Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, M. Haubs of The Painted Area discusses five sports books he's excited to see this year... and five he wishes were written. Enjoy. 

Last summer, we noted in our regular moonlighting space that the past few years seemed to be something of a golden age for basketball books, with intriguing reads about topics from the pros down to the high-school ranks.

In fact, it seems like it's been a pretty rich period for books across American sports.  Football's had pretty much a full century covered, from Sally Jenkins' Real All-Americans to Michael McCambridge's sweeping history of the rise of pro football, America's Game, to Michael Lewis' thoroughly modern look at the left tackle, The Blind Side, among many, many others.

As usual, there has been a motherlode of new baseball volumes spanning the scope of the sport's history, everything from Cait Murphy on the crazy 1908 season to Jonathan Eig on Jackie Robinson's first days as a Dodger to Joshua Prager on the Shot Heard Round The World and the great Joe Posnanski traveling the country with Buck O'Neill.

Meanwhile, it's not a stretch to say that contemporary takes such as Moneyball, Game of Shadows and the immortal Juiced! have affected the course of baseball history.

Even though we could continue naming dozens of intriguing sports books from recent years, there are still plenty of topics out there to be covered.  Here are five '08 releases we're looking forward to... followed by five more sports books we'd like to see:

FIVE FOR '08

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox and the Playoff of '78 by Richard Bradley
(Scheduled release: March 18)

Bradley, who wrote American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., takes a highly detailed look at the Yankees-Red Sox one-game playoff while also stepping back to examine the epic 1978 pennant race as a whole.

The topic has been covered from a pinstripe perspective in Roger Kahn's October Men and  famously in Sparky Lyle's The Bronx Zoo, the first sports book we ever read.

Sure, Lyle's juvenile humor and casual curse words were a forbidden delight to our prepubescent selves, and - let's face it - nothing can top Sparky's lesson on how to properly leave an ass imprint on a birthday cake.  Still, it seems like it's well overdue to have a balanced, thorough examination of this classic pennant race.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but in our minds, you can't beat a good old-fashioned pennant race as a dramatic tale. Of course, it has to be "old-fashioned" because a sad aspect of the wild-card era in baseball is that true pennant races are no more.

Contemporary races simply can't compare to races like '78, when the Yanks stormed back from 14 games down in July to edge the Sox in a do-or-die one-game playoff, thanks, of course, to Bucky Fuckin' Dent.

A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL by Stefan Fatsis
(Scheduled release: July 3)

Considering its dominance on the American sports landscape, the NFL is the most under-represented sports entity on bookshelves. Well, we've got three '08 releases for your consideration.  

First up is Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR commentator known for his acclaimed book Word Freak, about the peculiar, obsessive world of competitive Scrabble players.  In A Few Seconds of Panic, Fatsis gets his George Plimpton on, as he suits up and participates as a placekicker in Denver Broncos training camp - an update of Plimpton's 1963 classic, Paper Lion, when the author played quarterback for the Lions in training camp.

We think it would be unbelievably awesome if the Fatsis book was sold as a package on Amazon, and basically everywhere, with fellow Bronco kicker Jason Elam's thriller, Monday Night Jihad.

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman
(Scheduled release: September 16)

Pearlman wrote perhaps the most thankless sports book in a generation, the thoroughly researched, exceptionally reviewed Love Me, Hate Me, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds is the biggest asshole in modern sports.  It's the definitive biography of a guy no one wants to read about.

Now Pearlman's getting back to something more like the fun-loving renegades in his chronicle of the '86 Mets, The Bad Guys Won!, as he delves into the '90s Cowboys in Boys Will Be Boys.  Can I get a White House?!

With characters like Jerry, Jimmy, Barry, Emmitt, Big Nate, The Playmaker and more, this is tailor-made for Pearlman.

The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL by Mark Bowden
(Scheduled release: June 1)

The 1958 NFL Championship, universally credited with launching the popularity of the modern NFL, is apparently a popular subject.  In addition to this book, Frank Gifford, along with GQ's Peter Richmond, has a book on the topic coming out in the fall, and the legendary David Halberstam was working on this subject at the time of his tragic death last year.

That said, Bowden is thoroughly bankable, as his resume includes highly acclaimed books such as Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo (about the hunt for druglord Pablo Escobar), and Guests of the Ayatollah (about the Iranian hostage crisis).  Bowden also has a well-regarded sports book, Bringing the Heat, to his name; the book followed the 1992 season of the Philadelphia Eagles, who Bowden covered for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World by David Maraniss
(Scheduled release: July 1)

Now, I know that events at the Olympics in 1936 and 1968 and 1972 shook the world a little bit. However, I have no real idea how the 1960 Rome Olympics changed the world, and I don't care.

