DescriptionLarry King is a true-blue baseball fanatic. Going to his first game as a kid in 1940s New York was the start of a lifelong love affair. This heartfelt valentine to America's game evokes a simpler time in our country's history: complete with the smells of…
DescriptionCritically acclaimed writer Tom Adelman is hailed as a renegade by the Village Voice Literary Supplement for his aggressive, no-holds-barred style. The Long Ball is his dynamic re-telling of baseball's thrilling 1975 season. The year began…
DescriptionIn the summer of 1908, the world-champion Chicago Cubs traveled to Onamata, Iowa, for an exhibition game against all-stars from the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, an amateur league. It was to be a short, pleasant, and, the Cubs thought, one-sided, game. Instead, it turned out to be a titanic battle of over 2, 000 innings, played mostly in the pouring rain. There is no proof that this game happened. There's no hint of it in the record books and no one remembers it or the Confederacy. Still, it is the quest of one man, Gideon Clarke, to prove to the world that it did.
DescriptionRoger Angell has witnessed many of the great and small events in the past 10 years of baseball. These writings, which first appeared in The New Yorker, provide a unique record of this turbulent decade, from the rise of California baseball and the comical and agonizing sufferings of the early Mets to the fall of the Yankee empire and the repeated triumphs of the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Orioles. In eloquent, concise language, Angell depicts the many faces of America's favorite pastime.
DescriptionAnyone who saw Roberto Clemente, as he played with a beautiful fury, will never forget him. He was a work of art in a game too often defined by statistics. During his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he won four batting titles and led his team to champ…
DescriptionAll he ever wanted was to be the best in baseball. Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, announces this dream aloud - a display of hubris that invites divine retribution. Stricken down in his first attempt, Hobbs gets a second chance, as Bernard Malamud brilliantly raises all the passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball to its ordained place in mythology. This is one of the few American novels that uses popular folk material in the interest of serious fiction, and the reverberations of the story carry far beyond the baseball park.
DescriptionFrom his perspective as a journalist and a true fan, Bob Costas, NBC's award-winning broadcaster, shares his views on the forces that are diminishing the appeal of Major League Baseball. In this cogent and provocative audio, Costas examines the growing fi…
DescriptionThere are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child's mind; it's as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever. There was a turning point in Michael Lewis' life, in a baseball game when he was 14 years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis's ability that the boy had no choice but to live up to it. "I didn't have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do." The coach's message was not simply about winning but about self-respect, sacrifice, courage, and endurance. In some ways, and now 30 years later, Lewis still finds himself trying to measure up to what Coach Fitz expected of him.
DescriptionThe Most Gigantic Sporting Swindle in the History of America! This headline proclaiming the 1919 fix of the World Series startled millions of readers and focused the attention of the entire country on one of the most incredible episodes ever to be enacted in the public eye. After painstaking research, Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-be-scene story of this fantistic scandal in which 8 Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the series to Cincinnati. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible.
DescriptionI wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it - before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in b…
