Fifty-Nine in '84

Smart Baseball: The Story Behind the Old Stats That Are Ruining the Game, the New Ones That Are Running It, and the Right Way to Think About Baseball

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Keith Law
• Narrated By Mike Chamberlain
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Predictably Irrational meets Moneyball in ESPN veteran writer and statistical analyst Keith Law's iconoclastic look at the numbers game of baseball, proving why some of the most trusted stats are surprisingly wrong, explaining what numbers actually work, and exploring what the rise of Big Data means for the future of the sport.

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
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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.

The Betrayal : The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 28 mins)
• By Charles Fountain
• Narrated By Bob Reed
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In the most famous scandal of sports history, eight Chicago White Sox players - including Shoeless Joe Jackson - agreed to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for the promise of $20,000 each from gamblers reportedly working for New York mobster Arnold Rothstein. Heavily favored, Chicago lost the Series five games to three. Although rumors of a fix flew while the series was being played, they were largely disregarded by players and the public at large.

Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 33 mins)
• By Charles Leerhsen
• Narrated By Malcolm Hillgartner
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Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote.

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
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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.

Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 30 mins)
• By Eliot Asinof
• Narrated By Harold N. Cropp
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In 1919, American headlines proclaimed the fix and cover-up of the World Series as "the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America." In this painstaking review, Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the scandal, in which eight 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.

Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (20th Anniversary Edition)

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Warren Goldstein
• Narrated By Robert J. Eckrich
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Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades.The 20th Anniversary Edition includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s.

The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Giants Ruled the World

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 38 mins)
• By Roger Kahn
• Narrated By Allan Robertson

Celebrated sports writer Roger Kahn casts his gaze on 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....

Ball Four: The Final Pitch

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Jim Bouton
• Narrated By Jim Bouton

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.

Our Game: An American Baseball History

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Charles C. Alexander
• Narrated By Grover Gardner
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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.

Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss

• UNABRIDGED (24 hrs and 12 mins)
• By Marty Appel
• Narrated By Gregory Gorton

Since their breakthrough championship season in 1923, when Yankee stadium opened, the New York Yankees have been baseball’s most successful, decorated, and colorful franchise. Home to Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, Jackson, and Mattingly; and later Torre, Jeter, Rivera, and Rodriguez, the team has been a fixture in our national consciousness.

Honus Wagner

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 2 mins)
• By Dennis DeValeria, Jeanne DeValeria
• Narrated By Ian Esmo
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Honus Wagner, whose career in baseball (most of it with the Pittsburgh Pirates) stretched from 1895 to 1917, was the first American sports superstar of the twentieth century. One of the first five players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in its first year (1939), he was probably the best shortstop in baseball's history.

Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life

• UNABRIDGED (57 mins)
• By Michael Lewis
• Narrated By Michael Lewis
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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 Boys of Summer

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Roger Kahn
• Narrated By Phil Gigante
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This is a story about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a story by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is the story about what happened to the team when their glory days were behind them.

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.

Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties Told by the Men Who Played It

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Donald Honig
• Narrated By Stephen McLaughlin

Donald Honig crossed the country to meet and interview former big-league ball players. They shared their memories with him and the result is a book packed with nostalgia, statistics, action, revelations - an extraordinary oral history of baseball in the halcyon days beween the two world wars. Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Dizzy Dean, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig, and many others are brought to life through the recollections of Wes Ferrell, Charlie Gehringer, Elbie Fletcher, Bucky Waters, Billy Herman, and more.

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

• UNABRIDGED (33 hrs and 53 mins)
• By Selwyn Raab
• Narrated By Paul Costanzo
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Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

The House That Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the First Yankees Championship, and the Redemption of 1923

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 40 mins)
• By Robert Weintraub
• Narrated By Fred Berman
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This is the untold tale of the Yankees' break-out 1923 season: when they first played on their own field, when Babe Ruth broke out of his slump, and when the Bronx Bombers finally won their first world series against their cross-town rivals the New York Giants.

Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 9 mins)
• By Brian Kenny
• Narrated By Brian Kenny
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Most people who resist logical thought in baseball preach "tradition" and "respecting the game". But many of baseball's traditions go back to the 19th century, when the pitcher's job was to provide the batter with a ball he could hit and fielders played without gloves. Instead of fearing change, Brian Kenny wants fans to think critically, reject outmoded groupthink, and embrace the changes that have come with the "sabermetric era".

Iron Dawn: The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 20 mins)
• By Richard Snow
• Narrated By Grover Gardner
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No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in the harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, built an iron fort containing 10 heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship.

What I Talk about When I Talk about Running: A Memoir

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 25 mins)
• By Haruki Murakami
• Narrated By Ray Porter
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From the best-selling author of Kafka on the Shore comes this rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running and the integral impact both have made on his life. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers Murakami's four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Settings range from Tokyo, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston, among young women who outpace him.

Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 37 mins)
• By Peter Golenbock
• Narrated By Raymond Todd
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Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. In Bums, best-selling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former players, writers, front-office executives, and faithful fans.

Walter Johnson: Baseball's Big Train

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 15 mins)
• By Henry W. Thomas
• Narrated By Ian Esmo

To many, Walter Johnson is the greatest pitcher of all time. He was a star second to none from the dawn of the game's modern era through the "Golden Age of Sports" of the Roaring Twenties. The playing career of "The Big Train", as the sportswriters called him, spanned the era of such greats as Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Lou Gehrig, and Al Simmons. Johnson knew every President from William Howard Taft to Franklin Roosevelt, and was friends with the likes of Will Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks.

Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and "The Worst Baseball Team in History"-The 1973-1975 Texas Rangers

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 28 mins)
• By Mike Shropshire
• Narrated By Peter Powlus
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Offering wonderful perspectives on dozens of unique (and likely never-to-be-seen-again) baseball personalities, Seasons in Hell recounts some of the most extreme characters ever to play the game and brings to life the no-holds-barred culture of major league baseball in the mid-'70s.