World Baseball

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2025 “Baseball books don’t get any better than this...Earl Weaver has at last been given his due.” —George F. Will “Vivid...Most sports books are pop flies to the infield. Miller’s is a screaming triple...

He was the biggest man baseball has ever produced. Babe Ruth transcended the sport that brought him fame, money, and adulation, moving beyond the limits of baselines and outfield fences into the mainstream of American life. In this extraordinary biography, Creamer uncovers the complex and captivating man behind the legend.

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.

From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences. World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost sixty million lives—an average of twenty-seven thousand a day. For...

What lies ahead for a boy growing up in Billings, Montana, in the 1950s, who lost his father during combat in World War II? Can he realize the dream of thousands of youngsters and become a major-league pitching star? And can he shape the sport for decades after his retirement and death? Yes, he can. This is the true story of Dave McNally, who began playing baseball as a Little Leaguer in Billings, became an American Legion star, and then developed into a stalwart of the Baltimore Orioles' pitching staff. McNally won 184 games in the major leagues, 181 for the Orioles and three for the ...

From a former college basketball player and Executive at Nike, a "riveting" (Sports Illustrated) insider's account into the business of college basketball exposes the corrupt and racist systems that exploit young athletes and offers a new way forward For Merl Code, basketball was life. In...

Baseball continues to be a popular game both as a spectator sport and as a pastime. Baseball for Dummies is for baseball fans at all levels, from players and coaches to spectators who love the game. Baseball Hall of Fame player Joe Morgan explains baseball with remarkable insight, using down-to-earth language so everyone from the casual observer to the die-hard fan can gain a fuller appreciation of the sport.

" Hynd has captured the spirit of the times in this quaint and entertaining sidelight to sports and show-biz history." - Publishers Weekly. Newly revised, expanded and re-illustrated....Mat 2021...... Here is a stunning and largely unknown true story about a scandalous romance, baseball and the American theater in the years before World War One. Think of this as the Joe Di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe of an earlier era. Former 'Sports Illustrated' contributor Noel Hynd has recreated a fascinating era in all its scandal, sexiness, charm and glamour. A memorable true tale! From Publishers Weekly...

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.

In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, author Christian Sheppard interweaves Homer’s epics with glorious stories from the green fields of America’s pastime, celebrating Achilles’ courage and Odysseus’ cunning along with the virtues of Hall of Fame players such as Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth and of great teams such as the 2004 Red Sox and the 2016 Cubs. Along the way, Sheppard humorously recollects trying to raise his baby daughter true to the teachings of ancient myth and his beloved game.

Move over, Moneyball -- this New York Times bestseller examines major league baseball's next cutting-edge revolution: the high-tech quest to build better players. As bestselling authors Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, the Moneyball era is over. Fifteen years after...

From the New York Times bestselling author of K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches comes the ultimate history of the World Series—a vivid portrait of baseball at its finest and most intense, filled with humor, lore, analysis, and fascinating behind-the-scenes stories from 117 years of the...

The incredible inside story of power, money, and baseball's last twenty years. 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...

From acclaimed journalist Ben Bradlee Jr. comes the epic biography of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams that baseball fans have been waiting for. Williams was the best hitter in baseball history. His batting average of .406 in 1941 has not been topped since, and no player who has hit more than...

Big league baseball would seem to have been a hard sell in 1942. World War II was not going well for the United States in the Pacific and not much better in Europe. Moreover, the country was in drastically short supply of ships, planes, submarines, torpedoes, and other war materials, and Uncle Sam needed men, millions of them, including those from 21 through 35 years of age who had been ordered to register for the draft, the age range of most big league baseball players.

Learn how to perform at your very best, from the psychologist who has advised elite military operators, Olympic medalists, big wave surfers, neurosurgeons, cliff divers, first responders, Cirque du Soleil acrobats, professional athletes and coaches, Fortune 500 business executives, and CIA...

In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year's World Series, one of the nation's strongest baseball teams practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The riveting story of four men - Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige - whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond.

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...

They Bled Blue is the rollicking yarn of the Los Angeles Dodgers' crazy 1981 season, a watershed campaign that cemented the team's place and reputation as fitting thoroughly within the surrounding LA culture. That it culminated in an unlikely World Series win - during a split season demarcated by a strike, no less - is not even the most interesting thing about this team.