Download or read book They Called Me God written by Doug Harvey and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incredible memoir from the man voted one of the “Best Umpires of All Time” by the Society of American Baseball Research—filled with more than three decades of fascinating baseball stories. Doug Harvey was a California farm boy, a high school athlete who nevertheless knew that what he really wanted was to become an unsung hero—a major league umpire. Working his way through the minor leagues, earning three hundred dollars a month, he survived just about everything, even riots in stadiums in Puerto Rico. And while players and other umps hit the bars at night, Harvey memorized the rule book. In 1962, he broke into the big leagues and was soon listening to rookie Pete Rose worrying that he would be cut by the Reds and laying down the law with managers such as Tommy Lasorda and Joe Torre. This colorful memoir takes you behind the plate for some of baseball’s most memorable moments, including Roberto Clemente’s three thousandth and final hit; the heroic three-and-two pinch-hit home run by Kirk Gibson in the ’88 World Series; and the nail-biting excitement of the ’68 World Series. But beyond the drama, Harvey turned umpiring into an art. He was a man so respected, whose calls were so feared and infallible, that the players called him “God.” And through it all, he lived by three rules: never take anything from a player, never back down from a call, and never carry a grudge. A book for anyone who loves baseball, They Called Me God is a funny and fascinating tale of on- and off-the-field action, peopled by unforgettable characters from Bob Gibson to Nolan Ryan, and a treatise on good umpiring techniques. In a memoir that transcends the sport, Doug Harvey tells a gripping story of responsibility, fairness, and honesty.

Download or read book Nobody s Perfect written by Armando Galarraga and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Detroit Tigers, an umpire, a pitcher, and a mistake—one of the “classic, human, baseball stories” (Ken Burns, creator of the PBS mini-series Baseball). The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in over 130 years, it has happened only twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first. Except that’s not how it entered the record books. That’s because Jim Joyce, voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 and 2011, missed the call on the final out. But rather than throwing a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound, and finished the game. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said later in the locker room. “You might think everything that could have been said, replayed, and revealed about that night has already been uttered, logged, and exposed. You would, however, be as wrong as the unfortunate Mr. Joyce” (The Detroit News). In Nobody’s Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports. The result is “a masterpiece”, an absorbing insider’s look at two careers in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of pure grace and sportsmanship (The Huffington Post).

Download or read book The Umpire Is Out written by Dale Scott and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dale Scott's career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, working in every Major League Baseball stadium, and interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players, from future Hall of Famers to one-game wonders. Scott has enough stories about his career on the field to fill a dozen books, and there are plenty of those stories here. He's not interested in settling scores, but throughout the book he's honest about managers and players, some of whom weren't always perfect gentlemen. But what makes Scott's book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career. Granted, that was after decades of remaining in the closet, and Scott writes vividly and movingly about having to "play the game": maintaining a facade of straightness while privately becoming his true self and building a lasting relationship with his future husband. He navigated this obstacle course at a time when his MLB career was just taking off--and when North America was consumed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Scott's story isn't only about his leading a sort of double life, then opening himself up to the world and discovering a new generosity of spirit. It's also a baseball story, filled with insights and memorable anecdotes that come so naturally from someone who spent decades among the world's greatest baseball players, managers, and games. Scott's story is fascinating both for his umpiring career and for his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within baseball and across sports.

Download or read book You ve Got to Have Balls to Make it in this League written by Pam Postema and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In You?ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League Pam Postema reveals with frank language and uncompromising candor what it was like being an umpire in professional baseball. For thirteen seasons, from 1977 until her unconditional release in 1989, Postema umpired more than two thousand baseball games, making national news as she worked in various minor leagues as high as level AAA?one step below the majors. She also called many major league spring training games as well as the Hall of Fame game in 1988 between the Yankees and the Braves. ø Postema?s story is one of grit and determination to succeed in a profession dominated by men, but it is also an intimate look at umpiring. Postema discusses the mindset behind making a proper call, the weeks of intensive training, ejecting problem players and managers, and the chaos mixed with the monotony of being on the road most of the year. Throughout, Postema relates her encounters with major league stars when they were just up-and-comers in the minors.

