Top Baseball Ebook Best Sellers

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What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? - Richard Ben Cramer Cover Art

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? A Remembrance by Richard Ben Cramer

Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed biographer of Joe DiMaggio decodes baseball icon Ted Williams and finds not just a great player, but also a great man. When legendary Red Sox hitter Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002, newspapers reviewed the stats, compared him to other legends of the game, and declared him the greatest hitter who ever lived. In 1986, Richard Ben Cramer spent months on a profile of Ted Williams, and the result was the Esquire article that has been acclaimed ever since as one of the finest pieces of sports reporting ever written. Given special acknowledgment in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century and adapted for a coffee-table book called Ted Williams: The Seasons of the Kid, the original piece is now available in this special edition, with new material about Williams's later years. While his decades after Fenway Park were out of the spotlight -- the way Ted preferred it -- they were arguably his richest, as he loved and inspired his family, his fans, the players, and the game itself. This is a remembrance for the ages.

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The Greatest Game - Richard Bradley Cover Art

The Greatest Game

The Greatest Game by Richard Bradley

In this spellbinding book, Richard Bradley tells the story of what was surely the greatest major league game of our lifetime and perhaps in the history of professional baseball. That game, played at Fenway Park on the afternoon of October 4, 1978, was the culmination of one of the most tense, emotionally wrought seasons ever, between baseball's two most bitter rivals, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Both teams finished this tumultuous season with identical 99-64 records, forcing a one-game playoff. With a one-run lead and two outs, with the tying run in scoring position in the bottom of the ninth, the entire season came down to one at-bat and to one swing of the bat. It came down, as both men eerily predicted to themselves the night before, to the aging Red Sox legend, Carl Yastrzemski, and the Yankees' free-agent power reliever, Rich "Goose" Gossage. Anyone who calls himself a baseball fan knows the outcome of that confrontation. And yet such are the literary powers of the author that we are pulled back in time to that late-afternoon moment and become filled anew with all the taut sense of drama that sports has to offer, as if we don't know what happened. As if the thoughts swirling around in the heads of pitcher and hitter are still fresh, both still hopeful of controlling events. That climactic game occurred thirty seasons ago and yet it still captures our imagination. In this delightful work of sports literature, we watch the game unfold pitch by pitch, inning by inning, but Bradley is up to something more ambitious than just recounting this wonderful game. He also tells us the stories of the participants -- how they got to that moment in their lives and careers, what was at stake for them personally -- including the rivalries within the rivalry, such as catcher Carlton Fisk versus catcher Thurman Munson,and Billy Martin versus everyone. Using a narrative that alternates points of view between the teams, Bradley reacquaints us with a rich roster of characters -- Freddy Lynn, Ron Guidry, Catfish Hunter, Mike Torrez, Jerry Remy, Lou Piniella, George Scott, and Reggie Jackson. And, of course, Bucky Dent, who craved just such a moment in the sun -- a validation he had vainly sought from the father he barely knew. Not a book intended to celebrate a triumph or lament a loss, The Greatest Game will be embraced in both Boston and New York, with fans of both teams recalling again the talented young men they once gave their hearts to. And fans everywhere will be reminded how utterly gripping a single baseball game can be and that the rewards of being a fan lie not in victory but in caring beyond reason, even decades after the fact.

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October 1964 - David Halberstam Cover Art

October 1964

October 1964
by David Halberstam

The “compelling”  New York Times  bestseller by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, capturing the 1964 World Series between the Yankees and Cardinals ( Newsweek ).  David Halberstam, an avid sports writer with an investigative reporter’s tenacity, superbly details the end of the fifteen-year reign of the New York Yankees in October 1964 . That October found the Yankees going head-to-head with the St. Louis Cardinals for the World Series pennant. Expertly weaving the narrative threads of both teams’ seasons, Halberstam brings the major personalities on the field—from switch-hitter Mickey Mantle to pitcher Bob Gibson—to life. Using the teams’ subcultures, Halberstam also analyzes the cultural shifts of the sixties. The result is a unique blend of sports writing and cultural history as engrossing as it is insightful.  This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.

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Why We Love Baseball - Joe Posnanski Cover Art

Why We Love Baseball

Why We Love Baseball A History in 50 Moments by Joe Posnanski

NEW YORK TIMES bestseller Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year #1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Posnanski is back with a masterful ode to the game: a countdown of 50 of the most memorable moments in baseball’s history, to make you fall in love with the sport all over again.   Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It's Willie Mays’s catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters. But these are also moments raw with the humanity of the game, the unheralded heroes, the mesmerizing mistakes drenched in pine tar, and every story, from the immortal to the obscure, is told from a unique perspective. Whether of a real fan who witnessed it, or the pitcher who gave up the home run, the umpire, the coach, the opposing player—these are fresh takes on moments so powerful they almost feel like myth.   Posnanski’s previous book, The Baseball 100 , portrayed the heroes and pioneers of the sport, and now, with his trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations, he gets at the real heart of the game. From nineteenth-century pitchers’ duels to breaking the sport’s color line in the ’40s, all the way to the greatest trick play of the last decade and the slide home that became a meme, Posnanski’s illuminating take allows us to rediscover the sport we love—and thought we knew.   Why We Love Baseball is an epic that ends too soon, a one-of-a-kind love letter to the sport that has us thrilled, torn, inspired, and always wanting more.

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Faithful - Stewart O'Nan & Stephen King Cover Art

Faithful

Faithful Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season by Stewart O'Nan & Stephen King

“ Faithful isn't just about the Red Sox. It's also about family, friendship, and what it truly means to be a baseball fan and to be—well, faithful, come hell or high water” ( The Boston Globe ). “Of all the books that will examine the Boston Red Sox's stunning come-from-behind 2004 ALCS win over the Yankees and subsequent World Series victory, none will have this book's warmth, personality, or depth” ( P ublishers Weekly ). Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan's notes for the ages.

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The New York Game - Kevin Baker Cover Art

The New York Game

The New York Game
Baseball and the Rise of a New City
by Kevin Baker

A hugely entertaining history of baseball and New York City, bursting with larger-than-life figures and fascinating stories from the game’s beginnings to the end of World War II. Baseball is “the New York game” because New York is where the diamond was first laid out, where the bunt and the curveball were invented, and where the home run was hit. It’s where the game’s first stars were born, and where everyone came to play or watch the game. With nuance and depth, historian Kevin Baker brings this all vividly back to life: the still-controversial, indelible moments—Did the Babe call his shot? Was Merkle out? Did they fix the 1919 World Series? Here are all the legendary players, managers, and owners, in all their vivid, complicated humanity, on and off the field.  In Baker’s hands the city and the game emerge from the murk of nineteenth-century American life—driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever.  From the first innings played in vacant lots and tavern yards in the 1820s; to the canny innovations that created the very first sports league; to the superb Hispanic and Black players who invented their own version of the game when white baseball sought to exclude them. And all amidst New York’s own, incredible evolution from a raw, riotous town to a new world city. The New York Game is a riveting, rollicking, brilliant ode to America’s beloved pastime and to its indomitable city of origin.

