Stranger to the Game (1994) by Bob Gibson with Lonnie Wheeler. An uneven autobiography. First the bad. A lot of moaning about how much the game has changed for the worse (what Bill James calls "Old Ballplayers Never Die"), something Gibson first notices around 1980, a few years after his retirement. A lot of discussion of his business ventures (restaurants, etc.) and why they succeeded and/or failed. And a lot of speculation from Gibson on why he hasn't been offered more work in MLB.
The good is the half of the book that concentrates solely on baseball. The highlight is a chapter devoted to the myriad subtle differences between Gibson's knockdown, brushback and hit-batsmen pitches. The reasoning is often comical and byzantine, like something out of a Joseph Heller novel, but Gibson's deadly serious, which of course makes it even funnier.
Gibson has a lot to say about his contemporaries. For example, he considers Juan Marichal a more talented pitcher than Sandy Koufax, but he respected Koufax more because Marichal ducked him (Gibson) in head-to-head matchups. And he's most interesting when writing about his own battles with hitters, from the little guys to stars like Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Stargell, Banks, and Rose. In one section on hitters stealing glances behind them before the pitch is thrown to see where the catcher is positioned and what he's signalling for, Gibson writes:
Mays was peeking at McCarver and saw something he didn't understand. So he stopped his warm-up swings, stepped out of the box, and said to McCarver, "Now what was that pitch? What in the hell are you doing back there?" I couldn't believe the guy.