Download or read book Veeck As In Wreck written by Bill Veeck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-24 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Veeck was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. His classic autobiography, written with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn, is an uproarious book packed with information about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners, including some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature.

Download or read book Bill Veeck written by Paul Dickson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Louis "Bill" Veeck, Jr. (1914-1986) is legendary in many ways-baseball impresario and innovator, independent spirit, champion of civil rights in a time of great change. Paul Dickson has written the first full biography of this towering figure, in the process rewriting many aspects of his life and bringing alive the history of America's pastime. In his late 20s, Veeck bought into his first team, the American Association Milwaukee Brewers. After serving and losing a leg in WWII, he bought the Cleveland Indians in 1946, and a year later broke the color barrier in the American League by signing Larry Doby, a few months after Jackie Robinson-showing the deep commitment he held to integration and equal rights. Cleveland won the World Series in 1948, but Veeck sold the team for financial reasons the next year. He bought a majority of the St. Louis Browns in 1951, sold it three years later, then returned in 1959 to buy the other Chicago team, the White Sox, winning the American League pennant his first year. Ill health led him to sell two years later, only to gain ownership again, 1975-1981. Veeck's promotional spirit-the likes of clown prince Max Patkin and midget Eddie Gaedel are inextricably connected with him-and passion endeared him to fans, while his feel for the game led him to propose innovations way ahead of their time, and his deep sense of morality not only integrated the sport but helped usher in the free agency that broke the stranglehold owners had on players. (Veeck was the only owner to testify in support of Curt Flood during his landmark free agency case). Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick is a deeply insightful, powerful biography of a fascinating figure. It will take its place beside the recent bestselling biographies of Satchel Paige and Mickey Mantle, and will be the baseball book of the season in Spring 2012.

Download or read book The Hustler s Handbook written by Bill Veeck and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the difference between a promoter and a hustler?" Bill Veeck asks. "Well, let's look at it this way. Neither one of them is an advertiser. An advertiser pays for his space. A promoter works out a quid pro quo . A hustler gets a free ride and makes it seem as if he's doing you a favor." Keep this in mind as Veeck, one of baseball's all-time characters and certainly its best-ever hustler, draws on an apparently bottomless well of stories, anecdotes, theories, and attitudes involving the often bizarre world of major league baseball. And, of course, he's never afraid to speak his mind. The Hustler's Handbook is a rich, hilarious, flagrantly outspoken lesson on how to operate as a hustler in the corporate jungle of modern baseball.

Download or read book Thirty Tons a Day written by Bill Veeck and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In between his romances with baseball, in early 1969 Bill Veeck took up the challenge of managing Boston's semi-moribund Suffolk Downs racetrack. When he took over the track, Veeck had yet to learn that the normal daily output of some sixteen hundred horses (including straw) would amount to so much, or be so hard to dispose of. But that was the least of his problems.

Download or read book Our Team written by Luke Epplin and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history. In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy. Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series--all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.

Download or read book Marketing Your Dreams written by Pat Williams and published by Sports Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2000-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Veeck marketed, promoted, and sold baseball like no one before him and like no one since. Influenced and inspired by the classic sports book Veeck: As in Wreck, veteran author and motivational speaker Pat Williams has penned his 19th book, Marketing Your Dreams: Business and Life Lessons from Bill Veeck, Baseball's Marketing Genius. Williams, senior vice president of the NBA's Orlando Magic, insists that Marketing Your Dreams isn't a Bill Veeck biography; instead, it's a book about success, a book about one of the most relentless and fascinating personalities in the history of organized sports. It's a book about extracting Veeck's traits and concentrating them into their purest form so that the reader can pull the same kind of inspiration from the master that Williams did.

Download or read book A Brand New Ballgame written by G. Scott Thomas and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America grew rapidly after World War II, and the national pastime followed suit. Baseball dramatically changed from a 19th century pastoral relic to a continental modern sport. Six Major League clubs relocated to new cities, capped by the coast-to-coast moves of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. Four expansion teams were created from thin air. Dozens of black stars emerged after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The players formed a union--higher salaries materialized. This book tells the story of baseball's metamorphosis 1945-1962, driven by larger-than-life personalities like the bombastic Larry MacPhail, the sage Branch Rickey, the kindly Connie Mack, the quick-witted Bill Veeck and the wily Walter O'Malley--Hall of Famers all. The upheaval they sparked--and sometimes failed to control--would broaden the sport's appeal, setting the stage for tremendous growth in the half-century to come.

Download or read book Mr Wrigley s Ball Club written by Roberts Ehrgott and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was a city of immigrants, mobsters, and flappers with one shared passion: the Chicago Cubs. It all began when the chewing-gum tycoon William Wrigley decided to build the world’s greatest ball club in the nation’s Second City. In this Jazz Age center, the maverick Wrigley exploited the revolutionary technology of broadcasting to attract eager throngs of women to his renovated ballpark. Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club transports us to this heady era of baseball history and introduces the team at its crazy heart—an amalgam of rakes, pranksters, schemers, and choirboys who take center stage in memorable successes, equally memorable disasters, and shadowy intrigue. Readers take front-row seats to meet Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Joe McCarthy, Lewis “Hack” Wilson, Gabby Hartnett. The cast of characters also includes their colorful if less-extolled teammates and the Cubs’ nemesis, Babe Ruth, who terminates the ambitions of Mr. Wrigley’s ball club with one emphatic swing.

