A Renegade Championship Summer
A Broadcaster's View of a Magical Minor League Baseball Season
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Narrated by:
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Mark Rossman
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By:
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Rick Schultz
About this listen
Come along for the ride with the 1999 New York-Penn League Champion Hudson Valley Renegades. Hear from the players and coaches who made it happen, including superstar Josh Hamilton and many other household names! You'll also get the true feel of minor league baseball, going behind the scenes with umpires, front office executives, scouts, former players and many more! Put yourself in the dugout, clubhouse and team bus to see what really goes on with a minor league baseball team! See what kind of impact Josh Hamilton, the number one pick in the draft, had on the 1999 Renegades. Truly a must for any baseball fan who wants to be closer than ever to the game!
This storybook season took place in the summer of 1999. It was my final season as the play by play voice of the Hudson Valley Renegades, a Tampa Bay Devil Rays Short Season A-Ball affiliate. I had no idea what kind of ride I was in for, but I paid close attention just in case. This season in 1999 turned out to be one of the most memorable, amazing runs in recent minor league baseball history! I was there for every pitch and every bus ride. I witnessed every moment, as the season crystalized into one for the ages. Complete with future Big Leaguers such as Josh Hamilton, Matt Diaz, Jorge Cantu and Edwin Rodriguez, the season was a continuous series of unexpected turns.
Following the season, I spent seven months holed up in a downtown apartment, transcribing thousands of hours of taped interviews and culling pages of notes. I'd make phone calls to players - recalling my recollection of events, in an effort to piece together an accurate and exciting recap of the season.
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Relived that season!
- By jeff olson on 12-20-18
By: Andrew Baggarly
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The Captain
- The Journey of Derek Jeter
- By: Ian O'Connor
- Narrated by: Nick Pollifrone
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Every spring, Little Leaguers across the country mimic his stance and squabble over the right to wear his number, 2, the next number to be retired by the world’s most famous ball team. Derek Jeter is their hero. He walks in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, and someday his shadow will loom just as large. Yet he has never been the best player in baseball. In fact, he hasn’t always been the best player on his team. But his intangible grace and Jordanesque ability to play big in the biggest of postseason moments make him the face of the modern Yankee dynasty, and of America’s game.
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Great book, terrible narrator.
- By Butter on 05-09-14
By: Ian O'Connor
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Bums
- An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
- By: Peter Golenbock
- Narrated by: Raymond Todd
- Length: 19 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. In Bums, best-selling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former players, writers, front-office executives, and faithful fans.
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A MUST for the true Dodgers or Giants fan!!
- By Karen on 02-25-07
By: Peter Golenbock
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The Best Team Money Can Buy
- The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse
- By: Molly Knight
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2012 the Los Angeles Dodgers were bought out of bankruptcy in the most expensive sale in sports history. Los Angeles icon Magic Johnson and his partners hoped to put together a team worthy of Hollywood. By most accounts they have succeeded, if not always in the way they might have imagined.
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BOTH BOOK AND TEAM NEED TO BE BETTER
- By Ray on 09-06-15
By: Molly Knight
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The Only Rule Is It Has to Work
- Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team
- By: Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, John Pruden
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies - with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That's what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.
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Narrarators have never watched baseball. Ever!
- By Anon on 06-02-16
By: Ben Lindbergh, and others
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The Last Innocents
- The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers
- By: Michael Leahy
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Legendary Dodgers Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Wes Parker, Jeff Torborg, Dick Tracewski, and Tommy Davis encapsulated 1960s America: white and black, Jewish and Christian, wealthy and working class, pro-Vietnam and anti-war, golden boy and seasoned veteran. The Last Innocents is a thoughtful, technicolor portrait of these seven players - friends, mentors, confidants, rivals, and allies - and their storied team that offers an intriguing look at a sport and a nation in transition.
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Reliving my youth
- By PJ on 05-24-17
By: Michael Leahy
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The Last Folk Hero
- The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson
- By: Jeff Pearlman
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 22 hrs
- Unabridged
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From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.
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If you are a sports fan and over 35 years old, you have to listen/read this. Awesome!
- By betty sammons on 06-29-23
By: Jeff Pearlman
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Pete Rose
- An American Dilemma
- By: Kostya Kennedy
- Narrated by: Ben Bartolone
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Pete Rose played baseball with a singular and headfirst abandon that endeared him to fans and peers, even as it riled others--a figure at once magnetic, beloved and polarizing. Rose has more base hits than anyone in history, yet he is not in the Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years ago he was banished from baseball for gambling, then ruled ineligible for Cooperstown; today, the question "Does Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame?" has evolved into perhaps the most provocative in sports, a layered, slippery and ever-relevant moral conundrum.
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Good book, not so good production.
- By david d. on 05-01-14
By: Kostya Kennedy
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Pull Up a Chair
- The Vin Scully Story
- By: Curt Smith
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Since 1950, the instantly recognizable voice of Vin Scully has invited listeners to “pull up a chair” for his peerless play-by-play sports reporting. Recruited and mentored by the legendary Red Barber, Scully has narrated NBC’s Game of the Week, twelve All-Star Games, eighteen no-hitters, and twenty-five World Series, describing players from Duke Snider to Orel Hershiser to Manny Ramirez, with hundreds in between.
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Almost perfect
- By steve finkelstein on 02-06-21
By: Curt Smith
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The Bad Guys Won
- A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform - and Maybe the Best
- By: Jeff Pearlman
- Narrated by: Jeff Pearlman
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake-hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.
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Maybe 3.5
- By Lifeisshort on 02-15-22
By: Jeff Pearlman
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The Chicago Cubs
- Story of a Curse
- By: Rich Cohen
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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For Rich Cohen and millions of other fans, the Chicago Cubs have always been more than a team: they've been the protagonists of a King Arthur epic, in search of the Holy Grail that is winning the World Series. A chronicle of the last few miraculous seasons as experienced through the prism of Cubs history, The Chicago Cubs tracks the famous curse, which was placed on the team in 1945 by the infamous owner of the Billy Goat Tavern, who was ejected from Wrigley Field when he tried to bring his goat into the grandstand for the fifth game of the World Series.
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just listen and it all happens again
- By Z. Kuhn on 10-28-17
By: Rich Cohen
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The Journey Home
- My Life in Pinstripes
- By: Jorge Posada, Gary Brozek
- Narrated by: Lorenzo Irizarry
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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For 17 seasons the name Jorge Posada was synonymous with New York Yankees baseball. A fixture behind home plate throughout the Yankees biggest successes, Jorge became the Yankees' star catcher almost immediately upon his arrival, and in the years that followed, his accomplishments, work ethic, and leadership established him as one of the greatest Yankees ever to put on the uniform.
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Jorge who?!!
- By Jacques on 11-30-22
By: Jorge Posada, and others
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The Last Best League, 10th Anniversary Edition
- One Summer, One Season, One Dream
- By: Jim Collins
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes of making it to "The Show." The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world, producing one out of every six major league players. Over the last decade, baseball's hard truths became evident for the Chatham stars who went on to play professionally, and the final chapter of their story can now be written.
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Jim Collins: Great American Storyteller
- By M. Leavell on 07-01-14
By: Jim Collins
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You Can't Make This Up
- Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television
- By: Al Michaels, L. Jon Wertheim
- Narrated by: Al Michaels, Ray Porter
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In this highly entertaining and insightful memoir, one of television’s most respected broadcasters interweaves the story of his life and career with lively firsthand tales of some of the most thrilling events and fascinating figures in modern sports.
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Great, everything I hoped for, but...
- By Shortfellow on 11-30-14
By: Al Michaels, and others