Baseball: A History of America's Game

Our Game: An American Baseball History

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Charles C. Alexander
• Narrated By Grover Gardner
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game’s surge in the early 20th century, the Golden 20s and the Gray 30s, the breaking of the color line in the late 40s, and the game’s expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities, but also demonstrates the many connections to society.

Past Time: Baseball as History

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 51 mins)
• By Jules Tygiel
• Narrated By Rodney Gardiner

In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a "national pastime." We witness the true birth of modern baseball with the development of its elaborate statistics - the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's "historical essence" and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of "errors" and "unearned" runs.

The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 51 mins)
• By Jeff Silverman
• Narrated By Mike Chamberlain, Hillary Huber

At a 1931 barnstorming exhibition game in Tennessee, a 17-year-old pitcher for the Chattanooga Lookouts struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back to back. Her name was Jackie Mitchell - "organized baseball's first girl pitcher." In July 1970, a stripper rushed onto the field at Riverfront Stadium to kiss Johnny Bench, temporarily disrupting a game attended by President Nixon and his family. These are just some of the great, quirky, and comic moments in the annals of baseball recorded in The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 27 mins)
• By Michael Lewis
• Narrated By Scott Brick

Moneyball reveals a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.

The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Tom Verducci
• Narrated By Tom Verducci
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

With inside access and reporting, Sports Illustrated senior baseball writer and FOX Sports analyst Tom Verducci reveals how Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon built, led, and inspired the Chicago Cubs team that broke the longest championship drought in sports, chronicling their epic journey to become World Series champions.

The Celebrant

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 36 mins)
• By Eric Rolfe Greenberg
• Narrated By Bronson Pinchot
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Eric Rolfe Greenberg brilliantly and authentically chronicles the real-life saga of the first national baseball hero, Christy Mathewson, and the fictional story of a Jewish immigrant family of jewelers. In this audio, Mathewson and other great players like John McGraw, Honus Wagner, and Connie Mack discover the realities behind the shining illusions: the burdens of being a hero and the temptations that taint success.

Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero

• UNABRIDGED (20 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Leigh Montville
• Narrated By Scott Brick

He was one of the greatest figures of his generation, and arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all time. But what made Ted Williams a legend, and a lightning rod for controversy in life and in death? New York Times best-selling author Leigh Montville delivers an intimate, riveting account of this extraordinary life.

Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 13 mins)
• By Harold Coyle
• Narrated By James Patrick Cronin
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Team Yankee, the New York Times best-seller by Harold Coyle, presents a glimpse of what it would have been like for the soldiers who would have had to meet the relentless onslaught of Soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions. Using the geo-political and military scenarios described by General Sir John Hackett, former NORTHAG commander and author of World War Three; August 1985, Team Yankee follows the war as seen from the turret of Captain Sean Bannon's tank.

So You Think You Know Baseball?: A Fan's Guide to the Official Rules

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 31 mins)
• By Peter E. Meltzer
• Narrated By Michael Butler Murray
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Essential for armchair umpires and scorekeepers, this guide challenges aficionados on every significant part of the Official Baseball Rules. Few sports lovers are as obsessed with rules and statistics as baseball fans. In So You Think You Know Baseball?, lifelong baseball enthusiast Peter E. Meltzer catalogues every noteworthy baseball rule from the Major League rulebook and illustrates its application with actual plays, from the historical to the contemporary. You can listen to the book from start to finish or consult it while watching a game to understand the mechanics of a play or how it should be scored.

Shoeless Joe

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 46 mins)
• By W. P. Kinsella
• Narrated By Grover Gardner
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Shoeless Joe, the soul-stirring novel on which the movie Field of Dreams is based, is more than just another baseball story. Kinsella captures the spiritual dimension that baseball represents for its most determined devotees in this tale of love and the power of dreams to make people come alive.

The Baseball Codes

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 4 mins)
• By Jason Turbow, Michael Duca
• Narrated By Michael Kramer
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Everyone knows that baseball is a game of intricate regulations, but it turns out to be even more complicated than we realize. What truly governs the Major League game is a set of unwritten rules, some of which are openly discussed (don’t steal a base with a big lead late in the game), and some of which only a minority of players are even aware of (don’t cross between the catcher and the pitcher on the way to the batter’s box).

The Matheny Manifesto: A Young Manager's Old-School Views on Success in Sports and Life

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 50 mins)
• By Mike Matheny, Jerry B. Jenkins
• Narrated By Mark Deakins
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Mike Matheny was just 41, without professional managerial experience and looking for a next step after a successful career as a Major League catcher, when he succeeded the legendary Tony La Russa as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012. While Matheny has enjoyed immediate success, leading the Cards to the postseason three times in his first three years, people have noticed something else about his life, something not measured in day-to-day results.

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

• UNABRIDGED (25 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Thomas Asbridge
• Narrated By Derek Perkins
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge - a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker) - covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious, listenable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history.

Great Baseball Writing

• UNABRIDGED (27 hrs and 1 min)
• By Editors of Sports Illustrated
• Narrated By Dennis Holland
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

When Sports Illustrated was launched in 1954, baseball was, indisputable, the national pastime, its stars America's epic heroes, its rivalries the era's mythology. As baseballs fortunes rose and fell over the next 50 years - and then rose again to new heights, drawing more than 65 million fans to ballparks in 2004 - the game never failed to produce great drama and inspired storytelling.

The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 20 mins)
• By Frank Deford
• Narrated By Frank Deford
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In The Old Ball Game, Frank Deford, NPR sports commentator and Sports Illustrated journalist retells the story of an unusual friendship between two towering figures in baseball history.

Stengel: His Life and Times

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 34 mins)
• By Robert Creamer
• Narrated By Peter Coleman

One of the most endearing of American heroes, Casey Stengel guided the New York Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons. Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked - the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking.

Robert Creamer shows us Casey at twenty-two, famous from his very first day in the big leagues. We see Casey's playing career fall apart as he is traded, shunted to last-place teams, hampered by injuries, considered finished - until he bats a glorious home run in the 1923 World Series.

The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers

• UNABRIDGED (20 hrs and 20 mins)
• By Jon Pessah
• Narrated By Jeremy Arthur

In the fall of 1992, America's national pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: cancelling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war with each other, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players' growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game's very foundation.

The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America's Game

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Edward Achorn
• Narrated By Ax Norman
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Chris Von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the St. Louis Browns, the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important - and funniest - figures in the game’s history.