Download or read book The End of Baseball written by Peter Schilling and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game.

Download or read book Can t Anybody Here Play This Game written by Jimmy Breslin and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times–bestselling author (Newark Star-Ledger). Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball. Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Download or read book The Baseball Business written by James Edward Miller and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 1991-04 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on the experiences of the Baltimore Orioles to trace the development of the baseball business since 1950

Download or read book Making My Pitch written by Ila Jane Borders and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making My Pitch tells the story of Ila Jane Borders, who despite formidable obstacles became a Little League prodigy, MVP of her otherwise all-male middle school and high school teams, the first woman awarded a college baseball scholarship, and the first to pitch and win a complete men’s collegiate game. After Mike Veeck signed Borders in May 1997 to pitch for his St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, she accomplished what no woman had done since the Negro Leagues era: play men’s professional baseball. Borders played four professional seasons and in 1998 became the first woman in the modern era to win a professional ball game. Borders had to find ways to fit in with her teammates, reassure their wives and girlfriends, work with the media, and fend off groupies. But these weren’t the toughest challenges. She had a troubled family life, a difficult adolescence as she struggled with her sexual orientation, and an emotionally fraught college experience as a closeted gay athlete at a Christian university. Making My Pitch shows what it’s like to be the only woman on the team bus, in the clubhouse, and on the field. Raw, open, and funny at times, her story encompasses the loneliness of a groundbreaking pioneer who experienced grave personal loss. Borders ultimately relates how she achieved self-acceptance and created a life as a firefighter and paramedic and as a coach and goodwill ambassador for the game of baseball.

Download or read book Baseball s Pivotal Era 1945 1951 written by William Marshall and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-11-21 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history. At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement. Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan—the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later. During these years, the game was led by A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him."

Download or read book Science of Hitting written by Ted Williams and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1986-04-29 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advice on how to improve your turn at bat and become the best hitter possible.

Download or read book Uppity written by Bill White and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are very few major personalities in the world of sports who have so much to say about our National Pastime. And even fewer who are as well respected as Bill White. Bill White, who's now in his mid 70s, was an All-Star first baseman for many years with the New York Giants, St.Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies before launching a stellar broadcasting career with the New York Yankees for 18 years. He left the broadcast booth to become the President of the National League for five years. A true pioneer as an African-American athlete, sportscaster, and top baseball executive, White has written his long-awaited autobiography in which he will be candid, open, and as always, most forthcoming about his life in baseball. Along the way, White shares never-before-told stories about his long working relationship with Phil Rizzutto, insights on George Steinbrenner, Barry Bonds, Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Bob Gibson, Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent, and scores of other top baseball names and Hall of Famers. Best of all, White built his career on being outspoken, and the years fortunately have not mellowed him. Uppity is a baseball memoir that baseball fans everywhere will be buzzing about.

Download or read book St Louis Browns written by Bill Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we all know, St. Louis is the best baseball town in America, but the city's major league history is not confined to the Cardinals. For several decades, until the middle of the twentieth century, St. Louis fielded a second professional team. True, it was mostly a losing team, but it once featured a first baseman who hit .400, a legendary Negro League star, and a pitcher who would go on to throw a perfect game in the World Series. They were the St. Louis Browns--the forerunners of the current Baltimore Orioles and a part of St. Louis's rich baseball history.

Download or read book Slouching Toward Fargo written by Neal Karlen and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1999-04-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this era of spoiled millionaire athletes and Big Business baseball, the pure, honest spirit of the Game is alive and well in America's heartland--if also a bit deranged. In Slouching Toward Fargo, Neal Karlen describes his two-year journey with the St. Paul Saints--the most audacious bush-league ballclub ever to plumb the bottom of the pro sports barrel. A motley collection of has-beens, hopefuls, rejects and mutts who've all been ignored or banished by the majors, "Da Saints" have become a national phenomenon for playing with as much gust off the field as on, while proudly adhering to the timeless sports credo that it takes heart, skill and cheap theatrics to plant devoted butts in stadium seats. Where else but in St. Paul could you find a 300-pound pig playing the role of a ball boy? Where else can otherwise normal fans do battle during the 7th-Inning Stretch while wearing giant sumo suits? Where else but in the Saints' ever-sold-out Midway Stadium can 6,329 die-hard fans get a back rub from a nun for $5 a pop? No gimmick is too weird for the Saints as long as it's fun--just what you'd expect from a club co-owned by comedian and team Czar Bill Murray and run by Mike Veeck, son of legendary promoter Bill Veeck and organizer of the biggest promotional disaster in the history of organized ball, Disco Demolition Night. With a small team in a small town, they've shown America that all the Bud Seligs in baseball aren't worth one pre-game Bar Mitzvah on the field. And where but in St. Paul, just down the road from the rehab clinics of Hazelden, would you find so many second chances and even more last or only chances? Neal takes you into the dugout with the infamous Darryl Strawberry as he starts his comeback to the majors and World Series glory, and into the locker room with Jack Morris, baseball's biggest bastard and winningest pitcher in the '80s, who would one day vanish from the team without a trace. In this era of spoiled millionaire athletes and Big Business baseball, the pure, honest spirit of the Game is alive and well in America's heartland--if also a bit deranged.