books tagged “baseball”

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Ball Four
by Jim Bouton

ISBN 1582613109 (1-58261-310-9)
Hardcover, Sports Pub

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Book summary:
As a player, former hurler Jim Bouton did nothing half-way; he threw so hard he'd lose his cap on almost every pitch. In the early '70s, he tossed off one of the funniest, most revealing, insider's takes on baseball life in Ball Four, his diary of the season he tried to pitch his way back from oblivion on the strength of a knuckler. The real curve, though, is Bouton's honesty. He carves humans out of heroes, and shines a light into the game's corners. A quarter century later, Bouton's unique baseball voice can still bring the heat. [via]
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Baseball: An Illustrated History
by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

ISBN 0679765417 (0-679-76541-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
530 illustrations in text [via]
More editions of Baseball: An Illustrated History:
- Baseball: An Illustrated History: ISBN 0679404597 (0-679-40459-7)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
- Baseball: An Illustrated History: ISBN 0679765417 (0-679-76541-7)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong
by Clay Davenport, Neil De Mause, James Click, Baseball Prospectus Team Of Experts, Jonah Keri

ISBN 0465005470 (0-465-00547-0)
Softcover, Perseus Books Group

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Book summary:
In the numbers-obsessed sport of baseball, statistics don't merely record what players, managers, and owners have done. Properly understood, they can tell us how the teams we root for could employ better strategies, put more effective players on the field, and win more games. The revolution in baseball statistics that began in the 1970s is a controversial subject that professionals and fans alike argue over without end. Despite this fundamental change in the way we watch and understand the sport, no one has written the book that reveals, across every area of strategy and management, how the best practitioners of statistical analysis in baseball-people like Bill James, Billy Beane, and Theo Epstein-think about numbers and the game. Baseball Between the Numbers is that book. In separate chapters covering every aspect of the game, from hitting, pitching, and fielding to roster construction and the scouting and drafting of players, the experts at Baseball Prospectus examine the subtle, hidden aspects of the game, bring them out into the open, and show us how our favorite teams could win more games. This is a book that every fan, every follower of sports radio, every fantasy player, every coach, and every player, at every level, can learn from and enjoy.
[via]
More editions of Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong:
- Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong: ISBN 0465005470 (0-465-00547-0)
  Softcover, Perseus Books Group
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Baseball Between the Numbers : Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong
by Jonah Keri, Nate Silver, Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts Staff

ISBN 0465005969 (0-465-00596-9)
Hardcover, Basic Books

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Book summary:
In the numbers-obsessed sport of baseball, statistics don't merely record what players, managers, and owners have done. Properly understood, they can tell us how the teams we root for could employ better strategies, put more effective players on the field, and win more games. The revolution in baseball statistics that began in the 1970s is a controversial subject that professionals and fans alike argue over without end. Despite this fundamental change in the way we watch and understand the sport, no one has written the book that reveals, across every area of strategy and management, how the best practitioners of statistical analysis in baseball-people like Bill James, Billy Beane, and Theo Epstein-think about numbers and the game. Baseball Between the Numbers is that book. In separate chapters covering every aspect of the game, from hitting, pitching, and fielding to roster construction and the scouting and drafting of players, the experts at Baseball Prospectus examine the subtle, hidden aspects of the game, bring them out into the open, and show us how our favorite teams could win more games. This is a book that every fan, every follower of sports radio, every fantasy player, every coach, and every player, at every level, can learn from and enjoy.
[via]
More editions of Baseball Between the Numbers : Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong:
- Baseball Between the Numbers : Why Everything You Know about the Game Is Wrong: ISBN 0465005969 (0-465-00596-9)
  Hardcover, Basic Books
The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Definitive Record of Major League Baseball

ISBN 0025790404 (0-02-579040-4)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
No single volume sings the epic saga of the game with quite the rhythms of The Baseball Encyclopedia. Now in its 10th edition, the granddaddy of all sports reference books is, at just over eight pounds and 3000 pages, the National Pastime's weightiest tome. As all-seeing as Homer and Milton, as all-knowing as Shakespeare and Yeats, the encyclopedia finds its poetry in the rhythms of baseball's numbers. Every player--regardless of significance--is present, with all the essential statistics of his career. There are, no doubt, some soulless creatures who may open the encyclopedia and just see page after page of dry, meaningless, numbing data; the rest of us know better: 755, 714, 61, 511, .406, 1.12, and 4,256 are all self-contained dramas filled with tension, and inspiring awe. It is in these stats, and thousands more, that the mysteries of the game begin to reveal themselves. [via]
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The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball
by Joseph L. Reichler

