While major league baseball gained popularity in large American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was still relatively unseen by small town inhabitants who could only read about it in the newspaper or catch an exhibition game as major league teams traveled through the United States. What was popular was "town baseball," fierce competitions between local teams to best the other in all aspects of baseball, particularly power hitting. It was from this environment that Jimmie Foxx, one of major league baseball's most talented players, began his journey toward the majors. Jimmie Foxx: The Pride of Sudlersville, is the story of one of baseball's most ferocious hitters. Growing up in small town Maryland, Jimmie seemed destined to play major-league baseball. By age 16 he was already playing professionally and wowing fans with his ability to smash homers. During his major-league career he appeared in three straight World Series, played for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Boston Red Sox, and spent the 1932 baseball season closely pursuing Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. The comparison to Babe Ruth has not been lost on many baseball scholars, but goes relatively unknown by the general public and many baseball fans. The most inclusive biography of Jimmie Foxx to date, Millikin's book provides a complete picture of his subject.

Grundman presents readers with a portrait, the first of its kind, of Dolph Schayes - the star of the Syracuse Nationals basketball team during the 1950s and 1960s. Schayes may not have one of the most recognizable names in basketball history, but his accomplishments are staggering. He was named one of the fifty greatest players of all time by the NBA, and he held six NBA records, including one for career scoring, at his retirement. Grundman chronicles Schayes's life from his early days as the child of Jewish Romanian immigrants, through his illustrious basketball career, first at New York University, then as part of the Syracuse Nationals. In writing about Schayes's career, Grundman also reflects on many of the revolutionary changes that were happening in the professional basketball world, changes that affected not only Schayes and his contemporaries but also the essence of the sport.

"Baseball Hacks" isn't your typical baseball book - it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book - one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game. So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handed pitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects, such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favourite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. "Baseball Hacks" shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author, Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favourite team, "Baseball Hacks" is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for "Baseball Hacks": ""Baseball Hacks" is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." - Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles. "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In "Baseball Hacks", Joe Adler not only demonstrates that the latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." - Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals.

Test Your Knowledge of the Kansas City Royals-facts, quotes, brainteasers, stories, and more from the Royals' 45 years in the American League. From George Brett to Bo Jackson to Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, this updated edition covers the team's beginning in 1969, the glory years in the 1970s and 80s, the down years in the 1990s and 2000s, and the beginning of the team's turnaround under GM Dayton Moore. Loaded with hundreds of trivia questions and photos, Legacy of Blue will test your knowledge of one of baseball's best-ever expansion franchises. Originally published as Kansas City Royals Facts & Trivia.

Bobby Thomson's home run in the ninth to beat Brooklyn and give the Giants the 1951 National League pennant. Bill Mazeroski's ninth-inning homer for Pittsburgh to beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series. The Mets' amazing 1969 stretch drive. It's the winners we remember in baseball's most dramatic episodes. But baseball being a game of inches, it's often a fine line between victory and defeat. Losing is unexpected, unpredictable, frequently a consequence of fickle fate. The game is designed to break your heart, Bart Giamatti said. In Heartbreakers, veteran baseball writer John Kuenster recalls fifteen of the game's most painful "disasters" of the last half-century and looks at them from the losers' point of view. With a reporter's skill and a fan's enthusiasm, he sets the scene for these memorable matchups, surveys the players who led each team to the big moment, and tells the story of the game and the emotions that can't be erased. He has interviewed key players who suffered the defeats, providing personal insights and sometimes surprising perspectives on the game action that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Heartbreakers offers a box seat for-and a fresh slant on-the replay of baseball's most thrilling games. With 50 black-and-white photographs.

For OVER fifty years, Lou Piniella has been a fixture in Major League Baseball, making a name for himself first as a player on the legendary New York Yankees of the 1970s and later as a manager for five different teams: the Yankees, the Reds, the Mariners, the Rays, and the Cubs.Now, in this raucous and entertaining memoir, Piniella opens up about his lifetime in the game, telling never-before-heard stories about electrifying wins, painful losses, and why sometimes your only option is to get in an umpire's face. Tracing his baseball life from its journeyman beginnings in the minors, he discusses how he came of age as a player during the wild years of the Bronx Zoo, when personalities like Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Catfish Hunter, and Billy Martin made the Yankee locker room the most controversial and colorful place in baseball. With surprising candor, he details his close yet often contentious reltionship with George Steinbrenner, offering a unique portrait of one of the game's most provocative figures, a man who mentored and supported Lou as a player and a manager while ultimately making life with the Yankees unsustainable for him. Stormy as his time in New York was, it was only the start of Lou's fiery career. From managing the Cincinnati Reds and their divisive owner, Marge Schott, to a World Series win, to transforming the perennially cellar-dwelling Seattle Mariners into one of the league's best teams, he recalls his experiences-both hilarious and heartbreaking-with some of the brightest stars from the last twenty-five years, including Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Ichiro Suzuki. For the first time, Lou also describes his important but little-known friendship with Alex Rodriguez, sharing how they formed a connection early in Alex's time with Seattle that spanned decades, teams, and scandals, as Lou helped Alex through his most tumultuous episodes.Whether facing the difficulties of managing his home team in Tampa Bay or helping the Cubs win back-to-back division championships, Lou brings an unforgettable and feisty voice to his rollercoaster ride of a career, going inside the fights, pranks, and seemingly impossible comebacks that defined every Lou Piniella team. Featuring a huge cast of Hall of Fame characters and uproarious stories from three generations of baseball, Lou offers a bridge to a rapidly disappearing era, a time when baseball was a bit more fun, when passion was a virtue, and when kicking a bit of dirt on an umpire was good for everyone.

