Download or read book The Soul of Baseball written by Joe Posnanski and published by William Morrow Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When legendary Negro League player Buck O'Neil asked Joe Posnanski how he fell in love with baseball, the renowned sports columnist was inspired by the question. He decided to spend the 2005 baseball season touring the country with the ninety-four-year-old O'Neil in hopes of rediscovering the love that first drew them to the game. The Soul of Baseball is as much the story of Buck O'Neil as it is the story of baseball. Driven by a relentless optimism and his two great passions—for America's pastime and for jazz, America's music—O'Neil played solely for love. In an era when greedy, steroid-enhanced athletes have come to characterize professional ball, Posnanski offers a salve for the damaged spirit: the uplifting life lessons of a truly extraordinary man who never missed an opportunity to enjoy and love life.
Download or read book Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan s Soul written by Jack Canfield and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Play Ball! These words resonate with special meaning in the minds of anyone who has ever enjoyed a game of baseball. Every fan will be amused and touched by stories of sportsmanship and victory gathered from the clay diamonds of America.
Download or read book The Baseball 100 written by Joe Posnanski and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.
Download or read book The Church of Baseball written by Ron Shelton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LA TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning screenwriter and director of cult classic Bull Durham, the extremely entertaining behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film, and an insightful primer on the art and business of moviemaking. "This book tells you how to make a movie—the whole nine innings of it—out of nothing but sheer will.” —Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy "The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the church of baseball."—Annie in Bull Durham Bull Durham, the breakthrough 1988 film about a minor league baseball team, is widely revered as the best sports movie of all time. But back in 1987, Ron Shelton was a first-time director and no one was willing to finance a movie about baseball—especially a story set in the minors. The jury was still out on Kevin Costner’s leading-man potential, while Susan Sarandon was already a has-been. There were doubts. But something miraculous happened, and The Church of Baseball attempts to capture why. From organizing a baseball camp for the actors and rewriting key scenes while on set, to dealing with a short production schedule and overcoming the challenge of filming the sport, Shelton brings to life the making of this beloved American movie. Shelton explains the rarely revealed ins and outs of moviemaking, from a film’s inception and financing, screenwriting, casting, the nuts and bolts of directing, the postproduction process, and even through its release. But this is also a book about baseball and its singular romance in the world of sports. Shelton spent six years in the minor leagues before making this film, and his experiences resonate throughout this book. Full of wry humor and insight, The Church of Baseball tells the remarkable story behind an iconic film.
Download or read book Future Value written by Eric Longenhagen and published by Triumph Books. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented look inside the world of baseball scouting and evaluation from two of the industry's top prospect analysts For the modern Major League team, player evaluation is a complex, multi-pronged, high-tech pursuit. But far from becoming obsolete in this environment—as Michael Lewis' Moneyball once forecast—the role of the scout in today's game has evolved and even expanded. Rather than being the antithesis of a data-driven approach, scouting now represents an essential analytical component in a team's arsenal. Future Value is a thorough dive into baseball's changing world of talent acquisition and development, a world with its own language, methods, metrics, and madness. From rural high schools to elite amateur showcases, from the back fields of spring training to major league draft rooms, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel break down the key systems and techniques used to assess talent. It's a process that has moved beyond the quintessential stopwatches and radar guns to include statistical models, countless measurable indicators, and a broader international reach. ?Practical and probing, discussing wide-ranging topics from tool grades to front office politics, this is an illuminating exploration of how to watch baseball and see the future.
Download or read book Baseball as a Road to God written by John Sexton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.
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 Negro League Baseball written by Daniel Wolff and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This treasure trove of images by Withers, the unofficial team photographer for the Memphis Red Sox, captures the peak of Negro League action through the years of groundbreaking integration, as well as the community in which black baseball was played.
Download or read book Perfect Once Removed written by Phillip Hoose and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the winter of 1956, Phillip Hoose was a gawky, uncoordinated 9-year-old boy just moved to a new town-Speedway, Indiana-and trying to fit into a new school and circle of friends. Baseball was his passion, even though he was terrible at it and constantly shamed by his lack of ability. But he had one thing going for him that his classmates could never have-his second cousin was a pitcher for the New York Yankees. Don Larsen wasn't a star, but he was in the Yankees' rotation. And on October 8, 1956, he pitched perhaps the greatest game that has ever been pitched: a perfect game (27 batters up, 27 out) against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. It forever changed Phil's life. Perfect, Once Removed, recalls with pitch-perfect clarity the angst and jubilation of Phil Hoose's 9th year. To be published on the 50th anniversary of The Perfect Game, it will be one of the best baseball books of 2006.