ISBN 0026019302 (0-02-601930-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Now with complete fielding statistics for all players and pitchers, The Baseball Encyclopedia is bigger and better than ever. All the major league players are covered--from Aaron to Zuverink--and a new section highlights the stars of the old Negro Leagues. Colorful and comprehensive, The Baseball Encyclopedia is recognized by Major League Baseball as the official record of the game and its players. [via]
More editions of The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball:
- The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball: ISBN 0026019302 (0-02-601930-2)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
by Bill James, Mary A. Wirth

ISBN 0394758056 (0-394-75805-6)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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Book summary:
At last available in paperback, the critically acclaimed bestseller that brilliantly analyzes, turns upside down, ranks the best and the worst of, pokes fun at, and shows a completely new way of viewing the game of baseball. Illustrated. [via]
More editions of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:
- The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: ISBN 0394537130 (0-394-53713-0)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
- The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: ISBN 0394758056 (0-394-75805-6)
  Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Boys of Summer
by Roger Kahn

ISBN 0060883960 (0-06-088396-0)
Softcover, Perennial

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Book summary:
This is a book about some young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s in such places as Reading, Pennsylvania; Anderson, Indiana; Plainfield, New Jersey; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and then went on to play for one of the most exciting professional teams that the major leagues ever fielded--the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s--the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson and set many other records besides.
It is also a book by and about a once-young sportswriter for the Herald Tribune who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s within shouting distance of Ebbets Field, was nurtured on Joyce and Shakespeare and occasionally escaped to see his bumbling heroes play, and then had the miraculous good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodger team for the Tribune.
Finally, this is a book about what's happened since to Jackie Robinson, Carl Erskine, Preacher Roe, Pee Wee Reese, Billy Cox, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo and the others, no longer boys but men in their middle years with their glories behind them. For some, they have been happy years; to others, fate has not been kind. In short, it is a book about America and how it has progressed from the 1930s to the 1970s, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster. Told with warmth, humor, wit, candor and love, The Boys of Summer is delightful and exhilarating.
[via]
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The Brothers K
by David James Duncan

ISBN 055337849X (0-553-37849-X)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
While their father mourns the destruction of his nascent baseball career and their mother clings obsessively to her faith, the four Chance brothers choose their own ways to deal with what the world has to offer them. Reprint. PW. NYT. [via]
More editions of The Brothers K:
- The Brothers K: ISBN 0385240031 (0-385-24003-1)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
- The Brothers K: ISBN 055337849X (0-553-37849-X)
  Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
The Brothers K
by David J. Duncan

ISBN 0553563149 (0-553-56314-9)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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- The Brothers K: ISBN 0553563149 (0-553-56314-9)
  Softcover, Bantam Books
Bunts
by George F. Will

ISBN 0684853744 (0-684-85374-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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- Bunts: ISBN 0684853744 (0-684-85374-4)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose, and Other Reflections on Baseball
by George F. Will

ISBN 0786216417 (0-7862-1641-7)
Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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Eight Men Out: The Blacksox and the 1919 World Series
by Eliot Asinof, Stephen J. Gould

ISBN 0805065377 (0-8050-6537-7)
Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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Book summary:
The headlines proclaimed the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up as the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America! First published in 1963, Eight Men Out has become a timeless classic. Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nations leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties.
[via]
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Faithful: Two Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
by Stewart O'Nan, Stephen King

ISBN 0743267532 (0-7432-6753-2)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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- Faithful: Two Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season: ISBN 0743267532 (0-7432-6753-2)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
by Stewart O'Nan, Stephen King

ISBN 0743267524 (0-7432-6752-4)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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- Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season: ISBN 0743267524 (0-7432-6752-4)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It
by Lawrence S. Ritter

ISBN 0688112730 (0-688-11273-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
by W.P. Kinsella

ISBN 0618340807 (0-618-34080-7)
Softcover, Mariner Books

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Book summary:
Gideon Clarke is a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world, as his father tried before him, that the world-champion Chicago Cubs traveled to Onamata, Iowa, in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against all-stars from the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, an amateur league. The game, which was to be short, pleasant, and, the Cubs thought, one-sided, turned into a titanic battle of over two thousand innings, played mostly in the pouring rain. This game is not on the record books. No one remembers it or the Confederacy. But Gideon Clarke knows it happened, and he is determined to set the record straight. [via]
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Men at Work
by George F. Will

