In this collection of interviews, baseball players, coaches, and managers speak candidly about their most memorable moments and experiences in baseballs big leagues. Their recollections of the former big leaguers often come from their early years spent learning the game, their first time stepping on the field as a big leaguer, their first strikeout as a pitcher, or their first hit as a batter--to the more disappointing moments such as a first trade, a World Series loss, or a release signaling the end of a career. Bob Friend, Bobby Thomson, Johnny Pesky, Jim Kaat, Frank Malzone, Dale Berra, Larry Bowa, Gil McDougald, Gene Garber, Billy Sample, Nellie Briles, Jon Matlack, Catfish Hunter, Fred Patek, Vern Law, Clem Labine, Virgil Trucks, Frank Tanana, Jimmy Greengrass, Bill Virdon, Sparky Anderson, Dick Williams, Hector Lopez, and Ralph Houk are the interviewees.

Each played baseball as kids. They all played together on a college baseball juggernaut at Seton Hall. All of them wanted to make baseball their life. The Hit Men and the Kid Who Batted Ninth traces the baseball lives of Craig Biggio, Mo Vaughn, John Valentin, and Marteese Robinson—from the playgrounds through college ball to the big leagues—revealing a fascinating and personal account of four routes to the same destination and dream.

The first book in the GAME CHANGERS sports series answers the questions: What were the 50 most revolutionary personalities, rules, pieces of equipment, controversies, organizational changes, radio and television advancements, and more in the history National Pastime? And how, exactly, did they forever change the game? Baseball’s Game Changers offers fascinating, detailed explanations along with a ranking system from 1 to 50 that is sure to inspire debate among baseball aficionados. Ranging from each sport’s beginnings to today and tackling on-the-field and off-the-field developments, the Game Changers series offers a history of each sport through their turning-points and innovations. Full-color, and including 60 photos plus pull-outs and sidebars, books within the Game Changers series are important and entertaining additions to every sports fan’s library.

When legendary Chicago Cubs' broadcaster Harry Caray passed away in February of 1998, thousands of baseball fans mourned the loss. In Where's Harry?, Steve Stone pays tribute to one of baseball's biggest legends never to take the field, remembering the unique baseball commentator who was also the game's biggest fan.

Since the early 1930s "MacPhail" has been a big name in baseball. Three generations of this one family have provided leadership, innovation and vision for the sport. Larry, Lee and Andy MacPhail, representing very different eras of American life, have each addressed baseball's needs and opportunities in his own way. During the 1930s and 1940s Larry MacPhail served as general manager and vice president of the Cincinnati Reds, executive vice president and president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and part owner and president of the New York Yankees. He was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978. Larry's son, Lee, worked for 13 years in the Yankee organization before serving as general manager and president of the Baltimore Orioles. Lee later served two five-year terms as president of the American League and two years as president of the Player Relations Committee. Lee was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998, becoming the only son ever to join his father in the Hall. Lee's son, Andy, worked in management positions for the Chicago Cubs, the Houston Astros and the Minnesota Twins before becoming president and CEO of the Cubs.

Those fortunate fans who attended Opening Day on August 18, 1910 could not have had the slightest inkling that their brand new stadium would one day be the oldest active professional ballpark in America. Nor could they have possibly imagined how dramatically baseball would transform itself over the course of a century. Back then there were no high-powered agents, no steroids dominating the sports headlines, no gleaming, billion-dollar stadiums with corporate sky boxes that lit up the neon sky. There was only the wood and the raw hide, the mitt and the cap, and the game as it was played a few miles from downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Allen Barra has journeyed to his native Alabama to capture the glories of a century of baseball lore. In chronicling Rickwood Field's history, he also tells of segregated baseball and the legendary Negro Leagues while summoning the ghosts of the players themselves -Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Ted Willians, and Willie Mays - who still haunt baseball's oldest Cathedral. But Rickwood Field, a place where the Ku Klux Klan once held rallies, has now become a symbol of hope and triumph, a stadium that reflects the evolution of a city where baseball was, for decades, virtually the sole connecting point between blacks and whites. While other fabled stadiums have yielded to the wrecker's ball, baseball's Garden of Eden seems increasingly invulnerable to the ravages of time. Indeed, the manually operated scoreboard still uses numbers painted on metal sheets, and on the right field wall, the Burma Shave sign hangs just as it did when the legendary Black Barons called the stadium their own. Not surprisingly, there is no slick or artificial turf here, only grass - and it's been trodden by the cleats of greats from Shoeless Joe Jackson to Reggie Jackson. Drawing on extensive interviews, best-selling author Barra evokes a southern city once rife with racial tension where a tattered ballpark was, and resplendently still is, a rare beacon of hope. Both a relic of America's past and a guidepost for baseball's future, Rickwood Field follows the evolution of a nation and its pastime through our country's oldest active ballpark.

