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Go for a triple header
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Jonathan Eig Simon & Schuster Audio, $29.95 6 hours abridged, CD ISBN 074353011X
3 Nights in August
Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees
Still hunting and fishing
By Melissa Bank Penguin Audio, $39.95 10.5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 0143057650
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Support your 
If you love baseball, or have someone in your life who does, here are three super ways to make the season last. Before steroids, mega-million dollar salaries and free agency, when the Yankee dynasty was first being formed, there was a shy, hard-hitting hero named Lou Gehrig. Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, written by Jonathan Eig and faultlessly read by Edward Hermann, is a well-researched, play-by-play biography that reveals the real man who played the game with all his heart even as ALS, the disease that carries his name, was starting its irreversible destruction. Eig delivers a wonderful portrait of the "greatest first baseman in baseball history" and his era. An archival excerpt of Gehrig's heartbreaking farewell speech is included in the audio version.
For the true baseball buff who views each at-bat through a prism of stats, strategy and psychology, there's Buzz Bissinger's 3 Nights in August, narrated by Jeffrey Nordling. Bissinger set out to "excavate deep into the game" and does it by dissecting a three-game series between the Cardinals and the Cubs in August 2003 and by getting "inside the mind" of Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa. Bissinger had unprecedented access to LaRussa, the team and the staff and with it he's put together a grand-slam homer of a book that touches all the bases.
Matthew McGough is a 29-year-old lawyer, but once upon a time (well, not that long ago) he lived a kid's baseball dream come true. With no other connection to the New York Yankees except his unconditional love for the team, he wrote asking to become a bat boy and, wonder of wonders, became one. His remembrance of baseball-things past, Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees recounts highs and lows of that two-year stint among his heroes. Matthew reads his memoir, reinforcing the (mostly) innocent joy he experienced.
Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a wow of a debut novel and her second, The Wonder Spot, is even better. Sophie Applebaum, sandwiched between two outstanding brothers, is 12 when she begins her self-deprecating, funny, sweet, always authentic explication of life—her own and her family's. She tells it in episodes, from Hebrew school phobia, through college, to jobs that never satisfy with employers she never satisfies. And through important friendships with women and imperfect relationships with men, who, like her jobs, are never quite right. Yet cynical-optimist Sophie never stops trying—to find that perfect mate, to fit in, to find herself. Ms. Bank reads, giving Sophie the voice she's meant to have.