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Michael Lewis Cover Art

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

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The Baseball 100 - Joe Posnanski Cover Art

The Baseball 100

The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” — New York Post * “Stellar.” — The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” — BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious, The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.

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Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? - Jimmy Breslin Cover Art

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year by Jimmy Breslin

A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times– bestselling author ( Newark Star-Ledger ).   Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball.  Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends.  This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

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The Era, 1947–1957 - Roger Kahn Cover Art

The Era, 1947–1957

The Era, 1947–1957
When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
by Roger Kahn

The author of The Boys of Summer explores the golden age of baseball, an unforgettable time when the game thrived as America’s unrivaled national sport. The Era begins in 1947, with Jackie Robinson changing major league baseball forever by taking the field for the Dodgers. Dazzling, momentous events characterize the decade that followed—Robinson’s amazing accomplishments; the explosion on the national scene of such soon-to-be legends as Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Bobby Thomson, Duke Snider, and Yogi Berra; Casey Stengel’s crafty managing; the emergence of televised games; and the stunning success of the Yankees as they play in nine out of eleven World Series. The Era concludes with the relocation of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, a move that shook the sport to its very roots. “Kahn knows where the bodies are buried and allows his audience a joyous read as he digs them up.”— Publishers Weekly “[Kahn] engagingly captures the flavor of the times by bringing to the fore the defining traits and relationships that added human dimension to the sport.”— Library Journal “Kahn weaves such personal information into his rich descriptions of thrilling regular-season, playoff and World Series games. And in doing so he endows the players, managers and owners with more dynamic dimensions than any baseball writer of his generation. The men in The Era are ballplayers, not deities; and it takes the unerring strength of a straight shooter like Kahn to remind nostalgic baseball fans of that simple fact.”— Chicago Tribune

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Playing with the Enemy - Gary W. Moore Cover Art

Playing with the Enemy

Playing with the Enemy A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams by Gary W. Moore

A memoir of fathers and sons, baseball, a world at war, and second chances. “I loved [it]. You will, too” (Jim Morris, author of The Oldest Rookie ).   Gene Moore was a small-town Illinois farm boy whose passion for “America’s Pastime” made him a local legend. It wasn’t long before word spread, and the Brooklyn Dodgers came calling on the teenage phenom who could hit a ball a country mile. Headed for stardom, and his dream within reach, Gene’s future in the majors was cut short by World War II. In 1944, after joining the US Navy, Gene found himself on a top-secret mission: guarding German sailors captured from U-505, a submarine carrying one of the infamous Enigma decoders. Stuck with guard duty, he decided to bide the time by doing what he loved. Gene taught the POWs how to play baseball. It was a decision that would change Gene’s life forever.   The story of a remarkable man told by his inspired son, “Gene’s journey from promise to despair and back again, set against a long war and an even longer post-war recovery . . . [is] a 20th-century epic that demonstrates how, sometimes, letting go of a dream is the only way to discover one’s great fortune” ( Publishers Weekly , starred review).

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The Pine Tar Game - Filip Bondy Cover Art

The Pine Tar Game

The Pine Tar Game The Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees, and Baseball's Most Absurd and Entertaining Controversy by Filip Bondy

The New York Times bestseller—“a rollicking account” ( The Kansas City Star ) of the infamous baseball game between the Yankees and Royals in which a game-winning home run was overturned and set off one of sports history’s most absurd and entertaining controversies. On July 24, 1983, during the finale of a heated four-game series between the dynastic New York Yankees and small-town Kansas City Royals, umpires nullified a go-ahead home run based on an obscure rule, when Yankees manager Billy Martin pointed out an illegal amount of pine tar—the sticky substance used for a better grip—on Royals third baseman George Brett’s bat. Brett wildly charged out of the dugout and chaos ensued. The call temporarily cost the Royals the game, but the decision was eventually overturned, resulting in a resumption of the game several weeks later that created its own hysteria. The game was a watershed moment, marking a change in the sport, where benign cheating tactics like spitballs, Superball bats, and a couple extra inches of tar on an ash bat, gave way to era of soaring salaries, labor strikes, and rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs. In The Pine Tar Game acclaimed sports writer Filip Bondy paints a portrait of the Yankees and Royals of that era, replete with bad actors, phenomenal athletes, and plenty of yelling. Players and club officials, like Brett, Goose Gossage, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry, Sparky Lyle, David Cone, and John Schuerholz, offer fresh commentary on the events and their take on the subsequent postseason rivalry. “A sticky moment milked for all its nutty, head-shaking glory” ( Sports Illustrated ), The Pine Tar Game examines a more innocent time in professional sports, and the shifting tide that resulted in today’s modern iteration of baseball. Some watchers of the Royals’ 2015 World Series win over New York’s “other baseball team,” the Mets, may see it as sweet revenge for a bygone era of talent flow and umpire calls favoring New York.

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Opening Day - Jonathan Eig Cover Art

Opening Day

Opening Day The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season by Jonathan Eig

This bestselling account of the most important season in baseball history, 1947, tells the dramatic story of how Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and changed baseball forever. April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front—and Robinson had a chance to lead the way. In Opening Day , Jonathan Eig tells the true story behind the national pastime’s most sacred myth. He offers new insights into events of sixty years ago and punctures some familiar legends. Was it true that the St. Louis Cardinals plotted to boycott their first home game against the Brooklyn Dodgers? Was Pee Wee Reese really Robinson’s closest ally on the team? Was Dixie Walker his greatest foe? How did Robinson handle the extraordinary stress of being the only black man in baseball and still manage to perform so well on the field? Opening Day is also the story of a team of underdogs that came together against tremendous odds to capture the pennant. Facing the powerful New York Yankees, Robinson and the Dodgers battled to the seventh game in one of the most thrilling World Series competitions of all time. Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration’s promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball’s ultimate story.

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For the Good of the Game - Bud Selig & Phil Rogers Cover Art

For the Good of the Game

For the Good of the Game The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball by Bud Selig & Phil Rogers

A  New York Times  bestseller Foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin The longtime Commissioner of Major League Baseball provides an unprecedented look inside professional baseball today, focusing on how he helped bring the game into the modern age and revealing his interactions with players, managers, fellow owners, and fans nationwide. More than a century old, the game of baseball is resistant to change—owners, managers, players, and fans all hate it. Yet, now more than ever, baseball needs to evolve—to compete with other professional sports, stay relevant, and remain America’s Pastime it must adapt. Perhaps no one knows this better than Bud Selig who, as the head of MLB for more than twenty years, ushered in some of the most important, and controversial, changes in the game’s history—modernizing a sport that had remained unchanged since the 1960s. In this enlightening and surprising book, Selig goes inside the most difficult decisions and moments of his career, looking at how he worked to balance baseball’s storied history with the pressures of the twenty-first century to ensure its future. Part baseball story, part business saga, and part memoir,  For the Good of the Game  chronicles Selig’s career, takes fans inside locker rooms and board rooms, and offers an intimate, fascinating account of the frequently messy process involved in transforming an American institution. Featuring an all-star lineup of the biggest names from the last forty years of baseball, Selig recalls the vital games, private moments, and tense conversations he’s shared with Hall of Fame players and managers and the contentious calls he’s made. He also speaks candidly about hot-button issues the steroid scandal that threatened to destroy the game, telling his side of the story in full and for the first time. As he looks back and forward, Selig outlines the stakes for baseball’s continued transformation—and why the changes he helped usher in must only be the beginning. Illustrated with sixteen pages of photographs.

