On the face of it, a diary of the 1969 season by a second-string pitcher for the Seattle Pilots baseball team, the only year that team existed, does not leap to the top of the to-read pile. But the total frankness in terms of locker-room talk, player drug use and womanising, bad blood, gamesmanship and other off-topic matters means this is the most inside-a-team book you’ll ever read. It offended baseball so much, Bouton’s 1971 follow-up was called I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. David Simon, creator of The Wire, put Ball Four in his six all-time favourite books.

10.B Text: I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo (2013)

I Am Zlatan is held up as the foreign footballer’s must-read memoir, but moderately entertaining though the Swede’s book is, time spent rubbing up against his ego isn’t so enlightening. Pirlo’s, however, has the sort of insight you’d expect from the thinking man’s Greatest Player of his Generation. “You won’t believe me, but it was right in that very moment,” about to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup Final shoot-out, “I understood what a great thing it is to be Italian. It’s a truly priceless privilege.” Also learned: he adores video-game football and always plays as Barça.

10.C Text: Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich (1980)

As mid-life crises go, Barich’s, aged 35, is special. Five rejected novels, mother and mother-in-law dead of cancer five weeks apart, no money, no job, wife with suspected brain tumour. Craving structure, he found it only studying the Daily Racing Form, picking horses methodically and placing small bets. He then told his wife (tumour: false alarm), he’d be moving to a motel next to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fields racetrack, “convinced there was something special about racing and I wanted to get to the heart of the matter.” There was. He did. His write-up of that time is spectacularly good.

10.D Text: Who’s the B* * * * *D in the Black? Confessions of a Premiership Referee by Jeff Winter (2006)

In a profession where it’s rare to be liked by the general public already, Jeff Winter is a man who seemed to go that extra mile to ensure mass unpopularity.

His refereeing style was less ‘look at me’ and more ‘gaze up the magnificence that is Jeff’. Therefore, you won’t be surprised to learn that his autobiography follows in the same self-aggrandising vein.

In the mind of Jeff Winter, Jeff Winter is the most magnificent specimen to ever put a whistle to his lips and in his book he explains, at length, just why he’s the best referee to don the black jersey and why lesser referees aren’t fit to share his dressing room.