Baseball Playing

What does it mean to play heads-up baseball? A heads-up player has confidence in his ability, keeps control in pressure situations, and focuses on one pitch at a time. His mental skills enable him to play consistently at or near his best despite the adversity baseball presents each day. 

I spent sixteen years telling myself Daniel was only my best friend. Coming home makes that lie a lot harder to believe. I came home after a career-ending injury with no plan except to figure out what comes next. Then my best friend from high school offers me a coaching job, and suddenly I’m spending every day beside the one man I spent sixteen years trying not to think about. Daniel still knows exactly how to read me. He remembers how I take my coffee, trusts me with his players, and somehow makes this small-town baseball field feel more like home than any major-league stadium ever did. ...

In 1940, at just 15 years old, small-town baseball star Gene Moore was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who saw in him the potential to become one of the great catchers of all time. Before that could happen, though, WWII intervened. Gene's story, a surprising paean to the power and humanity of a game, is told here by his son, a first-time author who exhibits the confidence and pacing of a pro.

Before the floodlights and television deals, before analytics and billion-dollar contracts, baseball was the story of a nation learning who it was. It rose from muddy fields and smoke-filled taverns, from gentlemen’s clubs and back alleys, from dreams stitched into horsehide and hope. It was America in miniature—its courage, its contradictions, its relentless ambition played out between the baselines. In Baseball- The Untold Story of America's Pastime, bestselling author, Tim Cooper, tells the sweeping, cinematic story of baseball’s evolution from a 19th-century curiosity to the ...

The company I worked for had been bought by who I later found out was my best friend's ex. That was one crazy story. He ended up being a retired Pittsburgh Pirate. I was just as shocked when I found out. He'd gotten three of his ball playing friends to agree to do some promotion for the company for practically nothing. I was going to be the one to get them everything they needed while they were there. Out of the three of them, I was sure there would be at least one sexy man that would have the need to release some stress, and I was all for helping him. You see, I didn't do love or ...

This fascinating book chronicles the unsung men of baseball who serve the job, the hardships they face, and their love for a game that would not always love them back-told partly through the experiences of an MLB veteran. "Reminds us of the beauty of baseball." —Jim Abott, former major league...

From the author of Some Girls Do comes another heartfelt YA sapphic romance—starring a baseball pitcher and a student umpire who are definitely not supposed to fall for one another. “Sapphic sports romance perfection. Swoony and romantic, but unafraid to tackle grief, family expectations...

In this candid, revealing, and entertaining memoir, the beloved New York Yankee legend looks back over his nearly fifty-year career as a player and a manager, sharing insights and stories about some of his most memorable moments and some of the biggest names in Major League Baseball. For nearly...

In Playing Through the Pain, writer Dan Good seeks to make sense of MLB MVP Ken Caminiti's fascinating, troubled life. The story of Caminiti, the player who opened the lid on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, has never been properly told. Caminiti voluntarily admitted in a 2002 Sports Illustrated cover story that he used steroids during his career, including his 1996 season, and guessed that half of the players were using performance-enhancing drugs. Good's on-the-record sources include Caminiti's steroids supplier, people who attended rehab with him, and more.

The companion to Ken Burns’s magnificent PBS television series—updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part Tenth Inning directed with Lynn Novick. The authors of the acclaimed and bestselling The Civil War, Jazz, and The War turn to another uniquely American...

He built his life on control. Mason lived his life in the open. Neither planned on meeting in the middle. Mason Levert had always been the easy one to like—the steady shortstop, the teammate everyone counted on. But when a roster change paired him with a guarded veteran pitcher, the balance he relied on began to shift in ways he hadn’t expected. Devin Rhodes had spent years keeping his world carefully contained. Focused. Controlled. Being forced into close partnership with the team’s sunshine shortstop wasn’t part of the plan—especially when Mason’s quiet kindness began to reach...

The roster email arrives at 9:40 on a Tuesday. Twelve names, a field map, and one sentence that does the damage: practices start Tuesday. You have never coached anything. Somewhere in the next ninety seconds you think: I need to learn how to coach soccer. That thought is going to cost you your whole season. You do not have a soccer problem. What you have been handed, with no training and no warning, is a very small organization: twelve employees who cannot read a schedule, nine stakeholders in folding chairs eleven yards away, a fixed operating window of seventy-five minutes twice a week, ...

Journey with prolific author and avid baseball fan Ethan Bryan on an exciting quest to play catch every day for a year, and discover the lessons he learned about the sacredness of play, finding connections, and being fully present to the human experience. A Casey Award finalist! Ethan Bryan...

Best-selling author George Vecsey is an esteemed and award-winning sports journalist for the New York Times. In Baseball, he recounts the history of America's national pastime. Baseball has been around in various forms for thousands of years, but only within the last 200 years has it become an American institution. Growing from a sport played in open fields and big-city streets, baseball has seen its share of innovators and detractors, heroes and villains.

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.

Baseball Mastery Series All 10 Books in a Single Volume Mastering Every Position and Aspect of Baseball Step onto the field with confidence and skill with the Ultimate Baseball Mastery Series All 10 Books in a Single Volume Mastering Every Position and Aspect of Baseball. This all-encompassing collection is your key to mastering every position and excelling in every facet of the game. Whether you're a seasoned player, an aspiring athlete, or a dedicated coach, these guides offer the expertise and insights needed to elevate your baseball performance to the next level. Titles Included in This...

Harvard has a reputation for turning out notable lawyers, doctors, politicians, and scientists - but not exactly for producing professional ballplayers. However, in the mid-1970s Rick Wolff transferred from this major leaguer of academia to baseball’s minors, playing for the Detroit Tigers organization. Thirty years later, his son followed in his footsteps: Harvard diploma in hand, he now plays for a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets.

Available for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits’s Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author’s season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player’s estranged wife...

Baseball explores the history of organized baseball during the mid-twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

A bold and impassioned meditation on injustice in our country that punctures the illusion of a postracial America and reveals it as a place where authoritarianism looms large. Whether the issues are protest, labor, patriotism, or class division, it is clear that professional sports are no longer...