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The Inside Game - Keith Law Cover Art

The Inside Game

The Inside Game Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves by Keith Law

In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball , offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

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We Would Have Played for Nothing - Fay Vincent Cover Art

We Would Have Played for Nothing

We Would Have Played for Nothing Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved by Fay Vincent

Former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent brings together a stellar roster of ballplayers from the 1950s and 1960s in this wonderful new history of the game. Whitey Ford, Duke Snider, Carl Erskine, Bill Rigney, and Ralph Branca tell stories about baseball in New York when the Yankees dominated and seemed to play either the Dodgers or the Giants in every World Series. By the end of the fifties, the two National League teams had relocated to California, as baseball expanded across the country. Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts, Braves mainstay Lew Burdette, home-run king Harmon Killebrew, Cubs slugger Billy Williams, and Hall of Famers Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson share great stories about milestone events, from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier on the field to Frank Robinson doing the same in the dugout. They remember the teammates and opponents they admired, including Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Warren Spahn, Don Newcombe, and Ernie Banks. For anyone who grew up watching baseball in the 1950s and 1960s, or for anyone who wonders what it was like in the days when ballplayers negotiated their own contracts and worked real jobs in the off-season, this is a book to cherish.

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Ted Williams, My Father - Claudia Williams Cover Art

Ted Williams, My Father

Ted Williams, My Father A Memoir by Claudia Williams

In this poignant memoir, Claudia Williams, the last surviving child of legendary Boston Red Sox great and Hall of Famer Ted Williams, tells her father’s story, including never-before-told anecdotes about his life on and off the field that reveal the flesh and blood man behind “The Kid.” Born after her father retired from baseball, Claudia Williams grew up with little idea that her dad was one of the most revered sports figures of all time—until she finally saw him in uniform at Fenway Park, receiving the adulation of thousands of fans. Now in this moving and surprising memoir, Claudia offers an unexpected look at Ted Williams, viewed from a unique and fresh perspective. Here she recalls her childhood growing up with a baseball legend after his heyday, capturing their loving yet tumultuous relationship, and shares the beloved stories he passed on to her. Reconciling his talent on the field with his life off of it, Claudia reveals the myriad passions—including baseball and much more—which shaped who he was. She also speaks candidly for the first time about his controversial choice to be cryogenically preserved after his death. Complete with sixteen pages of never-before-seen color photographs, told with sincerity and heart, Claudia William’s poignant memoir is a love letter to New England and one of its greatest sons—Ted Williams—the champion, the man, and most importantly, the father.

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Baseball America 2024 Prospect Handbook Digital Edition - The Editors at Baseball America Cover Art

Baseball America 2024 Prospect Handbook Digital Edition

Baseball America 2024 Prospect Handbook Digital Edition by The Editors at Baseball America

   

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The Teammates - David Halberstam Cover Art

The Teammates

The Teammates A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam

More than 6 years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country's most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his ground-breaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and has become the standard by which all journalists measure themselves. The Teammates is the profoundly moving story of four great baseball players who have made the passage from sports icons--when they were young and seemingly indestructible--to men dealing with the vulnerabilities of growing older. At the core of the book is the friendship of these four very different men--Boston Red Sox teammates Bobby Doerr, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Ted Williams--who remained close for more than sixty years. The book starts out in early October 2001, when Dominic DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky begin a 1,300-mile trip by car to visit their beloved friend Ted Williams, whom they know is dying. Bobby Doerr, the fourth member of this close group--"my guys," Williams used to call them--is unable to join them.This is a book--filled with historical details and first-hand accounts--about baseball and about something more: the richness of friendship.

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Sprawlball - Kirk Goldsberry Cover Art

Sprawlball

Sprawlball A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA by Kirk Goldsberry

From the leading expert in the exploding field of basketball analytics, a stunning infographic decoding of the modern NBA: who shoots where, how well, and why. Says Nate Silver: “If you want to understand how the modern NBA came to be, you’ll need to read this book.” The field of basketball analytics has leaped into overdrive thanks to Kirk Goldsberry, whose spatial and visual analyses of players, teams, and positions have helped us all understand who really is the most valuable player at any position. SprawlBall combines stunning visuals, in-depth analysis, behind-the-scenes stories, and gee-whiz facts to chart a modern revolution. Since the introduction of the three-point line, the game has changed drastically, with players like Steph Curry and James Harden leading the charge. In chapters like “The Geography of the NBA,” “The Interior Minister (LeBron James),” “The Evolution of Steph Curry,” and “The Investor (James Harden),” Goldsberry explains why today’s on-court product—with its emphasis on shooting, passing, and spacing—has never been prettier or more democratic. And it’s never been more popular. For fans of Bill Simmons and FreeDarko,SprawlBall presents a bold new vision of the game, giving readers an innovative, cutting-edge look at the sport based on the latest research, as well as a visual and infographic feast for fans. ¶“Beautifully illustrated and sharply written, SprawlBall is both a celebration and a critique of the three-point shot. If you want to understand how the modern NBA came to be, you’ll need to read this book.” —Nate Silver, editor, fivethirtyeight.com, and bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise

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You Gotta Have Wa - Robert Whiting Cover Art

You Gotta Have Wa

You Gotta Have Wa When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond by Robert Whiting

From the author of Tokyo Junkie , “the definitive book on Japanese baseball and one of the best-written sports books ever” ( San Francisco Chronicle ).   One might expect the sport of baseball in Japan to be a culture clash—a collision of American individualism with the Japanese focus on wa , or harmony. Instead, it has turned into a winning symbiosis. Imported American sluggers—some past their primes—have found new life in the East and have given credibility to the Japanese game. A succession of Japanese stars like Hideo Nomo left their teams to find success in the US major leagues, enabling MLB International to make hundreds of millions of dollars selling TV and licensing rights to its games in Japan.   While philosophical differences remain, You Gotta Have Wa guides you through the strange and fascinating world of besuboru , or baseball. With a history of the game in Japan and an overview of the Japanese leagues and their rules, this book follows the careers of players and managers who influenced the game in the East and vice versa—including Babe Ruth, Ichiro Suzuki, Bobby Valentine, and Sadaharu Oh, the Japanese homerun king.   Whether you are a Yankees or a Red Sox fan, a sports or an enthusiast of Japanese culture, “simply sit back and enjoy the wonderful stories in You Gotta Have Wa , one of the most unusual baseball books of the season” ( The New York Times ).   “A wonderfully entertaining look at baseball and wa .” — Time   “A terrific, fast-paced account of Japanese baseball.” — Chicago Tribune   “A funny look at baseball in Japan that is as much a work of cultural anthropology as a sports book.” — Playboy

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Baseball Prospectus 2024,Edition 29 - Baseball Prospectus Cover Art

Baseball Prospectus 2024,Edition 29

Baseball Prospectus 2024,Edition 29 by Baseball Prospectus

The 2024 edition of The New York Times Bestselling Guide. PLAY BALL! The 29th edition of this industry-leading baseball annual contains all of the important statistics, player predictions and insider-level commentary that readers have come to expect, along with significant improvements to several statistics that were created by, and are exclusive to, Baseball Prospectus, and an expanded focus on international players and teams. Baseball Prospectus 2024 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with prescient PECOTA projections, which The New York Times called “the überforecast of every player’s performance.” With more than 50 Baseball Prospectus alumni currently working for major-league baseball teams, nearly every organization has sought the advice of current or former BP analysts, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2024 will understand why!