When the Philadelphia Phillies signed Dick Allen in 1960, fans of the franchise envisioned bearing witness to feats never before accomplished by a Phillies player. A half-century later, they're still trying to make sense of what they saw. Carrying to the plate baseball's heaviest and loudest bat as well as the burden of being the club's first African American superstar, Allen found both hits and controversy with ease and regularity as he established himself as the premier individualist in a game that prided itself on conformity. As one of his managers observed, "I believe God Almighty hisself would have trouble handling Richie Allen." A brutal pregame fight with teammate Frank Thomas, a dogged determination to be compensated on par with the game's elite, an insistence on living life on his own terms and not management's: what did it all mean? Journalists and fans alike took sides with ferocity, and they take sides still. Despite talent that earned him Rookie of the Year and MVP honors as well as a reputation as one of his era's most feared power hitters, many remember Allen as one of the game's most destructive and divisive forces, while supporters insist that he is the best player not in the Hall of Fame. God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen explains why. Mitchell Nathanson presents Allen's life against the backdrop of organized baseball's continuing desegregation process. Drawing out the larger generational and business shifts in the game, he shows how Allen's career exposed not only the racial double standard that had become entrenched in the wake of the game's integration a generation earlier but also the forces that were bent on preserving the status quo. In the process, God Almighty Hisself unveils the strange and maddening career of a man who somehow managed to fulfill and frustrate expectations all at once.

Beginning in an era before traffic jams, air-conditioning, and Atlanta's ascension to international fame, Tim Darnell chronicles the emergence of amateur and minor-league baseball in various forms in Atlanta from just after the Civil War through the rise of the Crackers (1901-65).Through never-before-published player interviews, rare illustrations, extensive charts and statistics, and thorough research, Darnell examines the drama and politics that affected the Crackers over the years. Also profiled is the Black Crackers, Atlanta's Negro Southern League franchise whose success and popularity paralleled those of their white counterparts.The Crackers is a light-hearted, fun, and engrossing history of a time, a people, and one very special centerfield magnolia tree whose stories are legend to this day.Includes a Crackers Trivia Quiz, and appendices with records and statistics.

At a time when many baseball fans wish for the game to return to a purer past, G. Edward White shows how seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game, transformed baseball into the national pastime. Not simply a professional sport, baseball has been treated as a focus of childhood rituals and an emblem of American individuality and fair play throughout much of the twentieth century. It started out, however, as a marginal urban sport associated with drinking and gambling. White describes its progression to an almost mythic status as an idyllic game, popular among people of all ages and classes. He then recounts the owner's efforts, often supported by the legal system, to preserve this image.

Baseball grew up in the midst of urban industrialization during the Progressive Era, and the emerging steel and concrete baseball parks encapsulated feelings of neighborliness and associations with the rural leisure of bygone times. According to White, these nostalgic themes, together with personal financial concerns, guided owners toward practices that in retrospect appear unfair to players and detrimental to the progress of the game. Reserve clauses, blacklisting, and limiting franchise territories, for example, were meant to keep a consistent roster of players on a team, build fan loyalty, and maintain the game's local flavor. These practices also violated anti-trust laws and significantly restricted the economic power of the players. Owners vigorously fought against innovations, ranging from the night games and radio broadcasts to the inclusion of African-American players. Nonetheless, the image of baseball as a spirited civic endeavor persisted, even in the face of outright corruption, as witnessed in the courts' leniency toward the participants in the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

White's story of baseball is intertwined with changes in technology and business in America and with changing attitudes toward race and ethnicity. The time is fast approaching, he concludes, when we must consider whether baseball is still regarded as the national pastime and whether protecting its image is worth the effort.

When the selection committee voted Alejandro "Alex" Pompez into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, some cried foul. A Negro-league owner during baseball's glory days, Pompez was known as an early and steadfast advocate for Latino players, helping bring baseball into the modern age. So why was his induction so controversial?
Like many in the era of segregated baseball, Pompez found that the game alone could never make all ends meet. To finance his beloved team, the New York Cubans, he delved headlong into a sin many baseball fans find unforgivable--gambling. He built one of the most infamous numbers rackets in Harlem, eventually arousing the ire of the famed prosecutor Thomas Dewey. But he also led his Cubans, with their star lineup of Latino players, to a Negro-league World Series championship in 1947.
In this effervescent biography, the historian and sportswriter Adrian Burgos, Jr., brings to life the world of professional baseball during a time of enormous change. Following Pompez from his early days to the twilight of his career, Burgos offers a glimpse inside the clubhouse as both owners and players struggled with the new realities of the game. That today's rosters are filled with names like Rodriguez, Pujols, Rivera, and Ortiz is a testament to Pompez and his lasting influence.