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Baseball in Evansville: Booms, Busts and One Global Disaster (Sports)
By Kevin Wirthwein. 2020
Baseball exploded in Evansville after the Civil War. Early clubs like the Resolutes, Blues, Brewers, Hoosiers and Blackbirds played, built…
ballparks, struggled financially and suffered scandals until the early 1900s. A near tragic event fueled the 1915 construction of Bosse Field, now the third-oldest professional ballpark in operation and the host to Major League Spring Training and the filming of A League of Their Own. After World War II, college baseball returned after lying dormant since the 1920s. In the late 1960s, a local entrepreneur attempted to build a third major league. When he failed, the city ascended to the minor leagues' highest level. Join sportswriter and Evansville native Kevin Wirthwein as he recounts baseball's illustrious history in the River City.This newest edition to the long-running Everything Kids&’ Baseball series updated with current information on the 2018 and 2019 baseball…
seasons, refreshed bios, and an expanded look at fantasy baseball is &“everything you want in a kid&’s book&” (Associated Press). Now you can introduce young fans to the fun, action, and excitement of America&’s favorite pastime with this all-inclusive, updated edition of The Everything Kids&’ Baseball Book. Featuring dozens of puzzles and games, this edition has up-to-date stats for all of your favorite players and teams. Get to know the best star players today, learn the rules and history of the game, and start to develop your own baseball skills—from t-ball to the World Series—with this comprehensive guide to the entertaining world of baseball. Covering everything you need to know, this book is sure to be a grand slam for kids and parents alike!Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
By Anika Orrock. 2020
This book chronicles the history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and the stories of the first women to…
play professional baseball in a league of their own.In 1941, the world was at war, and with able-bodied American men fighting overseas, professional baseball was in danger of becoming a quaint relic—until women stepped up to the plate.In this heartwarming illustrated history, the League's story is told by the ones who know it best: the players. Author Anika Orrock collects a variety of funny, charming, wince-worthy, and powerful vignettes told by the players themselves about their time playing the American pastime.• Features stories of grit and perseverance against all odds, told by the players themselves• Filled with player statistics, historical beats, headlines, and more; and fully illustrated in Anika's vibrant style• A visually engaging, readable women-led history bookWritten in an approachable manner and beautifully illustrated, The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League is a one-of-a-kind story told through the women's own voices and their own perspectives.This book ultimately proves that the incredible women of the AAGPBL truly were in a league of their own.• A unique celebration of a specific moment in women's and sports history• A great read for experienced and new sports fans alike, readers young and old, baseball fans• Perfect accompaniment to books like Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky, Strong is the New Pretty by Kate T. Parker, and Rad American Women A-Z: Rebels, Trailblazers, and Visionaries who Shaped Our History . . . and Our Future! by Kate SchatzWho Got Game?: Amazing but True Stories!
By Derrick D. Barnes. 2020
Celebrate the unheralded people and stories that helped shape the game of baseball! Meet unsung pioneers, like John &“Bud&” Fowler,…
William Edward White, and brothers Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weld Walker, four African Americans who integrated white teams decades before Jackie Robinson.Discover unforgettable moments, like the time a 17-year old girl named Jackie Mtchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.Marvel at records. Did you know that Japanese superstar Sadaharu Oh has a whopping 113 more career homers than Hank Aaron? And that&’s just for starters! This lively illustrated collection of shiny nuggets of baseball lore will transform you into a superfan who knows the game better than anyone else. Someone who&’s got game.The Science of Hitting a Home Run: Forces And Motion In Action (Action Science Ser.)