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Ball Four - Jim Bouton Cover Art

Ball Four

Ball Four by Jim Bouton

The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books.   When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.   Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four . Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.”   Today Ball Four has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.”   Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman   “An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” — The Washington Post

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One Shot at Forever - Chris Ballard Cover Art

One Shot at Forever

One Shot at Forever A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season by Chris Ballard

" One Shot at Forever is powerful, inspirational. . . This isn't merely a book about baseball. It's a book about heart." -- Jeff Pearlman, New York Time s bestselling author of Boys Will Be Boys and The Bad Guys Won In 1971, a small-town high school baseball team from rural Illinois, playing with hand-me-down uniforms and peace signs on their hats, defied convention and the odds. Led by an English teacher with no coaching experience, the Macon Ironmen emerged from a field of 370 teams to represent the smallest school in Illinois history to make the state final, a distinction that still stands. There the Ironmen would play against a Chicago powerhouse in a dramatic game that would change their lives forever. In this gripping, cinematic narrative, Chris Ballard tells the story of the team and its coach, Lynn Sweet: a hippie, dreamer, and intellectual who arrived in Macon in 1966, bringing progressive ideas to a town stuck in the Eisenhower era. Beloved by students but not administration, Sweet reluctantly took over the ragtag team, intent on teaching the boys as much about life as baseball. Together they embarked on an improbable postseason run that buoyed a small town in desperate need of something to celebrate. Engaging and poignant, One Shot at Forever is a testament to the power of high school sports to shape the lives of those who play them, and it reminds us that there are few bonds more sacred than that among a coach, a team, and a town. "Macon's run at the title reminds us why sports matter and why sportswriting has such great power to inspire. . . [It's] one hell of a good story, and Ballard has written one hell of a good book." -- Jonathan Eig, Chicago Tribune

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The Wax Pack - Brad Balukjian Cover Art

The Wax Pack

The Wax Pack On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife by Brad Balukjian

A Los Angeles Times Best Seller A 2020 NPR Best Book of the Year Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. On Balukjian’s trip in the summer of 2015, he spanned 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. Actively engaging with his subjects, he took a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watched kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and went to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Alternately elegiac and uplifting, The Wax Pack is part baseball nostalgia, part road trip travelogue, and all heart, a reminder that greatness is not found in the stats on the backs of baseball cards but in the personal stories of the men on the front of them.

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Pennant Race - Jim Brosnan Cover Art

Pennant Race

Pennant Race The Classic Game by Game Account of a Championship Season, 1961 by Jim Brosnan

“Brosnan obviously knows his baseball, writes about it wittily, informally and with irony. He is a cynical, tough professional athlete and his book makes wonderful reading.”— New Yorker From the author of The Long Season —considered by many to be the greatest baseball book of all time—comes another classic sports memoir by legendary pitcher Jim Brosnan, which chronicles how his team, the Cincinnati Reds, went on to win the 1961 National League pennant. In Pennant Race , Brosnan—with his trademark wise-guy wit and plain-spoken practicality—once again offers a refreshingly candid alternative to hackneyed baseball mythologizing. Day by day, game by game, Brosnan reveals the real lives of professional ballplayers: their exhilaration and frustration, hope and despair, chronic worry over job security, playful camaraderie, world-weary cynicism, and boyish—if cautious—optimism. Although the Reds would ultimately lose the World Series to the Yankees, for Brosnan and his teammates, this was a winning season. Pennant Race vividly captures a remarkable year in the life of a ball club and the golden age of one of Major League Baseball’s most memorable eras.

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Game 7, 1986 - Ron Darling & Daniel Paisner Cover Art

Game 7, 1986

Game 7, 1986 Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life by Ron Darling & Daniel Paisner

New York Times Bestseller An inside look at one of the most famous baseball games of all time, game seven of the 1986 World Series from Emmy-winning baseball analyst Ron Darling, the METS' starting pitcher, in his words. Every little kid who's ever taken the mound in Little League dreams of someday getting the ball for Game Seven of the World Series. Ron Darling got to live that dream - only it didn't go exactly as planned. In New York Times bestselling Game 7, 1986 , the award-winning baseball analyst looks back at what might have been a signature moment in his career, and reflects on the ways professional athletes must sometimes shoulder a personal disappointment as their teams find a way to win. Published to coincide with the anniversary of the 1986 New York Mets championship season, Darling's book breaks down one of baseball's great "forgotten" games - a game that stands as a thrilling, telling, and tantalizing exclamation point to one of the best-remembered seasons in Major League Baseball history. Working once again with bestselling collaborator Daniel Paisner, who teamed with the former All-Star pitcher on his acclaimed 2009 memoir, The Complete Game , Darling offers a book for the thinking baseball fan, a chance to reflect on what it means to compete at the game's highest level, with everything on the line.

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The Captain - Ian O'Connor Cover Art

The Captain

The Captain The Journey of Derek Jeter by Ian O'Connor

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Derek Jeter is undoubtedly the most talked about, argued about, cheered, booed and ultimately respected baseball player of his generation. And as public a figure as he has been, he is in many ways the least known. That changes now as Ian O’Connor, one of the best sports writers anywhere, goes deep and does what no one has quite been able to do: Tell us a bit about who Derek Jeter really is.”—Joe Posnanski, author of The Machine "Deftly told.”—The Washington Post In The Captain, Ian O’Connor draws on unique access to Derek Jeter and more than 200 new interviews to reveal how a biracial kid from Michigan became New York’s most beloved sports figure and the face of the steroid-free athlete. O’Connor takes us behind the scenes of a legendary baseball life, from Jeter’s early struggles in the minor leagues, when homesickness and errors threatened a stillborn career, to the heady days of Yankee superiority and nightlife, to the battles with former best friend A-Rod. All along the way, Jeter has made his Hall-of-Fame destiny look easy. But behind that leadership and hero’s grace there are hidden struggles and complexities that have never been explored, until now.