Download or read book Game Worn written by Stephen Wong and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game Worn: Baseball Treasures from the Game's Greatest Heroes and Moments is a richly illustrated exploration and first-of-its-kind compendium study of the world's most coveted and precious baseball uniforms worn by Major League ballplayers during the twentieth century. This coffee-table book features many of the most historically significant uniforms, jackets, hats, as well as other treasured baseball collectibles that tell us as much about the history and soul of America as they do about the game and the players. Some of the extraordinary highlights featured in this book include: Babe Ruth's road jersey from his first season with the New York Yankees (1920), the sole surviving uniform from the infamous 1919 World Series, Joe DiMaggio's rookie uniform from 1936, the Boston Red Sox road uniform Ted Williams wore during his epic 1941 season, Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodgers home jersey from the 1952 season, Bill Mazeroski's Pittsburgh Pirates home uniform worn to hit the game-winning home run in game 7 of the 1960 World Series, and a visual feast of rare uniform styles. Each of the 71 entries includes sumptuous photography of the uniform and associated memorabilia, as well as a poignant and lively narrative highlighting its significance. The book also features a first-of-its-kind illustrated compendium with elaborate definitions of relevant terms that every baseball fan and collector needs to know, ranging from the All Star Game Uniform to the Zig-Zag Stitch. This book is an absolute must-have for anyone who has ever loved the game of baseball.
Download or read book The Baseball Drill Book written by Bob Bennett and published by Human Kinetics. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers 198 activities for baseball players' training. Covers drills for warm-up, throwing, catching, base running, hitting, pitching, and fielding.
Download or read book We Are the Ship written by Kadir Nelson and published by Jump At The Sun. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We are the ship; all else the sea.”—Rube Foster, founder of the Negro National League The story of Negro League baseball is the story of gifted athletes and determined owners; of racial discrimination and international sportsmanship; of fortunes won and lost; of triumphs and defeats on and off the field. It is a perfect mirror for the social and political history of black America in the first half of the twentieth century. But most of all, the story of the Negro Leagues is about hundreds of unsung heroes who overcame segregation, hatred, terrible conditions, and low pay to do the one thing they loved more than anything else in the world: play ball. Using an “Everyman” player as his narrator, Kadir Nelson tells the story of Negro League baseball from its beginnings in the 1920s through its decline after Jackie Robinson crossed over to the majors in 1947. The voice is so authentic, you will feel as if you are sitting on dusty bleachers listening intently to the memories of a man who has known the great ballplayers of that time and shared their experiences. But what makes this book so outstanding are the dozens of full-page and double-page oil paintings—breathtaking in their perspectives, rich in emotion, and created with understanding and affection for these lost heroes of our national game. We Are the Ship is a tour de force for baseball lovers of all ages.
Download or read book Why Baseball Matters written by Susan Jacoby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.
Download or read book The Book written by and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball "by The Book."
Download or read book The Comic Book Story of Baseball written by Alex Irvine and published by Ten Speed Graphic. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A graphic novel-style history of baseball, providing an illustrated look at the major games, players, and rule changes that shaped the sport. This graphic novel steps up to the plate and covers all the bases in illustrating the origin of America's national pastime, presenting a complete look at the beginnings (both real and legendary), developments, triumphs, and tragedies of baseball. It also breaks down the cultural impact and significance of the sport both in America and overseas (including Japan, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic), from the early days of America to the flying W outside Wrigley Field in 2016. Featuring members of Baseball's Hall of Fame and modern day stand-outs—including Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, the 1930s New York Yankees, the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the 2016 Chicago Cubs, and more—The Comic Book Story of Baseball spotlights the players, teams, games, and moments that built the sport's legacy and ensured its popularity.
Download or read book Son of Havana written by Luis Tiant and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir by the mustachioed baseball pitcher who went playing rocky, trash-ridden fields in Castro’s Cuba to becoming a Boston Red Sox legend. Luis Tiant is one of the most charismatic and accomplished players in Boston Red Sox and Major League Baseball history. With a barrel-chested physique and a Fu Manchu mustache, Tiant may not have looked like the lean, sculpted aces he usually played against, but nobody was a tougher competitor on the diamond, and few were as successful. There may be no more qualified twentieth-century pitcher not yet enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His big-league dreams came at a price: racism in the Deep South and the Boston suburbs, and nearly fifteen years separated from a family held captive in Castro’s Cuba. But baseball also delivered World Series stardom and a heroic return to his island home after close to a half-century of forced exile. The man whose name—“El Tiante” —became a Fenway Park battle cry has never fully shared his tale in his own words, until now. In Son of Havana, Tiant puts his heart on his sleeve and describes his road from torn-up fields in Havana to the pristine lawns of major league ballparks. Readers will share Tiant’s pride when appeals by a pair of US senators to baseball-fanatic Castro secure freedom for Luis’s parents to fly to Boston and witness the 1975 World Series glory of their child. And readers will join the big-league ballplayers for their spring 2016 exhibition game in Havana, when Tiant—a living link to the earliest, scariest days of the Castro regime—threw out the first pitch.
Download or read book Spring Training written by William Knowlton Zinsser and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new Introduction by the author, this book vividly brings to life the unique once-a-year relationship between Bradenton, Florida, and its adopted team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. 25 photos.
