching for the Yankees, by Marty Appel. Appel, who spent most of the 1970s working for the Yankees, is a fine writer, a wonderful storyteller, and doesn't shy away from revealing something about himself. The sections of the book concerning his brief periods of non-baseball employment didn't particularly interest me, but the great majority of the book is about Appel's positions in the Yankees PR department and with WPIX-TV, which broadcast Yankees games.

Appel clearly adored Phil Rizzuto, then one of the Yankee broadcasters, but that doesn't mean he can't be honest about the Scooter ...

Phil always did play-by-play, never color. If he was the color commentator, you might as well not have him there at all. His concentration would be gone, he would be saying hello to everyone walking by the broadcast booth, he would be running out for cannolis, and he couldn't add much about the players because he didn't really know them ...

The problem with most baseball books is that they're written by people who don't write particularly well. But this is Appel's 16th book, and he knows what he's doing. If you want to know what the Yankees were like before (and during) Billy Martin's various turns at the helm, Now Pitching for the Yankees just might be the best place to start.

I mentioned David L. Fleitz's Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson a few months ago, but let me say again that Fleitz's book is the best baseball biography published this year. Baseball writing is just a "hobby" for Fleitz, but he's an impeccable researcher, and he writes better than you'd expect from an impeccable researcher. The last two paragraphs of Shoeless rank among the best I've ever read in a baseball book.

And finally, a book that I had trouble putting down: John Eisenberg's From 33rd Street to Camden Yards: An Oral History of the Baltimore Orioles. I'm no fan of the Orioles, and there are plenty of pedestrian oral histories about baseball ... but I'm telling you, this is a great book. The Orioles have been around for nearly half a century, and the book is full of great stories about Paul Richards and Earl Weaver and all of the other characters who have populated Baltimore rosters over the years (and here's another plus: no mention at all of Tony Muser).

And if you're wondering why the Orioles are so screwed up right now, there's some big fun near the end of the book, including this bizarre pair of quotes from owner Peter Angelos and one-time GM Frank Wren. The subject is Mike Timlin ....

Peter Angelos: "Signing Timlin was a horrendous decision. When Frank told me he signed him for four years, I said, 'What? Four years?' That was a disaster for us. He's a nice young man, but he demoralized the club ..."

Frank Wren: "Peter urged me to sign Timlin to a fourth year. I was leaving the general managers' meetings, literally leaving the parking lot of the hotel, when I got a call from Timlin's agent saying he was close to a deal with another club. I called Peter to give him the update and told him the agent had told us it was going to take four years to get him. He said, 'Let's just get it done. This will get us rolling.' That was his exact quote, 'This will get us rolling.'..."

The section of the book on Angelos's reign is only a small percentage of the book, but it's enormously entertaining ... unless, I suppose, you're an Orioles fan. In which case it might make you hope they build that new ballpark in D.C. sooner rather than later.