Michael Jack Schmidt, in the minds of many the greatest third baseman of all time, was a Philadelphia institution. From 1973 to 1989 he led the Phillies to five National League championship series and two World Series. Twelve times an All-Star, Schmidt was perhaps baseball's premier power hitter during the 1970s and 1980s. His 548 home runs are seventh best all-time. In the field he was just as exceptional, winning ten Gold Gloves, more than any other third baseman besides Brooks Robinson. A three-time N.L. Most Valuable Player (1980, 1981 and 1986), Schmidt was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1995, his first year of eligibility. This book is the first serious account of Schmidt's celebrated career with the Philadelphia Phillies. Concentrating on contemporary newspaper accounts, periodicals, baseball histories and biographies by Schmidt's teammates, this long-overdue work is the full story of one of the game's greatest sluggers, and one of its true heroes and role models.

This work contains the heretofore unpublished memoirs of Brother Gilbert (a.k.a. Philip F. Cairnes), the Xaverian brother generally credited with steering the Babe to his first professional contract. Ruth was raised by the Xaverian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, at St. Mary's Industrial School from 1902 (when he was only 7) until 1914. These reminiscences begin with Babe Ruth's departure from St. Mary's and concentrate on his early playing years. An historical introduction by the editor of these memoirs, Harry Rothgerber, details the history and relationship that existed between this organization of Catholic educators and the man who was to become the most influential baseball player and greatest slugger who ever lived. Brother John Joseph Sterne, the book's forewordist, recounts a St. Mary's band fundraising trip in which the band accompanied the Yankees through the American League cities at the end of the 1920 season. Several previously unpublished photos from the Xaverian Order complement the text.

The Baseball Trust is about the origins and persistence of baseball's exemption from antitrust law, which is one of the most curious features of our legal system and also one of the most well known to sports fans. Every other sport, like virtually every other kind of business, is governed by the antitrust laws, but baseball has been exempt for nearly a century. No one thinks this state of affairs makes any sense. The conventional explanation of this oddity emphasizes baseball's unique cultural status as the national pastime, and assumes that judges and legislators have expressed their love for the game by insulating it from antitrust attack. A serious baseball fan, Stuart Banner provides a thoroughly entertaining history of the game through the prism of the antitrust exemption. But he also narrates a very different kind of baseball history, one in which a sophisticated business organization successfully worked the levers of the legal system to achieve a result enjoyed by no other industry in America. For all the well-documented foibles of the owners of major league baseball teams, baseball has consistently received and followed smart antitrust advice from sharp lawyers, going all the way back to the 1910s. At the same time, it is a story that serves as an arresting reminder of the path-dependent nature of the legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but this series of decisions yielded an outcome that makes no sense at all.

Bismarck once said that God looked after drunkards, children and the U.S. of A. Some say that baseball should be added to the list. It must have been divine intervention that led the sport through a series of transformative challenges from the end of World War II to the games first expansion in 1961. During this period baseball was forced to make a number of painful choices. From 1949 to 1954, attendance dropped more than 30 percent, as once loyal fans turned to other activities, started going to see more football, and began watching television. Also, the sport had to wrestle with racial integration, franchise shifts and unionization while trying to keep a firm hold on the minds and emotions of the public. This work chronicles how baseball, with imagination and some foresight, survived postwar challenges. Some of the solutions came about intelligently, some clumsily, but by 1960 baseball was a stronger, healthier and better balanced institution than ever before.

When legendary Chicago Cubs' broadcaster Harry Caray passed away in February of 1998, thousands of baseball fans mourned the loss. In Where's Harry?, Steve Stone pays tribute to one of baseball's biggest legends never to take the field, remembering the unique baseball commentator who was also the game's biggest fan.