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Glory Days in Tribe Town - Terry Pluto & Tom Hamilton Cover Art

Glory Days in Tribe Town

Glory Days in Tribe Town The Cleveland Indians and Jacobs Field 1994–1997 by Terry Pluto & Tom Hamilton

Relive the most thrilling seasons of Cleveland Indians baseball in recent memory! Remember the excitement of those first years at Jacobs Field? When it seemed the Indians could find a way to win almost any game? When screaming fans rocked the jam-packed stands every night? When a brash young team snapped a forty-year slump and electrified the city?  Those weren’t baseball seasons, they were year-long celebrations.  Step back into the glory days with sportswriter Terry Pluto and broadcaster Tom Hamilton as they share behind-the-scenes stories about a team with all-stars at nearly every position . . . a sparkling new ballpark . . . wild comeback victories . . . a record sellout streak . . . two trips to the World Series . . . and a city crazed with Indians fever.  Revisit baseball’s most fearsome lineup: Albert Belle’s mighty swing and ferocious glare . . . Jim Thome’s moon-shot home runs . . . Omar Vizquel’s poetry-in-motion play at shortstop . . . Kenny Lofton’s exhilarating baserunning and over-the-wall catches . . . These two Cleveland baseball veterans were there for it all. Now, they combine firsthand experience and in-depth player interviews to tell a richly detailed story that Tribe fans will love.

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Fastball Fitness: The Art and Science of Training to Throw With Real Velocity - Tom House Cover Art

Fastball Fitness: The Art and Science of Training to Throw With Real Velocity

Fastball Fitness: The Art and Science of Training to Throw With Real Velocity by Tom House

Fastball Fitness presents an in-depth but easy-to-apply look at velocity and how it can be safely developed. Details how to condition the total body to maximize a pitcher’s genetic potential.  Topics covered include rotational and directional momentum, timing, and fastball velocity, the biomechanical derivation of real velocity, how the legs, hips & shoulders, and spine & torso contribute to the mechanics of real velocity, prehabilitation training regimens, as well as conditioning protocols for real velocity from the National Pitching Association, the Titleist Performance Institute, Elite Baseball Academy, Beacon Orthopedics/Champion Sports, Victorian Institute of Sports Conditioning, and much, much more. Large format with over 180 clear photographs and illustrations.

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Before the Machine - Mark J. Schmetzer Cover Art

Before the Machine

Before the Machine The Story of the 1961 Pennant-Winning Reds by Mark J. Schmetzer

The Big Red Machine dominated major league baseball in the 1970s, but the Cincinnati franchise began its climb to that pinnacle in 1961, when an unlikely collection of cast-offs and wannabes stunned the baseball world by winning the National League pennant. Led by revered manager Fred Hutchinson, the team featured rising stars like Frank Robinson, Jim O'Toole, and Vada Pinson, fading stars like Gus Bell and Wally Post, and a few castoffs who suddenly came into their own, like Gene Freese and 20-game-winner Joey Jay. In time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their pennant-winning season, the amazing story of the "Ragamuffin Reds" is told from start to finish in Before the Machine. Written by long-time Reds Report editor Mark J. Schmetzer and featuring dozens of photos by award-winning photographer Jerry Klumpe of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star, this book surely will be a winner with every fan in Reds country and coincides with an anniversary exhibit at the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum. Through interviews and research, Before the Machine captures the excitement of a pennant race for a team that had suffered losing seasons in 14 of the past 16 years. Schmetzer also beautifully evokes the time and place--a muggy Midwestern summer during which, as the new song of the season boasts, "the whole town's batty for that team in Cincinnati." Led by regional talk-show star Ruth Lyons (the Midwest's "Oprah") fans rallied around the Reds as never before. The year didn't begin well for the team. Budding superstar Frank Robinson was arrested right before spring training for carrying a concealed weapon, and long-time owner Powel Crosley Jr., died suddenly just days before the start of the season. Few experts--or fans--gave the Reds much of a chance at first place anyway. With powerhouse teams in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Milwaukee, the National League pennant was unlikely to fly over Cincinnati's Crosley Field. But manager Hutchinson somehow galvanized his motley crew and led them to victory after victory. Joey Jay, who had languished with the Braves, mowed down hitters while his rotation mates O'Toole and knuckleballer Bob Purkey did the same. The team also featured a dynamic duo in the bullpen in Bill Henry and Jim Brosnan, whose book about the season, Pennant Race, became a national bestseller the following year. As the rest of the league kept waiting for the Reds to fade, Hutch's boys kept winning--and finally grabbed the pennant. Though they couldn't continue their magic in the World Series against the Yankees, the previously moribund Reds franchise did continue to their success throughout the decade, winning 98 games in 1962 and falling just short of another pennant in 1964. They established a recipe for success that would lead, a few years later, to the emergence of the Big Red Machine.

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Francona - Terry Francona & Dan Shaughnessy Cover Art

Francona

Francona The Red Sox Years by Terry Francona & Dan Shaughnessy

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. “Eloquent and dazzling,” the story of the legendary baseball manager’s tenure with the Boston Red Sox ( Philadelphia Daily News ). When Terry Francona took over as manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2004, the storied franchise hadn’t won a World Series championship in eighty-six years. Led by Francona, the team won two over the course of four years. During the full eight years of Francona’s tenure, the Red Sox were transformed from “cursed” into one of the most successful and profitable teams in baseball history—only to fall back to last place as soon as Francona was gone. Francona: The Red Sox Years  lets readers in on the inner workings of the Red Sox clubhouse like no book has ever done before. From the highs of the World Series to the lows of the final months of the 2011 season—the most epic collapse of a team in baseball history—this book features the never-before-told stories about Sox fans’ favorite players, moments, wins, and losses. “A scorched-earth memoir . . . [that] touches fleetingly on steroid use, sabermetrics, and Michael Jordan’s stint in the minor leagues . . . but saves its heaviest artillery for the owners . . . [and] Theo Epstein backs him up.” — The New York Times Book Review “It’s not often that baseball aficionados and gossip gluttons can plunk down on a shared portion of outfield grass with the same book for an afternoon of readerly delight, but Francona can bridge those kinds of differences.” — The Boston Globe

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Growing the Game - Alan M. Klein Cover Art

Growing the Game

Growing the Game The Globalization of Major League Baseball by Alan M. Klein

A sociologist and anthropologist scientifically examines the worldwide growth of MLB and America’s favorite pastime. Baseball fans understand the game has become increasingly international. Major league rosters include players from no fewer than fourteen countries, and more than one-fourth of all players are foreign born. Here, Alan Klein offers the first full-length study of a sport in the process of globalizing. Looking at the international activities of big-market and small-market baseball teams, as well as the Commissioner’s Office, he examines the ways in which Major League Baseball operates on a world stage that reaches from the Dominican Republic to South Africa to Japan. The origins of baseball’s efforts to globalize are complex, stemming as much from decreasing opportunities at home as from promise abroad. Klein chronicles attempts to develop the game outside the United States, the strategies that teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals have devised to recruit international talent, and the ways baseball has been growing in other countries. He concludes with an assessment of the obstacles that may inhibit or promote baseball’s progress toward globalization, offering thoughtful proposals to ensure the health and growth of the game in the United States and abroad.   “A superb inside look at how the national pastime has reinvented itself . . . Klein’s writing is engaging, and his research is top-notch.” —Tim Wendel, author of The New Face of Baseball: The One-Hundred-Year Rise and Triumph of Latinos in America’s Favorite Sport “A timely contribution to our understanding of baseball in our contemporary age.” —Michael L. Butterworth, Sociology of Sport Journal

