Professional Baseball

This smart and funny fan's guide to baseball explains the ins and outs of pitching, hitting, running, and fielding, while offering insider trivia and anecdotes that will appeal to anyone - whether you're a major league couch potato, lifelong season ticket-holder, or a beginner. Combining the narrative voice and attitude of Michael Lewis with the compulsive brilliance of Schott's Miscellany, Watching Baseball Smarter will increase your understanding and enjoyment of the sport-no matter what your level of expertise.

Discover the transformative New York Times bestseller—a step-by-step manual for mastering your inner mind for peak performance and living your life to the fullest. As a professional baseball player, Jim Murphy’s sense of worth revolved around results. He was focused on achievement but also...

This is The Shift, where “for the love of the game” has given way to an exclusive world of wealth and greed. Learn about it from someone who has lived it as a coach, mentor, and most importantly, as a father.

The complete inside story of the shocking steroids scandal that turned the sports world upside down For years, in the shadowy reaches of the world of sports, there were rumors that some of our nation’s greatest athletes were using steroids, human growth hormone, and other drugs to run faster...

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.

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.

In time for the 50th anniversary of the Mets' miraculous 1969 World Series win, right fielder Ron Swoboda tells the story of that amazing season, the people he played with and against (sometimes at the same time), and what life was like as an "Every Man" ballplayer. Ron Swoboda wasn't the greatest player the Mets ever had, but he made the greatest catch in Met history, saving a game in the 1969 World Series, and his RBI clinched the final game. By Met standards that makes him legend.

It was the year that Joe DiMaggio set his 56-game hitting streak, that Ted Williams batted .406, that the Dodgers and the Yankees battled each other in a classic World Series, and that America went to war. In this look at what he calls "the best baseball season ever", Robert Creamer skillfully intertwines all these epochal baseball happenings with an informal history of a pivotal period in American life.

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 ...

In his unfiltered style, Dave Portnoy details the journey of how he built his polarizing media empire, Barstool Sports, while refusing to bend the knee to those who tried to tear him down, staying true to himself and blocking out the haters. Dave Portnoy is a gambler. From his days playing...

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...

The only pitch he can't hit? The fastball she throws at his heart. Jameson has finished rehab for his shoulder and dives into Spring Training eager to show he’s fully healed. Then he meets Sloane. She’s smart in the boardroom, sexy everywhere else, and completely off-limits. She’s the owner’s daughter, and getting involved with him would derail her career before it even starts. As a new team VP, Sloane wants a corner office and a clear line between work and her personal life. Then she meets Jameson: hilarious off-field, painfully earnest on it, and utterly forbidden because the ...

In the April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major-league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three Black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman’s much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball.

While much has been written about his father, Sam, a titan of industry, there is no public record of Charles Bronfman’s thoughts on his own life, family, career and his significant accomplishments in sport and philanthropy. Distilled does just that, chronicling key events in the life of the heir to one of Canada’s great fortunes. Born in 1931 to the fabulously wealthy Bronfmans, Charles grew up in a 20-room mansion with many staff. Via their control of the distilling giant Seagram, the Bronfman family dominated the liquor business.

A poignant, inspirational story about football, family, and love from Bill Cowher, the Super Bowl–winning, Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers coach, and cohost of CBS’s The NFL Today. Long before the Lombardi Trophy, the Golden Hall of Fame jacket, and successful TV career, legendary head...

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.

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...

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.

Documenting multiple challenges at every turn - as a target for racism from society at large and sexism both inside and outside of the Negro League - this is the unique story of the first woman to play professional baseball on a men's team, breaking barriers in sports while believing, "There's got to be a first in everything. Maybe it will be me." The text explains that as players began to leave the Negro League for major league teams, Toni Stone seized her only opportunity to play professional ball and replaced Henry Aaron on the Negro League's top team.

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...