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 Baseball s Great Experiment written by Jules Tygiel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a history of African American exclusion from baseball, and assesses the changing racial attitudes that led up to Jackie Robinson's acceptance by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Download or read book Promises to Keep How Jackie Robinson Changed America written by Sharon Robinson and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2016-11-29 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warm, intimate portrait of Jackie Robinson, America's sports icon, told from the unique perspective of a unique insider: his only daughter. Sharon Robinson shares memories of her famous father in this warm loving biography of the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. Jackie Robinson was an outstanding athlete, a devoted family man and a dedicated civil rights activist. The author explores the fascinating circumstances surrounding Jackie Robinson's breakthrough. She also tells the off-the-field story of Robinson's hard-won victories and the inspiring effect he had on his family, his community. . . his country! Includes never-before-published letters by Jackie Robinson, as well as photos from the Robinson family archives.
Download or read book Branch Rickey s Little Blue Book written by Branch Rickey and published by SportClassic Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branch Rickey's own words from his personal papers are skillfully compiled to form a book of witticisms and observations that abounds with common sense and insight, stands today a work of inspiration.
Download or read book Opening Day written by Jonathan Eig and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronicle of the 1947 baseball season during which Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier is a sixtieth anniversary tribute based on interviews with Robinson's wife, daughter, and teammates.
Download or read book Branch Rickey written by Murray Polner and published by Atheneum Books. This book was released on 1982 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has any sport executive had as many words written about him as Branch Rickey? A one-time catcher, Rickey managed the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals at the end of the deadball era before serving as vice president of the Dodgers and general manager of the Pirates. Possessed of one of the most creative minds in the game's long history, Rickey made early use of statistical analysis, pioneered the farm system, and pressed for the expansion of major league baseball. But he is best known for integrating organized baseball, signing Jackie Robinson to a contract at a time when the U.S. armed forces were still segregated and the Civil Rights movement was years away. A courageous move, the signing also stands as proof of Rickey's foresight; by tapping the Negro Leagues, he enlarged the pool of exploitable talent. Soon after, major league ties to the talent-rich Caribbean were cinched up, and years later scouts sign players from Asia and all over the globe. Based on nearly one hundred of interviews and vast amounts of research, including exclusive access to Rickey's own papers, Branch Rickey was originally published in 1982. It still stands as the definitive biography of the legendary executive. The McFarland edition includes updates and revisions, new photographs, a foreword by Branch B. Rickey, and a new preface.
Download or read book I Never Had It Made written by Jackie Robinson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling autobiography of American baseball and civil rights legend Jackie Robinson Before Barry Bonds, before Reggie Jackson, before Hank Aaron, baseball's stars had one undeniable trait in common: they were all white. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke that barrier, striking a crucial blow for racial equality and changing the world of sports forever. I Never Had It Made is Robinson's own candid, hard-hitting account of what it took to become the first black man in history to play in the major leagues. I Never Had It Made recalls Robinson's early years and influences: his time at UCLA, where he became the school's first four-letter athlete; his army stint during World War II, when he challenged Jim Crow laws and narrowly escaped court martial; his years of frustration, on and off the field, with the Negro Leagues; and finally that fateful day when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers proposed what became known as the "Noble Experiment"—Robinson would step up to bat to integrate and revolutionize baseball. More than a baseball story, I Never Had It Made also reveals the highs and lows of Robinson's life after baseball. He recounts his political aspirations and civil rights activism; his friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, William Buckley, Jr., and Nelson Rockefeller; and his troubled relationship with his son, Jackie, Jr. I Never Had It Made endures as an inspiring story of a man whose heroism extended well beyond the playing field.
