World Baseball

Baseball continues to be a popular game both as a spectator sport and as a pastime. Baseball for Dummies is for baseball fans at all levels, from players and coaches to spectators who love the game. Baseball Hall of Fame player Joe Morgan explains baseball with remarkable insight, using down-to-earth language so everyone from the casual observer to the die-hard fan can gain a fuller appreciation of the sport.

Packed with "compelling inside stories" (Chicago Tribune), Teammate is the inspiring memoir from "Grandpa Rossy", the veteran catcher who became the heart and soul of the 2016 Chicago Cubs championship team and was named manager in 2019. In 2016 the Cubs snapped a 108-year curse, winning the World Series in a history-making, seven-game series against the Cleveland Indians. Of the many storylines to Chicago's fairytale season, one stood out: The late-career renaissance of David Ross, the 39-year-old catcher who had played back-up for 13 of his 15 pro seasons.

In the most famous scandal of sports history, eight Chicago White Sox players - including Shoeless Joe Jackson - agreed to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for the promise of $20,000 each from gamblers reportedly working for New York mobster Arnold Rothstein. Heavily favored, Chicago lost the Series five games to three. Although rumors of a fix flew while the series was being played, they were largely disregarded by players and the public at large.

The Gas and Flame Men explores how these famous baseball men, along with an eclectic mix of polo players, collegiate baseball and football stars, professors, architects, and prominent social figures all came together in the Chemical Warfare Service. Jim Leeke examines their service and its long-term effects on their physical and mental health-and on Major League Baseball and the world of sports.

Humorous case histories and profiles of great baseball scouts accompany a discussion of the trade secrets of baseball scouts, the economics of scouting, player development, and the history of the profession. In a new epilogue Kevin Kerrane explores the world of baseball scouting in the late 1990s.

The riveting story of four men - Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige - whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond.

It was the year that Joe DiMaggio set his 56-game hitting streak, that Ted Williams batted .406, that the Dodgers and the Yankees battled each other in a classic World Series, and that America went to war. In this look at what he calls "the best baseball season ever", Robert Creamer skillfully intertwines all these epochal baseball happenings with an informal history of a pivotal period in American life.

In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year's World Series, one of the nation's strongest baseball teams practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In the fall of 1992, America's national pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: cancelling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war with each other, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players' growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game's very foundation.

The Year of the Pitcher is the story of the remarkable 1968 baseball season, which culminated in one of the greatest World Series contests ever, with the Detroit Tigers coming back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cardinals in Game Seven of the World Series. In 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's hope for integration at a heated moment in American history. Denny McLain, his adversary, was a crass self-promoter.

Best-selling author George Vecsey is an esteemed and award-winning sports journalist for the New York Times. In Baseball, he recounts the history of America's national pastime. Baseball has been around in various forms for thousands of years, but only within the last 200 years has it become an American institution. Growing from a sport played in open fields and big-city streets, baseball has seen its share of innovators and detractors, heroes and villains.

Big league baseball would seem to have been a hard sell in 1942. World War II was not going well for the United States in the Pacific and not much better in Europe. Moreover, the country was in drastically short supply of ships, planes, submarines, torpedoes, and other war materials, and Uncle Sam needed men, millions of them, including those from 21 through 35 years of age who had been ordered to register for the draft, the age range of most big league baseball players.

After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927, Ruth embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth’s life and times. Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.

The A-team takes A-Town! Mike and Kate are in Atlanta, where Hammerin' Hank hit his legendary 715th home run. But Hank's historic bat and ball, which he used to break Babe Ruth's record, have been stolen! Good thing Mike and Kate are sleuthing pros. Can the cousins track down Hank Aaron's missing treasurs...before it's gone forever?

The former ESPN columnist and analytics pioneer dramatically recreates an action-packed 2017 game between the Oakland A’s and eventual World Series champion Houston Astros to reveal the myriad ways in which Major League Baseball has changed over the last few decades.

Josh feels like he's starting to make it big! Jaden, the school reporter, says he's going to take the baseball team to number one. Then his dad pulls him off the field and signs him up with Coach Rocky Valentine's youth championship team, the Titans. He says Josh has what it takes to be a baseball great and the Titans will help him get there. Now Josh is gulping down Rocky's "Super Stax" milkshakes to build muscle and trying to fit in with his new teammates.

Red Sox versus Cubs. Game five. It looks like Mike and Kate are about to watch the Cubs win it all. But then someone starts messing with the team - ruining equipment, getting Cubs players in trouble, and even stirring up an old baseball curse. Now the Red Sox are coming back! Who will win the ultimate baseball trophy? And can Mike and Kate make sure it's won fair and square?

This best-selling, highly-acclaimed account is a hilarious but scathing baseball tell-all. After being voted the 1977 American League Cy Young Award winner, Sparky Lyle was rewarded for his efforts by being benched. The Yankees, a leader of free agency, signed Goose Gossage as their closer. Things only went downhill from there and the 1978 season turned out to be one of controversy, firings, fights, and acrimony. In short, it was a zoo.

Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange e-mails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness not only the greatest comeback ever in sports, but the first Red Sox championship in 86 years as the team put '86 behind them and eighty-sixed the Curse.

In 1940, at just 15 years old, small-town baseball star Gene Moore was signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who saw in him the potential to become one of the great catchers of all time. Before that could happen, though, WWII intervened. Gene's story, a surprising paean to the power and humanity of a game, is told here by his son, a first-time author who exhibits the confidence and pacing of a pro.