By Jim Whiting. 2010
War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War
By Randy Roberts, Johnny Smith. 2020
A "richly detailed" portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston (Michael S. Neiberg): baseball…
star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard Law student Charles Whittlesey.In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radical lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.Baseball America 2020 Prospect Handbook Digital Edition
By Editors of Baseball America. 2020
Buzz Saw: The Improbable Story of How the Washington Nationals Won the World Series
By Jesse Dougherty. 2020
The remarkable story of the 2019 World Series champion Washington Nationals told by the Washington Post writer who followed the…
team most closely.By May 2019, the Washington Nationals—owners of baseball&’s oldest roster—had one of the worst records in the majors and just a 1.5 percent chance of winning the World Series. Yet by blending an old-school brand of baseball with modern analytics, they managed to sneak into the playoffs and put together the most unlikely postseason run in baseball history. Not only did they beat the Houston Astros, the team with the best regular-season record, to claim the franchise&’s first championship—they won all four games in Houston, making them the first club to ever win four road games in a World Series. &“You have a great year, and you can run into a buzz saw,&” Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg told Washington Post beat writer Jesse Dougherty after the team advanced to the World Series. &“Maybe this year we&’re the buzz saw.&” Dougherty followed the Nationals more closely than any other writer in America, and in Buzz Saw he recounts the dramatic year in vivid detail, taking readers inside the dugout, the clubhouse, the front office and ultimately the championship parade. Yet he does something more than provide a riveting retelling of the season: he makes the case that while there is indisputable value to Moneyball-style metrics, baseball isn&’t just a numbers game. Intangibles like team chemistry, veteran experience and childlike joy are equally essential to winning. Certainly, no team seemed to have more fun than the Nationals, who adopted the kids&’ song &“Baby Shark&” as their anthem and regularly broke into dugout dance parties. Buzz Saw is just as lively and rollicking—a fitting tribute to one of the most exciting, inspiring teams to ever take the field.The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife
By Brad Balukjian. 2020
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. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects—taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going 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, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. 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.Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers
By Robert K. Fitts. 2020
Baseball has been called America&’s true melting pot, a game that unites us as a people. Issei Baseball is the…
story of the pioneers of Japanese American baseball, Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, Kiichi Suzuki, and others—young men who came to the United States to start a new life but found bigotry and discrimination. In 1905 they formed a baseball club in Los Angeles and began playing local amateur teams. Inspired by the Waseda University baseball team&’s 1905 visit to the West Coast, they became the first Japanese professional baseball club on either side of the Pacific and barnstormed across the American Midwest in 1906 and 1911. Tens of thousands came to see &“how the minions of the Mikado played the national pastime.&” As they played, the Japanese earned the respect of their opponents and fans, breaking down racial stereotypes. Baseball became a bridge between the two cultures, bringing Japanese and Americans together through the shared love of the game.Issei Baseball focuses on the small group of men who formed the first professional and semiprofessional Japanese baseball clubs. These players&’ story tells the history of early Japanese American baseball, including the placement of Saisho, Kitsuse, and their families in relocation camps during World War II and the Japanese immigrant experience.Summer Baseball Nation: Nine Days in the Wood Bat Leagues
By Will Geoghegan. 2020
The college baseball season doesn&’t end when the school year is finished. Many of the top NCAA Division I, II,…
and III baseball players continue to play in one of the game&’s most unique environments, the summer wood bat leagues. They swap aluminum bats for wood and play from June through August in more than forty states. The poetry of America&’s pastime persists as soon-to-be stars such as Gordon Beckham, Buster Posey, and Aaron Judge crash in spare bedrooms and play for free on city and college ball fields.Summer Baseball Nation chronicles a season in America&’s summer collegiate baseball leagues. From the Cape to Alaska and a lot of places in between, Will Geoghegan tells the stories of a summer: eighteen of the best college players in the country playing Wiffle ball on Cape Cod, the Midnight Sun Game in Alaska, a California legend picking up another win, home runs flying into Lake Michigan, and the namesake of an old Minor League club packing the same charming ballpark. At every stop, players chase dreams while players and fans alike savor the moment.Philadelphia's Top Fifty Baseball Players
By Rich Westcott. 2013