Download or read book Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson written by Fritz Knapp and published by Price World Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of the acclaimed Sports Virtues series, "Branch Rickey & Jackie Robinson: Nobility " discusses the struggles and triumphs of Branch Rickey's and Jackie Robinson's lives. As with each story in the Sports Virtues series, this book assigns a virtue to a celebrated athlete or coach, and uses that person's story to help the reader achieve that virtue for him or herself. What emerges after reading these stories is not only a greater understanding and appreciation of the virtues that these icons needed to get through life, but also an inspiration for the reader. Each story is followed by a small quotation from literature to amplify the meaning and application of the virtue, and each story is also followed by a series of study/review questions and other interactive activities to help the reader further understand the virtue and how to achieve it. This book is for people of all ages, but it makes for the perfect gift from parents to children or from adult mentors to their students. Other books in the Sports Virtues series include: Lou Gehrig: Appreciation Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo: Compassion Roberto Clemente: Dedication Susan Butcher: Determination Pele: Devotion John Wooden: Discipline Mike Krzyzewski: Encouragement Cal Ripken, Jr.: Endurance Walter ""Red"" Barber: Fairness Dennis Byrd: Faithfulness Hank Aaron: Fearlessness Amos Alonzo Stagg: Honesty Eric Liddell: Humility Arthur Ashe: Integrity Bill Bradley: Intelligence Jim Valvano: joyfulness Dan O'Brien & Dave Johnson: Kindness Dean Smith: Loyalty Harvey Penick: Modesty Branch Rickey & Jackie Robinson: Nobility Althea Gibson: Persistence Clarence "Big House" Gaines, Sr.: Respectability Joan Benoit Samuelson & Wilma Rudolph: Strength Vince Lombardi: Toughness Gertrude Ederle: Triumph Ken Venturi: Trust The 1980 Men's and 1998 Women's United States Olympic Hockey Teams: Unity Eddie Robinson: Visionary Happy Chandler: Wisdom
Download or read book 42 Today written by MichaeL G Long and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores Jackie Robinson’s compelling and complicated legacy Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him. Many are familiar with Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson’s perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation’s most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. Featuring a foreword by celebrated directors and producers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, this volume recasts Jackie Robinson’s legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.
Download or read book In Pursuit of Pennants written by Mark Armour and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1936 Yankees, the 1963 Dodgers, the 1975 Reds, the 2010 Giants—why do some baseball teams win while others don’t? General managers and fans alike have pondered this most important of baseball questions. The Moneyball strategy is not the first example of how new ideas and innovative management have transformed the way teams are assembled. In Pursuit of Pennants examines and analyzes a number of compelling, winning baseball teams over the past hundred-plus years, focusing on their decision making and how they assembled their championship teams. Whether through scouting, integration, instruction, expansion, free agency, or modernizing their management structure, each winning team and each era had its own version of Moneyball, where front office decisions often made the difference. Mark L. Armour and Daniel R. Levitt show how these teams succeeded and how they relied on talent both on the field and in the front office. While there is no recipe for guaranteed success in a competitive, ever-changing environment, these teams demonstrate how creatively thinking about one’s circumstances can often lead to a competitive advantage. Purchase the audio edition.
Download or read book Baseball Has Done it written by Jackie Robinson and published by Ig Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction by Spike Lee. Back in print for the first time since its initial publication in 1964, Baseball Has Done It is an oral history of baseball as told by its greatest players to Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the colour line. This one-of-a-kind classic features rare and candid interviews with ballplayers who played and lived through the first generation of integration in baseball. This is an important document of the struggle for civil rights in America with a timely and affectionate message: if baseball has done it, the rest of society can too.
Download or read book The Boys of Summer written by Roger Kahn and published by Aurum. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book 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 colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book 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 a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.
Download or read book Invisible Men written by Donn Rogosin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Feb. 13, 1920, a group of independent black baseball team owners held a meeting at a YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri. While they couldn't have known at the time that they were about to change the course of American history, it was out of that meeting that the Negro National League was born. The league flourished throughout the 1920s and beyond, becoming the first successful, organized professional black baseball league in the country. By providing a playing field for African American and Hispanic baseball players to showcase their world-class baseball abilities, it became a force that provided cohesion and a source of pride in black communities. Among them were the legendary pitchers Smokey Joe Williams, whose fastball seemed to "come off a mountain top," Satchel Paige, the ageless wonder who pitched for five decades, and such hitters as Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and Oscar Charleston, whose talents as players may have even been surpassed by their total commitment to their profession and hardiness. Leading the leagues were memorable characters like Gus Greenlee of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Effa Manley of the Newark Eagles. Although their games were ignored by white-owned newspapers and radio stations, black ballplayers and their teams became folk heroes in cities such as Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC, where the teams drew large crowds and became major contributors to the local community life, with influence extending far beyond the baseball fields. This memorable narrative, filled with the memories of many surviving Negro League players, pulls the veil off these "invisible men" who were forced into the segregated leagues. What emerges is a glorious chapter in African American history and an often overlooked aspect of our American past.