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Tales from the 1962 New York Mets Dugout - Janet Paskin & Greg W. Prince Cover Art

Tales from the 1962 New York Mets Dugout

Tales from the 1962 New York Mets Dugout A Collection of the Greatest Stories from the Mets Inaugural Season by Janet Paskin & Greg W. Prince

Tales from the 1962 New York Mets Dugout chronicles the adventures, mishaps, and unforgettable stories as the New York Mets burst onto the baseball scene. From the team’s first win, in its 10th game of the season, to its last loss, which ended with the Mets grounding into a triple play, Tales from the 1962 New York Mets Dugout recaptures that spectacle of a season, with stories from those who lost and lived to tell the tale. A must-have for any baseball fan!

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Major League Baseball A Mile High: The First Quarter Century of the Colorado Rockies - Society for American Baseball Research Cover Art

Major League Baseball A Mile High: The First Quarter Century of the Colorado Rockies

Major League Baseball A Mile High: The First Quarter Century of the Colorado Rockies by Society for American Baseball Research

Major League Baseball A Mile High: The First Quarter Century of the Colorado Rockies provides a look at the first 25 years (1993 through 2017) of the major-league baseball team in Denver, the Colorado Rockies. Included are essays on the birth of the Rockies and biographies of 24 of the most important players, managers, and club executives as selected by the Rocky Mountain chapter of SABR. We added "ballpark bios" of the two fields on the Rockies have called home: Mile High Stadium and Coors Field. In addition, 18 memorable and historic games are recapped here. Including a foreword by beat writer Thomas Harding, who has covered the Rockies since the year 2000, and illustrated with over 30 photos from the archives of the Colorado Rockies and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball A Mile High is the perfect addition to any Rocky Mountain baseball fan's personal library. This book is a production of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Over three dozen SABR members contributed as authors, editors, fact-checkers, and pitched in with ideas to shape the book.

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The Way of Baseball - Shawn Green & Gordon McAlpine Cover Art

The Way of Baseball

The Way of Baseball Finding Stillness at 95 MPH by Shawn Green & Gordon McAlpine

Shawn Green’s career statistics can be found on the backs of baseball cards in shoe boxes across America: 328 home runs, 1,071 RBIs, .282 career batting average, All-Star, Gold Glove, Silver Slugger. . . . But numbers tell only part of the story. His path to success was as grounded in philosophical study as in ballpark wisdom. Striving to find stillness within the rip-roaring scene of Major League Baseball—from screaming fans to national scandals— Green learned to approach the sport with a clear mind. In the tradition of Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops , Green shares the secrets to remaining focused both on and off the field, shedding light on a signature approach to living by using his remarkable baseball experiences to exemplify how one can find full awareness, presence, and, ultimately, fulfillment in any endeavor. Following his development from inconsistent rookie to established All-Star to aging veteran, The Way of Baseball illustrates the spiritual practices that enabled him to “bring stillness into the flow of life.” Requiring mastery of perspective and continual management of ego, the game of baseball afforded Green the opportunity to explore his potential as more than just a ballplayer. A treasure of practical wisdom and an intimate look at what it really means to “let go,” The Way of Baseball illuminates the creative possibilities within us all.

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Fifty-Nine in '84 - Edward Achorn Cover Art

Fifty-Nine in '84

Fifty-Nine in '84 Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, & the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn

Fifty-nine in ’84 is award–winning journalist Edward Achorn’s riveting history of late nineteenth century baseball and the era’s most legendary pitcher. In 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won an astounding fifty-nine games—more than anyone in major-league history ever had before, or has since. He then went on to win all three games of baseball's first World Series. Fifty-nine in ’84 tells the dramatic story not only of that amazing feat of grit but also of big-league baseball two decades after the Civil War—a brutal, bloody sport played barehanded, the profession of uneducated, hard-drinking men who thought little of cheating outrageously or maiming an opponent to win. Wonderfully entertaining, Fifty-nine in ’84 is an indelible portrait of a legendary player and a fascinating, little-known era of the national pastime. “A beautifully written, meticulously researched story about a bygone baseball era that even die-hard fans will find foreign, and about a pitcher who might have been the greatest of all time.” —Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian “First-class narrative history that can stand with everything Steven Ambrose wrote. . . . Achorn's description of the utter insanity that was barehanded baseball is vivid and alive.” — Boston Globe

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Power Ball - Rob Neyer Cover Art

Power Ball

Power Ball Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game by Rob Neyer

“Winner of the 2018 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year.” The former ESPN columnist and analytics pioneer dramatically recreates an action-packed 2017 game between the Oakland A’s and eventual World Series Champion Houston Astros to reveal the myriad ways in which Major League Baseball has changed over the last few decades. On September 8, 2017, the Oakland A’s faced off against the Houston Astros in a game that would signal the passing of the Moneyball mantle. Though this was only one regular season game, the match-up of these two teams demonstrated how Major League Baseball has changed since the early days of Athletics general manager Billy Beane and the publication of Michael Lewis’ classic book. Over the past twenty years, power and analytics have taken over the game, driving carefully calibrated teams like the Astros to victory. Seemingly every pitcher now throws mid-90s heat and studiously compares their mechanics against the ideal. Every batter in the lineup can crack homers and knows their launch angles. Teams are relying on unorthodox strategies, including using power-losing—purposely tanking a few seasons to get the best players in the draft. As he chronicles each inning and the unfolding drama as these two teams continually trade the lead—culminating in a 9-8 Oakland victory in the bottom of the ninth—Neyer considers the players and managers, the front office machinations, the role of sabermetrics, and the current thinking about what it takes to build a great team, to answer the most pressing questions fans have about the sport today.

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The Mental Game of Baseball - H.A. Dorfman Cover Art

The Mental Game of Baseball

The Mental Game of Baseball A Guide to Peak Performance by H.A. Dorfman

Without a doubt the classic guide to mental performance enhancement for baseball. Here in the third edition, authors H.A. Dorfman and Karl Kuehl present their practical and proven strategy for developing the mental skills needed to achieve peak performance at every level of the game. The theory and applications are illustrated by anecdotes and insights from major and minor league players, who at some point discovered the importance of mastering the inner game in order to play baseball as it should be played. Intended for players, managers, coaches, agents, and administrators as well as fans who want a more in-depth look at the makeup of the complete baseball player.

