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 577 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 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 Bill Veeck written by Paul Dickson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on primary sources and more than 100 interviews in a richly detailed portrait of the influential baseball team owner and promoter, providing coverage of such topics as his relationships with his Chicago Cubs president father, his struggles with formidable war injuries and his steadfast advocacy of integration. 40,000 first printing.
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 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 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 Twilight of the Long ball Gods written by John Schulian and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he does venture into the big leagues, Schulian gives us the underdogs and the human touches, from Bill Veeck peg-legging toward retirement as the game's last maverick team owner, to musings on Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at Christmas, to Studs Terkel's reflections on baseball."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Branch Rickey written by Lee Lowenfish and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881-1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport--not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey--the man sportswriters dubbed "The Brain," "The Mahatma," and, on occasion, "El Cheapo"--Lee Lowenfish tells the full and colorful story of a life that forever changed the face of America's game. As the mastermind behind the Saint Louis Cardinals from 1917 to 1942, Rickey created the farm system, which allowed small-market clubs to compete with the rich and powerful. Under his direction in the 1940s, the Brooklyn Dodgers became truly the first "America's team." By signing Jackie Robinson and other black players, he single-handedly thrust baseball into the forefront of the civil rights movement. Lowenfish evokes the peculiarly American complex of God, family, and baseball that informed Rickey's actions and his accomplishments. His book offers an intriguing, richly detailed portrait of a man whose life is itself a crucial chapter in the history of American business, sport, and society.
Download or read book Charlie Finley written by Roger D. Launius and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-11 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the "Bronx Zoo" of George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, there were the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s, one of the most successful, most colorful-and most chaotic-baseball teams of all time. They were all of those things because of Charlie Finley. Not only the A's owner, he was also the general manager, personally assembling his team, deciding his players' salaries, and making player moves during the season-a level of involvement no other owner, not even Steinbrenner, engaged in. Drawing on interviews with dozens of Finley's players, family members, and colleagues, G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius present "Baseball's Super Showman" (Time magazine's description of Finley on the cover of an August 1975 issue) in all his contradictions: generous yet vengeful, inventive yet destructive. The stories surrounding him are as colorful as the life he led, the chronicle of which fills an important gap in baseball's literature.
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 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 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 Disco Demolition written by Steve Dahl and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Disco Demolition, Dave Hoekstra sets the record straight about the night that epitomized the rock and disco culture clash.
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.
