It’s no surprise that, with so much exposure to the game, your child has developed an interest in the sport. Every single time they’re around someone who loves baseball, they’re going to hear excited conversations about scores, player performance, and historical clashes between top players. And when your child starts to get curious and ask out-of-the-box questions, they’re going to turn to you for answers.

There are few places more exciting than the basketball court. Yet few kids realize just how exciting the whole story of the game really is. More than 210 million people follow the NBA league across its various social media platforms, making it the most popular sports league in the world. So why is it that no one really understands its history? If your kids aspire to be the next LeBron James, they’re already hungry for basketball knowledge.

Astroball is the inside story of how a gang of outsiders went beyond the stats to find a new way to win. When new Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and his top analyst, the former rocket scientist Sig Mejdal, arrived in Houston in 2011, they had already spent more than half a decade trying to understand how human instinct and expertise could be blended with hard numbers. Astroball is the story of the next wave of thinking in baseball and beyond, at once a remarkable underdog story and a fascinating look at the cutting edge of evaluating and optimizing human potential.

A New York Times best seller, David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions. The tactile authenticity of Halberstam's knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed.

The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.

The San Francisco 49ers shaped the NFL throughout the 1980s with their unique blend of precision, panache, and preparation. Three decades later, NFL teams are still copying the system and the methods that made the 49ers unlike any other organization in professional sports. Now fans of this dynamic franchise will relive all the action and thrills of 49ers football through the eyes of one of the greatest San Francisco legends of all time: Roger Craig.

Barcelona is the greatest football team in the world, the greatest for a generation, and possibly the greatest of all time. This is the untold inside story of how the best and most loved football team in the world came to redefine how the game is played. We start with the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley, the game that ended the debate about whether Barcelona was the greatest team in the world and began a new one: are they the best ever?

In The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, veteran baseball writer Bruce Markusen tells the story of one of the most likable and significant teams in the history of professional sports. In addition to the fact that they fielded the first all-minority lineup in major league history, the 1971 Pirates are noteworthy for the team's inspiring individual performances.

The author, a native of Philadelphia and an alumnus, as was Wilt Chamberlain, of Overbrook High School, spent four years researching and interviewing the most important people in Wilt's life. The result is a capturing of Wilt's personality and thoughts that relatively few people other than family and closest friends ever knew.

Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari is known for his unparalleled ability to recruit the nation's best young players, some of whom will spend just one year with him before going to the NBA, and convincing them to commit to the team without sacrificing their personal goals. It is a promise he makes to them: "Fully invest in the present - and each other - and I guarantee it will serve your future." Here, for the first time, he distills his team-building methods in ways that apply to CEOs, business owners, and more.

For fans of Michael Lewis, the astounding untold story of how professional sports transformed, in the span of a single generation, from a cottage industry into a massive global business. In the cash-soaked world of contemporary sports, where every season brings news of higher salaries, endorsement deals, and television contracts, it is mind-boggling to remember that as recently as the 1970s elite athletes earned so little money that many were forced to work second jobs in the off-season to make ends meet.

Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam's best seller takes you inside the football genius of Bill Belichick for an insightful profile in leadership. Bill Belichick's thirty-one years in the NFL have been marked by amazing success - most recently with the New England Patriots. In this groundbreaking audiobook, David Halberstam explores the nuances of both the game and the man behind it. He uncovers what makes Bill Belichick tick both on and off the field.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time. But his preeminence is more than just extraordinary athletic ability: The lessons of his life - such as focus, passion, hard work, perseverance, and accountability - have shaped him into one of the most revered celebrities of the 20th century. In this inspiring audiobook Pat Williams, motivational speaker and senior vice president of the NBA's Orlando Magic, reveals Jordan's method for living a life of greatness that we can all incorporate into our lives.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Return of the King comes the story of LeBron James' incredible transformation from basketball star to sports and business mogul.

Ever since he joined the sports department of the Boston Globe in 1968, sports enthusiasts have been blessed with the writing and reporting of Bob Ryan. Tony Kornheiser calls him the "quintessential American sportswriter". For the past 25 years, he has also been a regular on various ESPN shows, especially The Sports Reporters, spreading his knowledge and enthusiasm for sports of all kinds.

When Kevin Garnett shocked the world by announcing that he would not be attending college - as young basketball prodigies were expected to do - but instead would enter the 1995 NBA draft directly from high school, he blazed a trail for a generation of teenage basketball players to head straight for the pros. That trend would continue until the NBA instituted an age limit in 2005, requiring all players to attend college or another developmental program for at least one year.

Clarinda, Iowa, population 5,000, sits two hours from anything. There, between the cornfields and hog yards, is a ball field with a bronze bust of a man named Merl Eberly, a baseball whisperer who specialized in second chances and lost causes. The statue was a gift from one of Merl's original long-shot projects, a skinny kid from the ghetto in Los Angeles who would one day become a beloved Hall of Fame shortstop: Ozzie Smith.

In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team's Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. By quantifying the game's intangibles, they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay an American League pennant. This is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.

Barcelona is the greatest football team in the world, the greatest for a generation, and possibly the greatest of all time. This is the untold inside story of how the best and most loved football team in the world came to redefine how the game is played. We start with the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley, the game that ended the debate about whether Barcelona was the greatest team in the world and began a new one: are they the best ever?

For fans of Michael Lewis, the astounding untold story of how professional sports transformed, in the span of a single generation, from a cottage industry into a massive global business. In the cash-soaked world of contemporary sports, where every season brings news of higher salaries, endorsement deals, and television contracts, it is mind-boggling to remember that as recently as the 1970s elite athletes earned so little money that many were forced to work second jobs in the off-season to make ends meet.

The San Francisco 49ers shaped the NFL throughout the 1980s with their unique blend of precision, panache, and preparation. Three decades later, NFL teams are still copying the system and the methods that made the 49ers unlike any other organization in professional sports. Now fans of this dynamic franchise will relive all the action and thrills of 49ers football through the eyes of one of the greatest San Francisco legends of all time: Roger Craig.

You gotta know the rules to play the game. Ball is life. Take it to the hoop. Soar. What can we imagine for ourselves? What if we were the star players, moving and grooving through the game of life? What if we had our own rules of the game to help us get what we want, what we aspire to, what will enrich our lives? The Playbook is intended to provide inspiration for kids ages 10 and up to help them succeed on and off the court.

The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.

In Golden Days, acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum uses these two teams - the Jerry West/Wilt Chamberlain/Elgin Baylor Lakers and the Stephen Curry/Kevin Durant/Draymond Green Warriors - to trace the dynamic history of the National Basketball Association, which for much of the last half century has marched memorably through the state of California. Tying together the two strands of McCallum's story is Hall of Famer West, the ferociously competitive Laker guard who later became one of the key architects of the Warriors.