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The Last Best League, 10th Anniversary Edition
- One Summer, One Season, One Dream
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
Ten years ago, Jim Collins chronicled a season in the life of one team: The Chatham A's, perhaps the most celebrated team in the league. Set against the backdrop of a resort town on the bend of the outer Cape, the story charted the changing fortunes of a handful of players battling slumps and self-doubt in their effort to make the league playoffs and, more importantly, impress the major league scouts.
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. In a new afterword for the tenth anniversary, Collins explores questions that sports literature rarely touches: What does it mean to devote your life to an almost impossible goal and almost but not quite make it? Or make it only briefly before it slips away? What does a dream look like in retrospect? How does the game look now?
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- 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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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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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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A Band of Misfits
- Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants
- By: Andrew Baggarly
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For 53 years, San Francisco waited. Waited for a team like the 2010 Giants to come along. Waited for a team that could end a title drought that started in New York and carried on for more than five decades after a move to the West Coast. Waited for that one magical postseason run that could unleash more than a half-century of pent-up frustration. At long last, the 2010 Giants hopped on that magic carpet and made it happen. San Jose Mercury News beat reporter Andrew Baggarly captured the 2010 Giants' incredible run through the regular season, playoffs and World Series in his new book.
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Relived that season!
- By jeff olson on 12-20-18
By: Andrew Baggarly
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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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Game Six
- Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime
- By: Mark Frost
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Mark Frost takes listeners back to the 1975 World Series in this thrilling account of the greatest baseball game ever played. The Reds and Red Sox endured three soggy days of inactivity to reach game six. But all that downtime could not prepare them for what happened when the skies finally cleared.
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For the love of Baseball
- By Al on 03-23-10
By: Mark Frost
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Molina
- The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty
- By: Bengie Molina, Joan Ryan
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A baseball rules book. A tape measure. A lottery ticket. These were in the pocket of Bengie Molina's father when he died of a heart attack on the rutted Little League field in his Puerto Rican barrio. The items serve as thematic guideposts in Molina's beautiful memoir about his father, who, through baseball, taught his three sons about loyalty, humility, courage, and the true meaning of success.
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A book about life
- By P. Griswold on 06-11-15
By: Bengie Molina, and others
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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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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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Three Nights in August
- Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager
- By: Buzz Bissinger
- Narrated by: Jeffrey Nordling
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Given unprecedented access to La Russa and his team, best-selling journalist Bissinger captures baseball's strategic and emotional essence. We watch from the dugout as La Russa's Cardinals take on their archrivals, the Chicago Cubs, in a thrilling three-game series.
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Book with good premise follows through
- By Peter on 11-18-05
By: Buzz Bissinger
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Summer of '68
- The Season That Changed Baseball - and America - Forever
- By: Tim Wendel
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From the beginning, ’68 was a season rocked by national tragedy and sweeping change. Opening Day was postponed and later played in the shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral. That summer, as the pennant races were heating up, the assassination of Robert Kennedy was later followed by rioting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But even as tensions boiled over and violence spilled into the streets, something remarkable was happening in major league ballparks across the country. Pitchers were dominating like never before, and with records falling and shut-outs mounting, many began hailing ’68 as “The Year of the Pitcher".
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Detroit Upsets St. Louis in 1968 World Series.
- By Matthew Tsien on 05-01-18
By: Tim Wendel
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108 Stitches
- Loose Threads, Ripping Yarns, and the Darndest Characters from My Time in the Game
- By: Ron Darling, Daniel Paisner - contributor
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This is New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated broadcaster Ron Darling's 108 baseball anecdotes that connect America’s game to the men who played it. Darling has played with or reported on just about everybody who has put on a uniform since 1983, and they in turn have played with or reported on just about everybody who put on a uniform in a previous generation. Like the 108 stitches on a baseball, Darling's experiences are interwoven with every athlete who has ever played, every coach or manager, and every fan.