Philadelphia&’s Top Fifty Baseball Players takes a look at the greatest players in Philadelphia baseball history from the earliest days…
in 1830 through the Negro Leagues and into the modern era. Their ranks include batting champions, home run kings, Most Valuable Players, Cy Young Award winners, and Hall of Famers—from Ed Delahanty, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Roy Campanella, Mike Schmidt, and Ryan Howard to Negro League stars Judy Johnson and Biz Mackey and other Philadelphia standouts such as Richie Ashburn, Dick Allen, Chuck Klein, Eddie Collins, and Reggie Jackson. For each player the book highlights memorable incidents and accomplishments and, above all, his place in Philadelphia&’s rich baseball tradition.The Bill James Handbook 2020
By Bill James, Baseball Info Solutions. 2019
The first-to-market, most comprehensive, insightful, and groundbreaking annual baseball book on the market. A must-have book or gift for every…
true fan, with lifetime statistics and leader boards for every player in the major leagues and projections for how they might do in the future.Red Sox in 5s and 10s: Boston's Agony and Ecstasy (Sports)
By Bill Nowlin. 2020
The Boston Red Sox have blown hot and cold over the decades. These lists of Top 5s and 10s cover…
both the highs and lows of a team that has endured a long history of both joy and sorrow. They won the first World Series ever played and then five more pennants in the next fifteen years. Famously, from 1918 until the magical year of 2004, the Sox endured eighty-six seasons without a championship, although they lost pennants and world championships on the last possible day more times than fans care to remember. Finally, in 2004, they won it all. Loyal fans will always remember the joy of Mo Vaughn's grand slam on opening day in 1998 and will likely never forget the agony of Game 6 in 1986. Through it all, unforgettable names like Buckner, Yaz, Tony C. and Big Papi still resonate in the shadows of Fenway Park. From the greatest pitchers to the worst opening days, author Bill Nowlin recounts the highs and lows of Boston's most celebrated sports franchise.Completely updated and expanded through the 2019 baseball season! In a game that has been our national pastime since the…
1850s, there have been countless changes, additions and adaptations to the rules of baseball. But while the sport has altered considerably in recent years, its essence is still deeply rooted in its early history. Completely revised and updated through the 2019 baseball season, David Nemec has brought back into print his renowned book The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated. Along with providing a thorough investigation into the rules of the game and how they came to be, Nemec explains the reasoning behind many of the modifications, both large and small, and in so doing furnishes numerous examples of the specific instances that led to a particular rule being created afresh, rewritten or excised from the rule book entirely. Whether we&’re talking about the uproarious &“Pine Tar Game,&” harrowing home plate collisions, or the constant fine tuning through the years to maintain an equilibrium between hitting and pitching, fans of all ages are given a comprehensive handbook of the pivotal incidents that shaped the game as we know it today. But The Official Rules of Baseball Illustrated is much more than a textbook on the rules. It is rich with illustrative anecdotes throughout the game&’s long history that feature many of baseball&’s most famous players, umpires and teams as well as some of its most unsung. With photographs that help bring to life some of the movers and shakers in the ways the game has evolved over time, all fans of the sport will welcome adding this book to their libraries. As The Glory of Their Times author Lawrence S. Ritter said, &“This is one of the most entertaining baseball books I have read in a very long time. Any baseball fan, young or old, will find it fun...&”Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask
By Jon Pessah. 2020
The definitive biography of Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees icon, winner of 10 World Series championships, and the most-quoted…
player in baseball historyLawrence "Yogi" Berra was never supposed to become a major league ballplayer. That's what his immigrant father told him. That's what Branch Rickey told him, too-right to Berra's face, in fact. Even the lowly St. Louis Browns of his youth said he'd never make it in the big leagues. Yet baseball was his lifeblood. It was the only thing he ever cared about. Heck, it was the only thing he ever thought about. Berra couldn't allow a constant stream of ridicule about his appearance, taunts about his speech, and scorn about his perceived lack of intelligence to keep him from becoming one of the best to ever play the game-at a position requiring the very skills he was told he did not have.Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and four years of reporting, Jon Pessah delivers a transformational portrait of how Berra handled his hard-earned success-on and off the playing field-as well as his failures; how the man who insisted "I really didn't say everything I said!" nonetheless shaped decades of America's culture; and how Berra's humility and grace redefined what it truly means to be a star. Overshadowed on the field by Joe DiMaggio early in his career and later by a youthful Mickey Mantle, Berra emerges as not only the best loved Yankee but one of the most appealingly simple, innately complex, and universally admired men in all of America.Becoming Babe Ruth