Download or read book The Umpire Strikes Back written by Ron Luciano and published by Permuted Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is Ron Luciano, the funniest ump ever to call balls and strikes. A huge and awesome legend who leaps and spins and shoots players with an index finger while screaming OUTOUTOUT!!! Now baseball's flamboyant fan-on-the-field comes out from behind the mask to call the game as he really sees it. There’s the day the automatic umpire debuted at home plate—and struck out. The time Rod Carew stole home twice in one inning, and Earl Weaver stole second base—and took it back to the dugout. The pitch Tommy John dropped on the mound, which Luciano called a strike. And there’s the fantastic phantom double play, the impossible frozen ice-ball theory, and, another first, Luciano picking Harmon Killebrew off second base. From brawls to catcalls, from dugout jokes to on-the-field pratfalls to one-of-a-kind conversations with baseball’s greats, Ron Luciano, the only umpire who confessed to missing calls, takes a few grand slam swings of his own. It is baseball at its best.

Download or read book Clean Your Cleats written by Dan Blewett and published by Dan Blewett. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Does it Take to Have a Great Baseball Career? You daydream about one day seeing your face on a baseball card. You live for pressure and the green grass beneath your cleats. But as your career progresses, the game gets harder. You slump and struggle. You get injured and overlooked. Your confidence plummets. Can you keep improving? Are your big dreams still within reach? A Handbook for the Dedicated Player Clean Your Cleats is filled with stories and advice learned the hard way, over a long career on the diamond. Develop better routines and improve your consistency. Handle the ups and downs with confidence and resolve. Strengthen relationships with teammates, parents and coaches. Learn mindset strategies to become the best version of you. Dan Blewett, in this practical guide, helps players understand all the little things in baseball that make a huge difference over a long career. Why clean your cleats? Because every detail matters.

Download or read book Ball Four written by Jim Bouton and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books. When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.” Today Ball Four has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.” Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman “An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” —The Washington Post

Download or read book The Baseball Codes written by Jason Turbow and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider’s look at baseball’s unwritten rules, explained with examples from the game’s most fascinating characters and wildest historical moments. Everyone knows that baseball is a game of intricate regulations, but it turns out to be even more complicated than we realize. All aspects of baseball—hitting, pitching, and baserunning—are affected by the Code, a set of unwritten rules that governs the Major League game. Some of these rules are openly discussed (don’t steal a base with a big lead late in the game), while others are known only to a minority of players (don’t cross between the catcher and the pitcher on the way to the batter’s box). In The Baseball Codes, old-timers and all-time greats share their insights into the game’s most hallowed—and least known—traditions. For the learned and the casual baseball fan alike, the result is illuminating and thoroughly entertaining. At the heart of this book are incredible and often hilarious stories involving national heroes (like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays) and notorious headhunters (like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale) in a century-long series of confrontations over respect, honor, and the soul of the game. With The Baseball Codes, we see for the first time the game as it’s actually played, through the eyes of the players on the field. With rollicking stories from the past and new perspectives on baseball’s informal rulebook, The Baseball Codes is a must for every fan.

Download or read book How Baseball Happened written by Thomas W. Gilbert and published by Godine+ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of baseball’s nineteenth-century origins: “a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat” (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal). You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. Perhaps you’ve read that baseball’s color line was first crossed by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. They were hundreds of uncredited, ordinary people who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War. In this myth-busting history, Thomas W. Gilbert reveals the true beginnings of baseball. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and other accounts, he explains how it evolved through the mid-nineteenth century into a modern sport of championships, media coverage, and famous stars—all before the first professional league was formed in 1871. Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year

Download or read book The Call Up to the Majors written by Thomas A. Rhoads and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-28 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the unique relationships between professional baseball teams and the unique ways professional baseball leagues are organized in North America with a primary focus on how proximity can and does impact consumer demand. Perhaps more than any other matter that arises in the business of baseball, proximity to other professional baseball teams is a concern that has uniquely shaped professional baseball leagues in North America. It is this particular component in how professional baseball leagues are organized that suggests building a proximity-based approach to studying the economics of minor league baseball. This book opens up new ways to study minor league baseball, specifically, and sports leagues more generally. So even as advanced technology has eliminated some of the need for fans to be in close proximity to the teams they love to follow, there is still a need to understand more completely how proximity matters can impact the way professional baseball leagues are structured and how that structure can ultimately impact the quality of the games that entertain sports fans everywhere. This book will be of interest to both sports economists and practitioners.