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Meh
- By Amazon Customer on 04-13-19
By: Ron Darling, and others
What listeners say about The Last Best League, 10th Anniversary Edition
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. Leavell
- 07-01-14
Jim Collins: Great American Storyteller
Jim Collins is one of the great storytellers of our time, one mark of which is the ability to tell, in an interesting way, a story in which the reader (or listener) might ordinarily assume he would have no interest. I still recall, many years ago now, reading an article he wrote for the US Airways in-flight magazine on the subject of glass-making, one that I started out of boredom and finished because I was fascinated. (Yes, I pay attention to by-lines; articles, like books, do not write themselves.)
My point? If he can write an engaging article on glass-making, rest assured, he can write a thoroughly delightful book on the subject of baseball.
Though the narrative tells the story of a single season of (arguably) the most-storied team of the Cape Cod League, the Chatham A’s, the brilliance of this book is in the way that Collins, without one entirely realizing it, tells us about baseball. For example, in the middle of a crucial plate appearance for Jamie D’Antona, he breaks into a scholarly disquisition on the history of bat-making, the relative advantages of various types of wood, the evolution of aluminum bats, and the rationale for the “radical” decision by the Cape Cod League to stick with wooden bats. Throughout the book Collins interweaves into the narrative stories of this sort, always with the pitch-perfect timing of a storyteller, someone versed in the oral tradition. And, yes, the story he tells, even for those with no real interest in baseball (I have no real interest in glass-making) makes for a book that is difficult to put down.
Reader interest lies not only in Collins’ ability to tell a story well; in the book, he tells the very human story of a score of young men pursuing their dreams, even those who know that the dream is being snatched away as water from Tantalus. His ability to tell the human side of the story rests on the respect in which he holds these young men and the dozens of people who support them, even when painting an honest but unflattering picture. Anyone doubtful of that trust should be persuaded otherwise by the afterward chapters Collins has written for this tenth anniversary edition; he is able to follow up with these people (both one year and ten years) only because he has remained in touch with them over the years. In the absence of the trust that mutual respect engenders, there is no possibility of follow-up - nor any interest on the writers’ part.
I bought the book because I wanted to hear the end of the story, but re-read it in entirety because it is worth a second read. I chose to listen via audible.com because I was, rightly, confident that Collins’ reading would enhance my experience of it. Whether this is your first time through, or your second, do not hesitate to read this book. Your time will be well-spent.
Of the audiobook, in particular, this is my first experience of a writer narrating his or her own book. Though I had some trepidations - after all, the ability to write well does not necessarily imply the ability to narrate the story well - Collins is such a good storyteller that I assumed this one would be a good bet. His reading of the book is very much worthy of the fine material he has crafted from words. This is not the Jim Norton reading of Ulysses, where my understanding of the book hinged entirely on the elucidation that Norton and Marcella Riordan provide with their voice characterizations, but it is a very good reading of a very good book, one that I recommend highly.
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- Diane14Sim
- 10-16-16
A Unique Opportunity
A once in a lifetime chance to experience the journey of college ballplayers as they enjoy the camaraderie of Cape Cod baseball and suffer the realization that baseball is more than a game and sometimes more than their God-given talents can see them through. Both uplifting and heartbreaking, Jim Collins' superb writing allows us an inside look at the most simple yet complex game we all love - baseball.
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- Lynn W Toole
- 05-13-15
Who cares? What's the point?
Silly me for thinking Mr. Collins' book was going to inspire me to attend a second Cape Cod Baseball League game. I was hoping for a story about a team of special young men who rallied and won a championship or a coach who put together a ragtag group of misfits and defied the odds and made it to the championship or even a team who came together to support an ill teammate or parent or created a successful charity. This is just an uninspiring book about a poor season which became a mediocre season, a pretty good coach with a decent staff and a few good players. I only finished the book, because I was hoping something wonderful was going to happen.
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