ISBN 0060973722 (0-06-097372-2)
Softcover, Perennial

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Book summary:
In Men at Work, political pundit George Will breaks baseball down, parsing it into essential tasks: hitting, fielding, pitching, and managing. Why do some succeed grandly while others are more apt to whiff? By analyzing the way Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken, Orel Hershiser, and Tony LaRussa approach the game and do what they do, he finds striking similarities in intelligence, dedication, drive, and desire. [via]
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis

ISBN 0393324818 (0-393-32481-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.
Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe [via]
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The Natural
by Bernard Malamud

ISBN 0374502005 (0-374-50200-5)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
Considered by many to be the greatest baseball novel ever written, this classic morality tale features one of the most memorable characters in all of literature, Roy Hobbs -- a talented athlete whose promising career is derailed by a youthful indiscretion. When Roy makes a comeback as an aging player, his struggle to achieve greatness in the midst of recreant temptations becomes the subject of an epic story about our national need for heroes and our simultaneous desire to see them fail. [via]
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The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
by Bill James

ISBN 0743227220 (0-7432-2722-0)
Softcover, Free Pr

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Book summary:
In 1985, when Bill James, by then already baseball's "Sultan of Stats" "(The Boston Globe)" and author of a bestselling annual compendium entitled "The Baseball Abstract," wrote a 700-page book entitled "The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract," he produced an immediate classic. Lawrence Ritter, author of "The Glory of Their Times," called it one of the three greatest baseball books ever written. Jonathan Yardley of "The Washington Post" wrote, "My own shelf of genuinely first-rate baseball books is very small, but a place will have to be found on it for this one." It's back. "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract," like the original, is really several books in one. The Game is a history of baseball, decade by decade, from the 1880s through the 1990s. For each decade, the "New Abstract" offers a bulleted summary incorporating the obvious -- highest batting average, best won-lost record by team -- and the eccentric. Included in the latter are such categories as Heaviest Player (for the 1930s: Jumbo Brown, a 6'4" 295-lb. pitcher), Most Admirable Superstar (for the 1960s: Roberto Clemente), Worst-Hitting Pitcher, Best Minor League Player, innovations in equipment, and dozens more. Also in each decade/chapter are essays on How, Where, and by Whom the game was played; uniforms; Best Minor League Teams; articles on forgotten achievements such as Wally Moses's remarkable 1936 campaign, or Jim Baumann's 72 home runs for Roswell, Texas (the minor league home-run record) in 1954. In The Players, James ranks -- and writes about -- the top 100 players at each position in major league baseball history. To support these rankings, he introduces a remarkable newstatistic called "Win Shares," a way of quantifying individual performance and equalizing the offensive "and" defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. [via]
More editions of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:
- The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: ISBN 0684806975 (0-684-80697-5)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
- The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: The Classic: ISBN 0743227220 (0-7432-2722-0)
  Softcover, Free Pr
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The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics
by Alan Schwarz, Peter Gammons

ISBN 0312322232 (0-312-32223-2)
Softcover, Griffin

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Book summary:
Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the National Pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a byproduct of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong.

In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more.

Almost every baseball fan for 150 years has been drawn to the game by its statistics, whether through newspaper box scores, the backs of Topps baseball cards, The Baseball Encyclopedia, or fantasy leagues. Today's most ardent stat scientists, known as "sabermetricians," spend hundreds of hours coming up with new ways to capture the game in numbers, and engage in holy wars over which statistics are best. Some of these men - and women -- are even being hired by major league teams to bring an understanding of statistics to a sport that for so long shunned it.