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Big Data Baseball - Travis Sawchik Cover Art

Big Data Baseball

Big Data Baseball Math, Miracles, and the End of a 20-Year Losing Streak by Travis Sawchik

Big Data Baseball provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the Pittsburgh Pirates used big data strategies to end the longest losing streak in North American pro sports history. New York Times Bestseller After twenty consecutive losing seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, team morale was low, the club’s payroll ranked near the bottom of the sport, game attendance was down, and the city was becoming increasingly disenchanted with its team. Big Data Baseball is the story of how the 2013 Pirates, mired in the longest losing streak in North American pro sports history, adopted drastic big-data strategies to end the drought, make the playoffs, and turn around the franchise’s fortunes. Big Data Baseball is Moneyball for a new generation. Award-winning journalist Travis Sawchik takes you behind the scenes to expertly weave together the stories of the key figures who changed the way the Pirates played the game, revealing how a culture of collaboration and creativity flourished as whiz-kid analysts worked alongside graybeard coaches to revolutionize the sport and uncover groundbreaking insights for how to win more games without spending a dime. From pitch framing to on-field shifts, this entertaining and enlightening underdog story closely examines baseball’s burgeoning big data movement and demonstrates how the millions of data points which aren’t immediately visible to players and spectators, are the bit of magic that led the Pirates to finish the 2013 season in second place and brought an end to a twenty-year losing streak.

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The Sabermetric Revolution - Benjamin Baumer & Andrew Zimbalist Cover Art

The Sabermetric Revolution

The Sabermetric Revolution Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball by Benjamin Baumer & Andrew Zimbalist

From the front office to the family room, sabermetrics has dramatically changed the way baseball players are assessed and valued by fans and managers alike. Rocketed to popularity by the 2003 bestseller Moneyball and the film of the same name, the use of sabermetrics to analyze player performance has appeared to be a David to the Goliath of systemically advantaged richer teams that could be toppled only by creative statistical analysis. The story has been so compelling that, over the past decade, team after team has integrated statistical analysis into its front office. But how accurately can crunching numbers quantify a player's ability? Do sabermetrics truly level the playing field for financially disadvantaged teams? How much of the baseball analytic trend is fad and how much fact? The Sabermetric Revolution sets the record straight on the role of analytics in baseball. Former Mets sabermetrician Benjamin Baumer and leading sports economist Andrew Zimbalist correct common misinterpretations and develop new methods to assess the effectiveness of sabermetrics on team performance. Tracing the growth of front office dependence on sabermetrics and the breadth of its use today, they explore how Major League Baseball and the field of sports analytics have changed since the 2002 season. Their conclusion is optimistic, but the authors also caution that sabermetric insights will be more difficult to come by in the future. The Sabermetric Revolution offers more than a fascinating case study of the use of statistics by general managers and front office executives: for fans and fantasy leagues, this book will provide an accessible primer on the real math behind moneyball as well as new insight into the changing business of baseball.

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The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty - Buster Olney Cover Art

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness by Buster Olney

For six extraordinary years around the turn of the millennium, the Yankees were baseball's unstoppable force, with players such as Paul O'Neill, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera. But for the players and the coaches, baseball Yankees-style was also an almost unbearable pressure cooker of anxiety, expectation, and infighting. With owner George Steinbrenner at the controls, the Yankees money machine spun out of control. In this new edition of The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, Buster Olney tracks the Yankees through these exciting and tumultuous seasons, updating his insightful portrait with a new introduction that walks readers through Steinbrenner's departure from power, Joe Torre's departure from the team, the continued failure of the Yankees to succeed in the postseason, and the rise of Hank Steinbrenner. With an insider's familiarity with the game, Olney reveals what may have been an inevitable fall that last night of the Yankee dynasty, and its powerful aftermath.

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The Franchise: New York Yankees - Mark Feinsand & Joe Torre Cover Art

The Franchise: New York Yankees

The Franchise: New York Yankees A Curated History of the Bronx Bombers by Mark Feinsand & Joe Torre

In The Franchise: New York Yankees, take a more profound and unique journey into the history of the baseball's most successful team. This thoughtful and engaging collection of essays captures the astute fans' history of the franchise, going beyond well-worn narratives of yesteryear to uncover the less-discussed moments, decisions, people, and settings that fostered the Yankees' iconic identity. Through wheeling and dealing, mythmaking and community building, explore where the organization has been, how it got to prominence in the modern major league landscape, and how it'll continue to evolve and stay in contention for generations to come. Yankees fans in the know will enjoy this personal, local, in-depth look at baseball history.

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Two Sides of Glory - Erik Sherman Cover Art

Two Sides of Glory

Two Sides of Glory The 1986 Boston Red Sox in Their Own Words by Erik Sherman

Following an epic American League Championship Series win over the California Angels and just one out from winning their first World Series in sixty-eight years, the 1986 Boston Red Sox lost Game Six to the New York Mets in unforgettable and devastating fashion. Then they lost Game Seven and the Series itself. Two Sides of Glory portrays the losing side of the story about one of baseball’s most riveting World Series match-ups. With the benefit of years of reflection from the men who made up the ’86 Sox, this will be the definitive book on this iconic yet most Shakespearian of Boston teams for years to come. After telling the Mets’ side of the story, Erik Sherman turns here to the Red Sox’s version, with recollections from players that are both insightful and surprisingly emotional. Bill Buckner, whose name became synonymous with a muffed grounder, speaks openly about the cruel aftermath. Pitcher Bruce Hurst broke down three times while being interviewed. Dwight Evans confesses in his interview that he had never before talked at length about the ’86 team. And Roger Clemens talks candidly not only about the ’86 squad but also accusations of alleged steroid abuse later in his career and the toll it has taken on his family. In each player’s retelling, there is the excitement of history never told and old mysteries answered. The story of the ’86 Red Sox is well known, but now, after thirty years, the players have opened up to Sherman like never before. It’s an in-depth, first-person account with the intriguing key players who made up this once-in-a-generation Boston team, and also a look at how the extremes of tantalizing victory and heart-wrenching failure shaped and influenced their lives—both on the field and off.  

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The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox - The Boston Globe, Chad Finn & Dennis Eckersley Cover Art

The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox

The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox More Than a Century of Championships, Challenges, and Characters by The Boston Globe, Chad Finn & Dennis Eckersley

Experience the illustrious and passionate history of the Boston Red Sox, one of the most storied franchises in baseball, as it happened through the articles, features, and lens of their hometown and national news outlet, The Boston Globe . The Boston Red Sox are the most winning baseball team in the 21st century with four World Series titles, and they're not slowing down any time soon. Two of the most prominent organizations in Boston, The Boston Globe and the Boston Red Sox, combine to share a tour de force history of the heralded baseball franchise from the very beginning in 1901, when they were known as the Boston Americans.  The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox includes more than 300 articles chronicling the team's rich history as told through the best sports writing and coverage from the beloved Globe reporters, led by veteran sports columnist and an EPPY Award finalist Chad Finn. Relive some of the biggest moments in franchise history, such as their first baseball title ever in 1901, Carlton Fisk's wave home run in 1975, David Ortiz's postseason heroics, and the most dominant Red Sox team ever in 2018. With a foreword from beloved former Sox pitcher and broadcaster, Dennis Eckersley, and Illustrated throughout with hundreds of photographs through every era, and updated through 2022, this beautiful archive celebrates two beloved organizations, and shares the hometown story of one of the world's most popular baseball teams.