Maraniss gets the full benefit of the doubt for being the master biographer of Bill Clinton (First In His Class), Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered), and Roberto Clemente (Clemente).  If he writes it, we wanna read it.

FIVE MORE WE'D LIKE TO SEE

Dave Maraniss on Jim Brown
Since we're talking Maraniss.... While we've been happy to see sweeping, well-regarded bios of Johnny Unitas, Vince Lombardi and Joe Namath released in recent years, the greatest football player who has ever lived, Jim Brown, still needs a treatment worthy of his complex, uncompromising life.

Yes, I know this might be an odd pick given that Mike Freeman's Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an Anti-Hero just came out in 2006.  But Freeman's work was rather dry.  We'd love to see Maraniss take a stab at providing a fuller, richer portrait of Brown.

1984 Summer Olympics
And speaking of Olympics which changed the world, don't sleep on Los Angeles '84.

On the one hand, the whole thing in L.A. was so goofily American, what with the Hollywood excesses of the opening ceremonies and the self-congratulatory cheerleading by us Yanks, quite amusing given that half the competition wasn't, you know, there. There's a little bit of nostalgia at work, in remembering the Cold-War, pre-Ben-Johnson, three-network era when the Olympic Games were a truly larger-than-life event. Throw in the entertainment provided by mismatched pairs like Decker and Budd, and Retton and Karolyi, and, in the right hands, there's simply a pretty fun read here.

That said, the L.A. Games were also a pivotal moment in American sports history, the turning point when sports truly became big business.  The era of modern sports marketing was really ushered in by the CEO of the L.A. organizing committee, Peter Ueberroth, who turned a massive profit on the '84 games with his systematic approach to corporate sponsorship.  And of course, there was also this guy who led the U.S. men's basketball team to gold who was on the cusp of playing his part in the sports marketing revolution, as well....

Game of the Century: UCLA-USC '67
Someday, the time will be right for a sweeping biography of O.J. Simpson, which will depict how the Juice was one of the truly most fascinating athletes of the 20th century.  Seems like it's still too soon, though, and you'd probably have Fred Goldman on your ass, garnishing your wages one way or another, anyway.

What I'm thinking for now is something like New Yorker editor David Remnick's beautiful book, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, which focused on the time when The Greatest loudly came onto the scene in the early 60s, highlighted by Ali's triumphant, shocking championship fights against Sonny Liston in 1964 and 1965.

I'd love to see Remnick look at Simpson through the prism of his USC years - when he rose from his troubled youth in San Francisco to become a polished media sensation in Hollywood - highlighted by the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup between UCLA and USC in November, 1967, which none other than Keith Jackson has called the greatest college football game he's ever seen.

Random aside: I hadn't realized until just this minute that UCLA's basketball Game of the Century, vs. Houston at the Astrodome, occurred just two months later, in January, 1968. Two Games of the Century in two sports in two months ain't bad.

Malcolm Gladwell's Sports Book
While we're dishing out the love to our favorite New Yorker writers, let's bring Malcolm Gladwell, celebrated author of The Tipping Point and Blink, into the fray.

We haven't quite forgiven Gladwell for pimping The Wages of Wins wildly in the pages of his magazine, while ignoring that other groundbreaking basketball rational analysts, like Dean Oliver and John Hollinger, exist.  But we'll settle up if Sideshow Mal - who is a sports fan, as illustrated thoroughly by these interviews on ESPN's Page 2 - makes his next hit a sports book.

We're thinking that something NFL-oriented might be up his alley - maybe a thorough look at  theories on how a team or an organization should be built, how game plans are constructed and executed, or how draft prospects are thoroughly scouted, vetted and ultimately selected.  I dunno, he's the crazy Canadian brother with the angles, I'm just the dear reader.

Larry, Magic and David
There aren't really any definitive biographies of Larry Bird or Magic Johnson out there.  Of course, the two are inextricably entwined, so why not combine them into one, and throw in a profile of David Stern to boot, and make it a full-scale look at the NBA's rise from the ashes, focused on the time period between the players' storybook 1979 college seasons and the ultimate triumph for all parties at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.  A no-brainer.

(Also be sure to check out The Painted Area's companion piece, on 10 basketball books they'd like to see.)

Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.