Taken together, Schwarz paints a history not just of baseball statistics, but of the soul of the sport itself. The Numbers Game will be an invaluable part of any fan's library and go down as one of the sport's classic books.
[via]
More editions of The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics:
- The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics: ISBN 0312322224 (0-312-32222-4)
  Hardcover, Rizzoli International Publications, Incorporated
- The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics: ISBN 0312322232 (0-312-32223-2)
  Softcover, Griffin
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October 1964
by David Halberstam

ISBN 0449983676 (0-449-98367-6)
Softcover, Fawcett Books

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Book summary:
Heroes have a habit of growing larger over time, as do the arenas in which they excelled. The 1964 World Series between the Yankees and Cardinals was coated in myth from the get-go. The Yankees represented the establishment: white, powerful, and seemingly invincible. The victorious Cards, on the other hand, were baseball's rebellious future: angry and defiant, black, and challenging. Their seven-game barnburner, played out against a backdrop of an America emerging from the Kennedy assassination, escalating the war in Vietnam, and struggling with civil rights, marked a turning point--neither the nation, nor baseball, would ever be quite so innocent again. Halberstam, one of the great reporters of the '60s, looks back in this marvelous and spirited elegy to the era, the game, and players such as Mantle, Maris, Ford, Gibson, Brock, and Flood with a clear eye in search of the truth that time has blurred into legend. His confident prose, diligent reporting, and deft analysis make it clear how much more interesting--and forceful--the truth can be. [via]
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The Physics of Baseball
by Robert Kemp Adair

ISBN 0060084367 (0-06-008436-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy
by Jane Leavy

ISBN 0060933291 (0-06-093329-1)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance.

He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely.

Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.
[via]
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Shoeless Joe
by W.P. Kinsella, John Radziewicz

ISBN 0395957737 (0-395-95773-7)
Softcover, Mariner Books

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Book summary:
W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie, Field of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need. [via]
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Summer of '49
by David Halberstam

ISBN 0060884266 (0-06-088426-6)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
With the airwaves saturated with so much sporting choice, it's hard to imagine how, not that long ago, baseball so completely dominated the landscape and captured imaginations. Given the 1949 season that veteran journalist David Halberstam meticulously recreates, maybe it's not so hard after all. It was a season of great public and personal drama for the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, with the conflict finally resolving itself in a Yankee pennant following a head-to-head showdown on the final day of the season. Each team was led by a star of the highest magnitude: Joe DiMaggio spurred the Yankees despite missing half the season with a foot injury; Ted Williams virtually carried the Sox on his back, missing an unprecedented third Triple Crown by mere decimal points on his batting average. Halberstam focuses much of his narrative on the trials of these two individual sporting giants, adding fine supporting performances by Yogi Berra, Ellis Kinder, Dom DiMaggio, even restaurateur Toots Shoor. Both on and off the field, Halberstam beautifully captures the ethos of a more innocent game that no longer exists, played by heroes far more driven by their pride than by their salaries. [via]
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Summerland: Library Edition
by Michael Chabon

ISBN 0786816155 (0-7868-1615-5)
Softcover, Disney Pr

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Book summary:
In Summerland, his first novel for young readers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon attempts an American Narnia. Inspired by Lewis and Tolkien, he's created his own magical landscape on which to paint a sweeping fantasy quest, but mixes the same ingredients--folklore and new inventions--in a distinctively American way.
The plot is simple and pure, but takes a long time to tell. The setting is Clam Island, Washington, specifically the area on the western tip of the island known as the Summerlands, which enjoys zero rainfall and yearlong fine weather. Ethan Feld, a self-described really bad ball player, is recruited by a 100-year-old scout called Mr. Chiron "Ringfinger" Brown. Ethan is needed to help the ferishers, essentially fairies, to save their world from eradication. On the great infinite tree of worlds, Summerland is on the boundary between two such worlds, and a particularly destructive fairy called Coyote and his band of warriors are nearby and threatening to destroy everything.
Heroes are desperately needed to counter this threat, and their journey involves a lot of baseball, but also encounters with giants, bat-winged goblins, sea monsters, and assorted cunning magic. The novel features an ensemble cast of equal parts that shine and fade in turn, and yet the undoubtedly fine writing fails to mask the enormity and complexities of the world in which they travel, and the bad guys getting their comeuppance always seems so far away. Readers need to savor every word in Summerland to extract the best flavors from it. (Ages 10 and older.) --John McLay, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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The Teammates
by David Halberstam

ISBN 0786888679 (0-7868-8867-9)
Softcover, Hyperion Books

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More editions of The Teammates:
- The Teammates: ISBN 0786888679 (0-7868-8867-9)
  Softcover, Hyperion Books
The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship
by David Halberstam

