Richard M Cohen (1938–1991)

Being a team-by-team, season-by-season statistical glance at each team's performance using both a short narrative and tables. It is very good at this; what it lacks is much emphasis or organizational attention to individual players. As such, it has been pretty much superceded by the ESPN and NFL books which do both, not to mention football-reference.com.

Every baseball geek needs one of these. It's biggest value is the pages of statistics. I used to like to pair this with the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia edited by Joe Reichler, but that has been published in over a decade. Not being a sabrmetrician, I tend to stay away from Total Baseball.