Download or read book Jackie Robinson written by Timothy D. Frystak and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke major league baseball's color barrier in partnership with Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Also includes profiles of Leroy "Satchel" Paige, one of the greatest pitchers of his day, who joined the majors in 1948, and of Branch Rickey.
Download or read book Branch Rickey written by Murray Polner and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has any sport executive had as many words written about him as Branch Rickey? A one-time catcher, Rickey managed the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals at the end of the deadball era before serving as vice president of the Dodgers and general manager of the Pirates. Possessed of one of the most creative minds in the game's long history, Rickey made early use of statistical analysis, pioneered the farm system, and pressed for the expansion of major league baseball. But he is best known for integrating organized baseball, signing Jackie Robinson to a contract at a time when the U.S. armed forces were still segregated and the Civil Rights movement was years away. A courageous move, the signing also stands as proof of Rickey's foresight; by tapping the Negro Leagues, he enlarged the pool of exploitable talent. Soon after, major league ties to the talent-rich Caribbean were strengthened, and years later scouts sign players from Asia and all over the globe. Based on nearly one hundred of interviews and vast amounts of research, including exclusive access to Rickey's own papers, Branch Rickey was originally published in 1982. It still stands as the definitive biography of the legendary executive. The McFarland edition includes updates and revisions, new photographs, a foreword by Branch B. Rickey, and a new preface.
Download or read book Jackie Robinson written by Arnold Rampersad and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights. Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern California. We see him blossom there as a student-athlete as he struggled against poverty and racism to uphold the beliefs instilled in him by his mother--faith in family, education, America, and God. We follow Robinson through World War II, when, in the first wave of racial integration in the armed forces, he was commissioned as an officer, then court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a bus. After he plays in the Negro National League, we watch the opening of an all-American drama as, late in 1945, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers recognized Jack as the right player to break baseball's color barrier--and the game was forever changed. Jack's never-before-published letters open up his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Rachel, whom he married just as his perilous venture of integrating baseball began. Her memories are a major resource of the narrative as we learn about the severe harassment Robinson endured from teammates and opponents alike; about death threats and exclusion; about joy and remarkable success. We watch his courageous response to abuse, first as a stoic endurer, then as a fighter who epitomized courage and defiance. We see his growing friendship with white players like Pee Wee Reese and the black teammates who followed in his footsteps, and his embrace by Brooklyn's fans. We follow his blazing career: 1947, Rookie of the Year; 1949, Most Valuable Player; six pennants in ten seasons, and 1962, induction into the Hall of Fame. But sports were merely one aspect of his life. We see his business ventures, his leading role in the community, his early support of Martin Luther King Jr., his commitment to the civil rights movement at a crucial stage in its evolution; his controversial associations with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Humphrey, Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Malcolm X. Rampersad's magnificent biography leaves us with an indelible image of a principled man who was passionate in his loyalties and opinions: a baseball player who could focus a crowd's attention as no one before or since; an activist at the crossroads of his people's struggle; a dedicated family man whose last years were plagued by illness and tragedy, and who died prematurely at fifty-two. He was a pathfinder, an American hero, and he now has the biography he deserves.
Download or read book Jackie Robinson My Own Story written by Jackie Robinson and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiography of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, beginning with his athletic career and dealing particularly with baseball and the first step toward equal participation by African Americans in this great sport. “I believe that a man’s race, color, and religion should never constitute a handicap. The denial to anyone, anywhere, any time of equality of opportunity to work is incomprehensible to me. Moreover, I believe that the American public is not as concerned with a first baseman’s pigmentation as it is with the power of his swing, the dexterity of his slide, the gracefulness of his fielding, or the speed of his legs.”—From Foreword by Branch Hickey