Download or read book Infinite Baseball written by Alva Noë and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball is a strange sport: it consists of long periods in which little seems to be happening, punctuated by high-energy outbursts of rapid fire activity. Because of this, despite ever greater profits, Major League Baseball is bent on finding ways to shorten games, and to tailor baseball to today's shorter attention spans. But for the true fan, baseball is always compelling to watch -and intellectually fascinating. It's superficially slow-pace is an opportunity to participate in the distinctive thinking practice that defines the game. If baseball is boring, it's boring the way philosophy is boring: not because there isn't a lot going on, but because the challenge baseball poses is making sense of it all. In this deeply entertaining book, philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths. The book ranges from the nature of umpiring and the role of instant replay, to the nature of the strike zone, from the rampant use of surgery to controversy surrounding performance enhancing drugs. Throughout, Noe's observations are surprising and provocative. Infinite Baseball is a book for the true baseball fan.

Download or read book TAKE TWO AND HIT TO RIGHT written by Jim Driscoll and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2023-10-12 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Take Two And Hit To Right” is an enjoyable and sometimes satirical insight into the heart and soul of the grand old game of Baseball. It covers its historical beginnings, as well as its make-up and growth, as it grew into the fabric of our National Pastime. It covers all of the surrounding aspects of the game, from Little League level all the way up to the Major Leagues, from the cat-calls from the stands to the lexicon of its play-by-play. Even its depiction up on the silver screen is reviewed. It’s all about the Game, with all of the fundamental components that make it such an enjoyable and entertaining treat to fans everywhere.

Download or read book Long Shot written by Mike Piazza and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelve-time All-Star catcher describes the inspiration he gleaned from his self-made father, his early career with the Dodgers, his memorable 2000 World Series with the Mets, and the controversies that have marked his career.

Download or read book Dear Baseball Gods A Memoir written by Dan Blewett and published by Dan Blewett. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dear Baseball Gods, Why didn't you look out for him? Didn't he deserve better? He hustled, competed, and played the game the right way. What happened wasn't fair. A Second Comeback Dan sat by a tree, staring at the ground trying to decide what he would do next. The doctor had just explained that everything he worked for was now ruined. A second Tommy John surgery? Does anyone come back from that? Is my career over? Is this it? A Winding Road to the Top As a walk-on in college, Dan had to earn everything. He pitched on three hours sleep, lived in the clubhouse, played for a team that collapsed mid-season, and endured more arm pain than any kid should. A Way to Move On When finally forced to hang up his cleats, Dan looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the man peering back. If no longer a ballplayer...what would he do? What had been the point of it all? Who was he? The Deeper Side of Life as an Athlete In this philosophical memoir, written as a series of letters, you'll learn that the pinstripes don't wash off so easily.

Download or read book Light or Darkness Reclaiming the Light in Sports written by Dr. Bob Stouffer and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Inside Game written by Keith Law and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

Download or read book Bargaining with Baseball written by William B. Gould IV and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1995, William B. Gould IV, then chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, cast the deciding vote to obtain the injunction that ended the longest strike in baseball history. Sixteen years of peaceful relations between baseball labor and management have followed, as well as unprecedented prosperity in a relationship that had just endured 30 years of strikes and lockouts. This study, which clearly illustrates the practical impact of law on America's pastime, considers the 140-year sweep of labor-management relationships and conflict, exploring player-owner disputes, the development of free agency, the collective bargaining process, and the racial integration of baseball, among other topics. It concludes with a discussion of the "steroids era," the problem with maintaining Jackie Robinson's legacy in the 21st century, and globalization.