ISBN 140130057X (1-4013-0057-X)
Hardcover, Hyperion Books

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- The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship: ISBN 140130057X (1-4013-0057-X)
  Hardcover, Hyperion Books
Three Nights In August: Strategy, Heartbreak, And Joy Inside The Mind Of A Manager
by Buzz Bissinger

ISBN 0618710531 (0-618-71053-1)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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- Three Nights In August: Strategy, Heartbreak, And Joy Inside The Mind Of A Manager: ISBN 0618405445 (0-618-40544-5)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
- Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, And Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager: ISBN 0618710531 (0-618-71053-1)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans: Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro
by Danny Peary, Tim McCarver

ISBN 0375753400 (0-375-75340-0)
Softcover, Villard Books

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- Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans: Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro: ISBN 0375753400 (0-375-75340-0)
  Softcover, Villard Books
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Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans : Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro
by Tim McCarver, Danny Peary

ISBN 0375500855 (0-375-50085-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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Book summary:
On the surface, baseball looks like such an easy game--you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball, and you run around the bases--but there are so many beautiful and hidden facets to the diamond. If anyone knows the game's on-field secrets, it's Tim McCarver. He caught in the Majors for 21 seasons, handling such Hall of Fame hurlers as Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton. Since hanging up his spikes almost two decades ago, he's been one of the game's most visible, thoughtful, and instructive analysts.
McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons is just that: a packed, at times densely penned, manual for smart and inquisitive fans, written up to their hunger for good, solid, challenging insight into the game's tactics, strategies, and maneuverings. McCarver goes into impressively thorough detail, which is his ultimate strength and occasional weakness; he assumes you've already got at least a baseball B.A. If you don't know a cut fastball from a four-seamer, you might consider applying elsewhere until you do, but if you are indeed up to the demands of a provocative graduate seminar, McCarver's quite a professor. He's an engaging storyteller, he never hides his biases, and while he's naturally strong on his perceptions into the game's most primal relationship of pitcher and catcher, he's never less than major league everywhere else around the diamond. [via]
More editions of Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans : Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro:
- Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans : Understanding and Interpreting the Game So You Can Watch It Like a Pro: ISBN 0375500855 (0-375-50085-5)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball
by John Thorn, Pete Palmer, Michael Gershman, Sean Lahman, Matthew Silverman, Greg Spira

ISBN 1930844018 (1-930844-01-8)
Hardcover, Total Sports

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- Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball: ISBN 1930844018 (1-930844-01-8)
  Hardcover, Total Sports
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Underworld
by Don Delillo

ISBN 1416548645 (1-4165-4864-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the cold war and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand.
"It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball, and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria.
Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. [via]
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Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
by Doris Kearns Goodwin

ISBN 1568955413 (1-56895-541-3)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood. [via]
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You Gotta Have Wa
by Robert Whiting

ISBN 067972947X (0-679-72947-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A hilarious, informative, and riveting account of Japanese baseball and the cultural clashes that ensued when Americans began playing there professionally.

In Japan, baseball is a way of life. It is a philosophy. It is besuboru. Its most important element is wagroup harmonyembodied in the proverb "The nail that sticks up shall be hammered down." In this witty and incisive book, Robert Whiting gives us a close-up look at besuboru's teams, obsessive ritualism, and history, as seen through the eyes of American players who found the Japanese approachrigorous pregame practices, the tolerance for tie games, injured pitchers encouraged to pitch through the paincompletely baffling. With vivid accounts of East meeting West, involving Babe Ruth, Ichiro Suzuki, Bobby Valentine, Japanese home run king Sadaharu Oh, and many others, this lively and completely unique book is an utter gem and baseball classic. [via]
More editions of You Gotta Have Wa:
- You Gotta Have Wa: ISBN 0026276615 (0-02-627661-5)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
- You Gotta Have Wa: ISBN 067972947X (0-679-72947-X)
  Softcover, Random House Inc

Spanish

Campeones Mundiales Al Fin!: Como los Medias Rojas lograron ganar la serie del 2004
by Stewart O'Nan, Stephen King

ISBN 0743280792 (0-7432-8079-2)
Softcover, Fireside

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More editions of Campeones Mundiales Al Fin!: Como los Medias Rojas lograron ganar la serie del 2004:
- Campeones Mundiales Al Fin!: Como los Medias Rojas lograron ganar la serie del 2004: ISBN 0743280792 (0-7432-8079-2)
  Softcover, Fireside

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