By Matt Tavares. 2013
Before he is known as the Babe, George Herman Ruth is just a boy who lives in Baltimore and gets…
into a lot of trouble. But when he turns seven, his father brings him to the gates of Saint Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, and his life is changed forever. At Saint Mary’s, he’s expected to study hard and follow a lot of rules. But there is one good thing about Saint Mary’s: almost every day, George gets to play baseball. Here, under the watchful eye of Brother Matthias, George evolves as a player and as a man, and when he sets off into the wild world of big-league baseball, the school, the boys, and Brother Matthias are never far from his heart. With vivid illustrations and clear affection for his subject, Matt Tavares sheds light on an icon who learned early that life is what you make of it — and sends home a message about honoring the place from which you came.In the summer of 1932, at the beginning of the turbulent decade that would remake America, baseball fans were treated…
to one of the most thrilling seasons in the history of the sport. As the nation drifted deeper into the Great Depression and reeled from social unrest, baseball was a diversion for a troubled country—and yet the world of baseball was marked by the same edginess that pervaded the national scene. On-the-field fights were as common as double plays. Amid the National League pennant race, Cubs&’ shortstop Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Violet Popovich in a Chicago hotel room. When the regular season ended, the Cubs and Yankees clashed in what would be Babe Ruth&’s last appearance in the fall classic. After the Cubs lost the first two games in New York, the series resumed in Chicago at Wrigley Field, with Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt cheering for the visiting Yankees from the box seats behind the Yankees&’ dugout. In the top of the fifth inning the game took a historic turn. As Ruth was jeered mercilessly by Cubs players and fans, he gestured toward the outfield and then blasted a long home run. After Ruth circled the bases, Roosevelt exclaimed, &“Unbelievable!&” Ruth&’s homer set off one of baseball&’s longest-running and most intense debates: did Ruth, in fact, call his famous home run? Rich with historical context and detail, The Called Shot dramatizes the excitement of a baseball season during one of America&’s most chaotic summers.Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original
By Mitchell Nathanson. 2020
From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (1939–2019) was the sports world&’s deceptive revolutionary. Underneath…
the crew cut and behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks lurked a maverick with a signature style. Whether it was his frank talk about player salaries and mistreatment by management, his passionate advocacy of progressive politics, or his efforts to convince the United States to boycott the 1968 Olympics, Bouton confronted the conservative sports world and compelled it to catch up with a rapidly changing American society. Bouton defied tremendous odds to make the majors, won two games for the Yankees in the 1964 World Series, and staged an improbable comeback with the Braves as a thirty-nine-year-old. But it was his fateful 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and his resulting insider&’s account, Ball Four, that did nothing less than reintroduce America to its national pastime in a lasting, profound way. In Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, Mitchell Nathanson gives readers a look at Bouton&’s remarkable life. He tells the unlikely story of how Bouton&’s Ball Four, perhaps the greatest baseball book of all time, came into being, how it was received, and how it forever changed the way we view not only sports books but professional sports as a whole. Based on wide-ranging interviews Nathanson conducted with Bouton, family, friends, and others, he provides an intimate, inside account of Bouton&’s life. Nathanson provides insight as to why Bouton saw the world the way he did, why he was so different than the thousands of players who came before him, and how, in the cliquey, cold, bottom‑line world of professional baseball, Bouton managed to be both an insider and an outsider all at once.Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir
By Alan D. Gaff. 2019
&“A compelling rumination by a baseball icon and a tragic hero.&” —Sports Illustrated The lost memoir from baseball icon Lou…
Gehrig—a sensational discovery, published for the first time as a book.At the tender age of twenty-four, Lou Gehrig decided to tell the remarkable story of his life and career. He was one of the most famous athletes in the country, in the midst of a record-breaking season with the legendary 1927 World Series-winning Yankees. In an effort to grow Lou&’s star, pioneering sports agent Christy Walsh arranged for Lou&’s tale of baseball greatness to syndicate in newspapers across the country. Until now, those columns were largely forgotten and lost to history. Lou comes alive in this inspiring memoir. It is a heartfelt rags-to-riches tale about a dirt poor kid from New York who became one of the most revered baseball players of all time. Fourteen years after his account, Lou would tragically die from ALS, a neuromuscular disorder now known as Lou Gehrig&’s Disease. His poignant autobiography is followed by an insightful biographical essay by historian Alan D. Gaff. Here is Lou—Hall of Famer, All Star, and MVP—back at bat.