At the outset of summer break in 1959, Texas Tech senior Jerry Craft had no more enticing options than to stay home and help on the family ranch–so the telephoned offer to play for a semipro baseball club he'd never heard of came as a welcome surprise. But Craft was in for an even bigger surprise when he reported for tryout and discovered he'd been recruited for the West Texas Colored League. Wichita Falls/Graham Stars manager Carl Sedberry persuaded Craft to put aside his misgivings and pitch for the Stars. Despite the derision of black teammates, fans, and opponents, and his own trepidation, �that white boy� took the mound to close a rousing victory in his first game. At home and on the road in segregated Texas, Craft saw discrimination firsthand and from every side. Yet out of his two seasons with the Stars comes an unlikely story of respect, character, humor, and ultimately friendship as the teammates pulled together to succeed in a game they loved.

The Players League, formed in 1890, was a short-lived professional baseball league controlled and owned in part by the players themselves, a response to the National League's salary cap and "reserve rule," which bound players for life to one particular team. Led by John Montgomery Ward, the Players League was a star-studded group that included most of the best players of the National League, who bolted not only to gain control of their wages but also to share ownership of the teams. Lasting only a year, the league impacted both the professional sports and the labor politics of athletes and nonathletes alike. The Great Baseball Revolt is a historic overview of the rise and fall of the Players League, which fielded teams in Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Though it marketed itself as a working-class league, the players were underfunded and had to turn to wealthy capitalists for much of their startup costs, including the new ballparks. It was in this context that the league intersected with the organized labor movement, and in many ways challenged by organized labor to be by and for the people. In its only season, the Players League outdrew the National League in fan attendance. But when the National League overinflated its numbers and profits, the Players League backers pulled out. The Great Baseball Revolt brings to life a compelling cast of characters and a mostly forgotten but important time in professional sports when labor politics affected both athletes and nonathletes.

This book covers the entirety of franchise history, from their birth and struggles as the Highlanders to the bludgeoning bats of Murderer's Row and the first Yankees dynasty to the juggernauts of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, to the anomalous mediocrity that followed, to the championships and circus of the Steinbrenner, Jackson and Billy Martin era to, the run of crowns two decades later, to the years of frustration and missed opportunity through the second decade of the twenty-first century. However, how to make a book exceptional when champonships are routine, and scores of a team's player are imortal? Emphasize a variety of players, teams, moments, events and contributors that made the Yankees unique in the annals of American sport, which this book ably does.

Richard D. Cramer has been doing baseball analytics for just about as long as anyone alive, even before the term "sabermetrics" existed. He started analyzing baseball statistics as a hobby in the mid-1960s, not long after graduating from Harvard and MIT. He was a research scientist for SmithKline and in his spare time used his work computer to test his theories about baseball statistics. One of his earliest discoveries was that clutch hitting-then one of the most sacred pieces of received wisdom in the game-didn't really exist. In When Big Data Was Small Cramer recounts his life and remarkable contributions to baseball knowledge. In 1971 Cramer learned about the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and began working with Pete Palmer, whose statistical work is credited with providing the foundation on which SABR is built. Cramer cofounded STATS Inc. and began working with the Houston Astros, Oakland A's, Yankees, and White Sox, with the help of his new Apple II computer. Yet for Cramer baseball was always a side interest, even if a very intense one for most of the last forty years. His main occupation, which involved other "big data" activities, was that of a chemist who pioneered the use of specialized analytics, often known as computer-aided drug discovery, to help guide the development of pharmaceutical drugs. After a decade-long hiatus, Cramer returned to baseball analytics in 2004 and has done important work with Retrosheet since then. When Big Data Was Small is the story of the earliest days of baseball analytics and computer-aided drug discovery.

Superstition has been a part of baseball from the beginning. From good luck charms to human mascots to ritual statues of Babe Ruth to the curse of Colonel Sanders, there may be almost as many superstitions as players (or fans). Drawing on social science, religious studies and SABRmetrics, this book explores the rich history of supernatural belief in the game and documents a wide variety of rituals, fetishes, taboos and jinxes. Some have changed over time but the preoccupation of coping with uncertainty on the field through magical thinking remains a constant.