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Game of Shadows - Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams Cover Art

Game of Shadows

Game of Shadows Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports by Mark Fainaru-Wada & Lance Williams

In the summer of 1998 two of baseball leading sluggers, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, embarked on a race to break Babe Ruth’s single season home run record. The nation was transfixed as Sosa went on to hit 66 home runs, and McGwire 70. Three years later, San Francisco Giants All-Star Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire by 3 home runs in the midst of what was perhaps the greatest offensive display in baseball history. Over the next three seasons, as Bonds regularly launched mammoth shots into the San Francisco Bay, baseball players across the country were hitting home runs at unprecedented rates. For years there had been rumors that perhaps some of these players owed their success to steroids. But crowd pleasing homers were big business, and sportswriters, fans, and officials alike simply turned a blind eye. Then, in December of 2004, after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Yankees slugger Jason Giambi had admitted taking steroids. Barry Bonds was also implicated. Immediately the issue of steroids became front page news. The revelations led to Congressional hearings on baseball’s drug problems and continued to drive the effort to purge the U.S. Olympic movement of drug cheats. Now Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose for the first time the secrets of the BALCO investigation that has turned the sports world upside down. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal That Rocked Professional by award-winning investigative journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, is a riveting narrative about the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports, and how baseball’s home run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, came to use steroids. Drawing on more than two years of reporting, including interviews with hundreds of people, and exclusive access to secret grand jury testimony, confidential documents, audio recordings, and more, the authors provide, for the first time, a definitive account of the shocking steroids scandal that made headlines across the country. The book traces the career of Victor Conte, founder of the BALCO laboratory, an egomaniacal former rock musician and self-proclaimed nutritionist, who set out to corrupt sports by providing athletes with “designer” steroids that would be undetectable on “state-of-the-art” doping tests. Conte gave the undetectable drugs to 28 of the world’s greatest athletes—Olympians, NFL players and baseball stars, Bonds chief among them. A separate narrative thread details the steroids use of Bonds, an immensely talented, moody player who turned to performance-enhancing drugs after Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals set a new home run record in 1998. Through his personal trainer, Bonds gained access to BALCO drugs. All of the great athletes who visited BALCO benefited tremendously—Bonds broke McGwire’s record—but many had their careers disrupted after federal investigators raided BALCO and indicted Conte. The authors trace the course of the probe, and the baffling decision of federal prosecutors to protect the elite athletes who were involved. Highlights of Game of Shadows include: Barry Bonds A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in part by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It was shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food store—first began using steroids. How Bonds’s weight trainer, steroid dealer Greg Anderson, arranged to meet Victor Conte before the 2001 baseball season with...

47

The Mental Keys to Hitting - H.A. Dorfman Cover Art

The Mental Keys to Hitting

The Mental Keys to Hitting A Handbook of Strategies for Performance Enhancement by H.A. Dorfman

A must-have book by acclaimed author and expert H.A. Dorfman that highlights the crucial mental components involved in hitting a baseball and playing the game, components that are as important, if not more so, than the intense physical regimen of an athlete.

48

The Card - Michael O'Keeffe & Teri Thompson Cover Art

The Card

The Card Collectors, Con Men, and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card by Michael O'Keeffe & Teri Thompson

Since its limited release just after the turn of the twentieth century, this American Tobacco cigarette card has beguiled and bedeviled collectors. First identified as valuable in the 1930s, when the whole notion of card collecting was still young, the T206 Wagner has remained the big score for collectors who have scoured card shows, flea markets, estate sales, and auctions for the portrait of baseball's greatest shortstop. Only a few dozen T206 Wagners are known to still exist. Most, with their creases, stains, and dog-eared corners, look worn and tattered, like they've been around for almost a century. But one—The Card—appears to have defied the travails of time. Thanks to its sharp corners and its crisp portrait of Honus Wagner, The Card has become the most famous and desired baseball card in the world. Over the decades, as The Card has changed hands, its value has skyrocketed. It was initially sold for $25,000 by a small card shop in a nondescript strip mall. Years later, hockey great Wayne Gretzky bought it at the venerable Sotheby's auction house for $451,000. Then, more recently, it sold for $1.27 million on eBay. Today worth over $2 million, it has transformed a sleepy hobby into a billion-dollar industry that is at times as lawless as the Wild West. The Card has made men wealthy, certainly, but it has also poisoned lifelong friendships and is fraught with controversy—from its uncertain origins and the persistent questions about its provenance to the possibility that it is not exactly as it seems. Now for the first time, award-winning investigative reporters Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson follow the trail of The Card from a Florida flea market to the hands of the world's most prominent collectors. They delve into a world of counterfeiters and con men and look at the people who profit from what used to be a kids' pastime, as they bring to light ongoing investigations into sports collectibles. O'Keeffe and Thompson also examine the life of the great Honus Wagner, a ballplayer whose accomplishments have been eclipsed by his trading card, and the strange and fascinating subculture of sports memorabilia and its astonishing decline. Intriguing and eye-opening, The Card is a ground-breaking look at a uniquely American hobby.

49

The Last Real Season - Mike Shropshire Cover Art

The Last Real Season

The Last Real Season A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone by Mike Shropshire

A rollicking and ribald first-person account of the 1975 Major League Baseball season—the last year before free agency took over and changed the national pastime forever—for better or for worse! There are baseball books and there are baseball books. But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: Ball Four by Jim Bouton. The Long Season by Jim Brosnan. Willie's Time by Charles Einstein. And Seasons In Hell by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers. Now, in The Last Real Season , Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'" And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.

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The Baseball Drill Book - American Baseball Coaches Association Cover Art

The Baseball Drill Book

The Baseball Drill Book by American Baseball Coaches Association

Seventeen of the game’s top collegiate coaches have teamed up with the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) to bring you the game’s most comprehensive assortment of practice activities. The Baseball Drill Book features 198 drills proven to improve individual and team performance. Former Fresno State coach Bob Bennett, Ripon College’s Gordie Gillespie, Lewis-Clark State’s Ed Cheff, Wichita State’s Gene Stephenson, and South Carolina’s Ray Tanner are among the greats who present their best practice drills and insights for improving these skills: • Conditioning and warm-up • Throwing and catching • Base running and sliding • Hitting and bunting • Pitching • Fielding • Offensive and defensive tactics Each drill follows a concise format. First, the primary skill or tactic to be enhanced is identified, then procedure and setup details are provided. Illustrations for proper technique are also included, followed by coaching insight to help you sharpen players’ understanding of the game’s finer points. Glean tactical advice such as how to get a teammate home from third when a key run is needed and how to “sit on” certain pitches while at the plate. Drill modifications are included so that each drill can be modified to fit specific needs. Additional chapters explain how to effectively and efficiently incorporate drills in practice sessions and to simulate game situations. In all, The Baseball Drill Book provides the essential link between initial skill learning and winning performance on the diamond.

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