Rube Marquards life was touched by success and scandal at nearly every turn. In 1906, the teenage pitcher defied his father and became a ballplayer. Two years later, the Giants purchased his contract for the then record $11,000. He soon became the best left-handed pitcher in the game; over the course of his career he won 201 games, threw a no-hitter and pitched in five World Series. Off the field, Marquard was a master at marketing himself, recreating his story as it suited him. He wrote his own newspaper column, starred in movies, delighted crowds by catching balls thrown off high buildings, and even appeared as a female impersonator. But it was his affair and brief marriage with vaudeville sensation Blossom Seeley that caused the most uproar. Along with Seeley, Marquard became the toast of Broadway to the chagrin of his baseball fans. Throughout his life, the pitcher re-created his story as it suited him; his largely fanciful account of his career in Lawrence Ritters Glory of Their Times (1966) was largely responsible for his election to the Hall of Fame in 1971. This book gives for the first time the true story of one of the most colorful and controversial baseball players of the century.

Though many of his contemporaries considered him second only to Babe Ruth in the 1920s and 1930s, Mickey Cochrane is often overlooked by fans and historians. The hard-hitting catcher played on three World Series winners. Fiercely competitive on the field, Cochrane was a true gentleman off it. Though he was a highly regarded member of the A's championship teams, it is his career in Depression-era Detroit that he is best remembered. The pressure of the adulation there and his duties as player, manager and Tigers vice president led to a breakdown in 1935. On his way to recovery, he was hit in the head by a pitch thrown by Bump Hadley and was nearly killed, ending his career. This full story of Cochrane's Hall of Fame career and his off-field life was researched from primary documents and interviews with his family.

For one brief period in the early 1940s, Pete Reiser was the equal of any outfielder in baseball, even Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, but his penchant for running into outfield walls while playing defense prematurely ended his journey to Cooperstown. Pitcher Herb Score was a brilliant pitcher until a Gil McDougald line drive shelved his career. And Thurman Munson was one of the games best catchers in the late 1970s until a tragic plane crash ended his life. These three players and fourteen others (Smoky Joe Wood, Vean Gregg, Kirby Puckett, Hal Trotsky, Tony Oliva, Paul Dean, Ewell Blackwell, David Ferris, Steve Busby, J.R. Richard, Tony Conigliaro, Johnny Beazley, Mark Fidrych, and Lyman Bostock) enjoyed brilliant careers--potentially worthy of the Hall of Fame--that were cut short by injury, illness or death. Some enjoyed several seasons of success only to see their playing days end just short of numbers worthy of Cooperstown; others enjoyed only a season or two of brilliance. The profiles concentrate on the players accomplishments and speculate on how their careers might have developed if they had continued.

Orlando Cepeda enjoyed a stellar baseball career in the late fifties and throughout the sixties, but after it ended in the mid-seventies, his life fell apart. In Baby Bull, Cepeda shares his story for the first time. He reflects on his baseball career and shares his twenty-year struggle to rebuild his life and regain his reputation.

Many young coaches, over the years have asked me," How does one climb the ladder in the baseball coaching profession?" This book will give you examples, through real life stories, on how you can move ahead in a coaching career. Someone has coined the phrase, Apples don't fall too far from the tree" or" He comes from good genes or good stock." These statements seem to indicate some successful endeavors are related, to some degree, to genetics. O the other hand, some doors may open because of the success of someone in the family. Not being an expert in genetics, let's leave this to speculation In addition, networking and what it is and how it works will be discussed in The Mainieri Factor, and how it may open doors for you in the coaching profession. Getting your foot in the door is only the beginning, being successful and proving yourself at each level is paramount to moving up the later. This book will give general insight into ways in which you can prove yourself as successful coach. You will be judged as having been a successful coach if you are able to substantially improve the players' skills from the time the players initially come under your tutelage. In the final analysis, the ultimate evaluation of you as a coach and leader will be directly related to your win-lost record In addition, it is essential that you develop the total person so that your players have the tools to meet the vicissitudes of their daily living. The game of baseball is a great laboratory for developing these skills. After reading The Mainieri Factor, you should understand better how the road to success in coaching works. You should find these life stories to be practical, helpful, interesting andentertaining.