Classic Baseball

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 ...

A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball. “Wonderful ... a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting.” —The New York Times “First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very...

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.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST “A masterpiece” (The Wall Street Journal) of a novel by the era-defining author of The Bonfire of the Vanities—now a Netflix original limited series from David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) starring Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu, and...

Sisters? Forever. Friends? NEVER. Who knew a reunion weekend could be so deadly? Meet the sorority sisters of Theta Gamma Mu: Roxy Callahan Gentry, the ruthless former sorority president and current hostess who has painstakingly choreographed every detail of this weekend—even matching the...

The Wizard of Oz, manager of the Marvels baseball team, wants desperately to play against the Serpents, led by Evillene, their manager, who is also known as the Wicked Witch of the West. But these two teams live on opposite sides of the Dimensional Gates, and have never met. Every day the Wizard pleads to the Great Wind, the tornado that controls the Gate, and begs the Wind to allow this to happen. Until finally the two teams, and the two most powerful entities on the planet, get to meet. Learn what happens when Dorothy from Kansas, along with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion play the ...

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first - and some would say still the best - novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material - the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era - and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.

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...

Alcatraz Island in the 1930s isn't the most normal place to grow up, but it's home for Moose Flanagan, his autistic sister, Natalie, and all the families of the guards. When Moose's dad gets promoted to Associate Warden, despite being an unlikely candidate, it's a big deal. But the cons have a...

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.

In Where You Once Belonged, the bestselling and award-winning novelist of Eventide, Kent Haruf tells of a small-town hero who is dealt an enviable hand--and cheats with all of the cards. Deftly plotted, defiantly honest, Where You Once Belonged sings the song of a wounded prairie community in a...

This baseball classic that Ernest Hemingway called "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived" includes a foreword from Jane Leavy and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton archives. The first of Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism, Out of My League chronicles...

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 taut, propulsive family drama steeped in mystery, menace and a long-buried secret from award-winning author Kevin Hardcastle. It has been years since Mara O’Hare has come home to North Simcoe County. But she is forced to return after her father’s death. Arthur O’Hare—the meanest, most...

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.

A succinct history of baseball, newly revised and updated. In this third edition of his lively history of America's game, widely recognized as the best of its kind, Benjamin G. Rader expands his scope, covering record crowds and record income, construction of new ballparks, a change in the strike zone, a surge in recruiting Japanese players, and an emerging cadre of explosive long-ball hitters. The book is published by The University of Illinois Press.

A pioneer of the long-form sports story, W. C. Heinz wrote with a freshness of perception, a gift for characterization, and a finely tuned ear for dialogue. Here is a first of its kind audio edition of some of his finest work, selected and read by Bill Littlefield (NPR's "Only a Game")...

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and...

You Know Me, Al is a classic of baseball, the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's great characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.