Rick Ankiel had the talent to be one of the best pitchers ever. Then, one day, he lost it. The Phenomenon is the story of how St. Louis Cardinals prodigy Rick Ankiel lost his once-in-a-generation ability to pitch -- not due to an injury or a bolt of lightning, but a mysterious anxiety condition widely known as "the Yips." It came without warning, in the middle of a playoff game, with millions of people watching. And it has never gone away. Yet the true test of Ankiel's character came not on...
Guys, Dolls, and Curveballs is a delightful collection of ballpark dispatches from one of the game's most unique chroniclersDamon Runyon, the legendary reporter and creator of such mythic gangster icons as Nathan Detroit and the Lemon Drop Kid. Best known as the bard of Broadway for turning two-bit hustlers and deadbeat horseplayers of Jazz Age New York City into literary legend, Runyon was first and foremost a newspaperman. After arriving in New York from Colorado in 1911, Runyon went to work...
Renowned artist Andy Jurinko believed the golden age of baseball was 1946-1960, an era that, not coincidentally, coincided with his childhood. It was a time that welcomed such legendary stars as Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, and Henry Aaron into the national consciousness, a fifteen year stretch marked by Robinson's breaking of the color barrier in 1947 and by ten Yankee championships. Jurinko spent twenty years creating more than 600 portraits of the colorful charac...
Composition Book 100 Sheet/200 Pages 8.5 X 11 In. Wide Ruled Sports-Blue
by Goddess Book Press
This anthology gathers selected papers from the 2007 and 2008 meetings of the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the long-running academic conference held annually at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Essays included employ the national pastime to comment on issues transcending the playing field, and are divided into six sections: 'Cultural Perspectives on the Game', 'Literary Baseball', 'Baseball at the Movies', 'Minority Standard Bearers', 'New Leagues', and 'The Busines...
Thirty-five years ago, Roberto Clemente made baseball history when he became the first Latin American to enter the Hall of Fame. Roberto Clemente: The Great One evaluates one of the game's most dynamic players and perhaps its most selfless humanitarian. From modest beginnings in Carolina, Puerto Rico, to a legendary career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, to his tragically premature death in a plane crash, Roberto Clemente remains one of baseball's most compelling characters. Interviews with teammat...
Games between the Dodgers and Giants are never just another day at the ballpark. Dating back to the late nineteenth century-when the teams embodied the competitive spirit of rival metropolises of New York and Brooklyn-the Giants-Dodgers rivalry gained intensity throughout the early twentieth century. The cheering and jeering continued unabated until 1957, when the clubs backed the moving vans up to the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, and took their rivalry to new venues in Los Angeles and San Fra...
Baseball has life encoded within it as completely as DNA does: the world's deepest wisdom, edgiest laughter, joys and sorrows. Among the millions who chase baseball's dream, though, only a few scale the sport's most rarified heights not only in terms of victory, but in becoming true selfless teams who are vivid role models, in a gritty age beyond the destruction of heroes. With uniquely wild style, the 2010 San Francisco Giants follow the 1969 New York Mets and 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers into hist...
The Negro Baseball Leagues
by Bob Motley, Byron Motley, and Larry Lester
Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Negro Leagues with updates and additions throughout! The Kansas City Monarchs, the Chicago American Giants, the St. Louis Stars, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Homestead Grays, and the Indianapolis Clowns; for over fifty years, they were the Yankees, Cardinals, and Red Sox of black baseball in America. And for over a decade beginning in the late 1940s, umpire Bob Motley called balls and strikes for many of their games, working alongside such legends...
"For decades, statistics such as batting average, saves recorded, and pitching won-lost records have been used to measure individual players' and teams' potential and success. But in the past fifteen years, a revolutionary new standard of measurement, sabermetrics, has been embraced by front offices in Major League Baseball and among fantasy baseball enthusiasts. But while sabermetrics is recognized as being smarter and more accurate, traditionalists, including journalists, fans, and managers, s...
'With every...baseball book, Don Honig heaps delight on top of pleasure...He has worked the vein with skill and taste and enthusiasm enough to enrich all of us fans' - Red Smith. 'Honig has proven himself to be one of baseball's best and most important chroniclers...This is baseball history at its best. Fans will treasure it' - "Library Journal". 'We are given a new dimension - we are made to discover not only what happens on the ballfield, but how it happens' - "Newsday". 'Honig shows his knack...
Last spring Billy Bean, the only living openly gay former major leaguer, gained national attention with his breakthrough memoir, Going the Other Way an unprecedented chronicle of America's national pastime that went on to sell more than 25,000 copies. Bean brings us inside the clubhouse and onto the playing field, offering dead-on insight into the game and the physical and emotional demands it makes on players. Bean faced an agonizing choice, in secrecy and solitude, between continuing to play t...
Amazing Tales from the New York Yankees Dugout (Tales from the Team)
by Ken McMillan and Ed Randall
Over 400 pages of stories about baseball’s most successful franchise—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Reggie Jackson Derek Jeter, Don Larsen, Mickey Mantle, Sparky Lyle, Don Mattingly, Thurman Munson, and so many more! When it comes to baseball glory, no other team comes close to the New York Yankees, winners of forty American League pennants and twenty-seven World Series championships. Amazing Tales from the Yankee Dugout is a compilation of the funniest, strangest, and most unique stories, anecdotes,...
Baseball (Modern Library) (Modern Library Chronicles)
by George Vecsey
“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The Number In Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles and triumphs, and performs a marvelous feat: maki...
Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line - like baseball itself, game after game and season after season - t...
Tales from the Los Angeles Dodgers Dugout (Tales from the Team)
by Rick Monday
It took something truly remarkable to save the 1981 Major League Baseball season from being remembered only as the year of the players' strike. It took the Los Angeles Dodgers: Fernandomania and Lasorda and Garv and Bake and the Penguin. It took three amazing October comebacks to beat the Houston Astros, the Montreal Expos, and, finally, the New York Yankees, avenging Dodger World Series losses to the Yankees in 1977 and 1978. Rick Monday was right in the middle of that magical 1981 Dodger seaso...
Bestselling author Darryl Brock returns to post Civil War America with Two in the Field, a novel that brings back his beloved protagonist Samuel Clemens Fowler. Recently returned from a trip through history, where he was a part-time "ballist" with the Cincinnati Red Stockings-baseball's first all-professional team-Sam is trying to readjust to life in the 21st century. But part of him is still back in 1869 Ohio, where he fell in love with a beautiful Irish widow named Cait. Determined to find h...