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.

The extent to which remarkable things can happen on a baseball field is virtually limitless. Bats break, balls carom wildly, personalities clash, and playing fields are invaded by uninvited guests. Mudville Madness is for baseball fans who seek something beyond the standard boxscores-something new or rarely encountered. This book is a jaunt into the realm of the extraordinary and (at times) outright bizarre. Spanning three centuries of baseball history, the most uncommon events in baseball history are recounted here in glorious detail, beginning with the game's earliest days when the rules were in their infancy, through the Deadball years, right up to the 2013 season. The epic brawls, bizarre plays and landmark achievements covered in this book will leave you shaking your head in disbelief.

In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman's iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman's ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself--what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises--when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what's behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball's biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game's ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player's risk of serious injury to whether teams actually "overvalue" trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball's longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

Major League Baseball, alone among industries of its size in the United States, operates as an unregulated monopoly. This 20th-century regulatory anomaly has become known as the baseball anomaly. Major League Baseball developed into a major commercial enterprise without being subject to antitrust liability. Long after the interstate commercial character of baseball had been established and even recognized by the Supreme Court, baseball's monopoly remained free from federal regulation. Duquette explains the baseball anomaly by connecting baseball's regulatory status to the larger political environment, tracing the game's fate through four different regulatory regimes. The constellation of institutional, ideological, and political factors within each regulatory regime provides the context for the survival of the baseball anomaly.

Duquette shows baseball's unregulated monopoly persists because of the confluence of institutional, ideological, and political factors which have prevented the repeal of baseball's antitrust exemption to date. However, both the institutional and ideological factors are fading fast. Baseball's owners can no longer claim special cultural significance in defense of their exemption. Nor can they credibly claim that the commissioner system approximates government regulation effectively. Both of these strategies have been discredited by the labor unrest of the 1980s and 1990s. Duquette provides a unique perspective on American regulatory politics, and by explaining a complicated story in comprehensive prose, he has given researchers, policy makers, and fans a fascinating look at the business of baseball.

When the Brooklyn Dodgers recruited Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues' Kansas City Monarchs in 1947, it marked a turning point both in baseball and civil rights history. Robinson became the first African American to play in the Major Leagues, and in doing so, led generations of black players into the previously all-white world of professional baseball. As one of the greatest players professional baseball has ever seen, Robinson fought fiercely for civil rights on and off the diamond throughout his lifetime, and in doing so became a great American hero.

Mary Kay Linge recounts the extraordinary story of Robinson's life-from his early childhood in the South, to his college years at UCLA, to becoming a Hall of Famer and a major figure in the NAACP. In analyzing the surrounding social and cultural contexts of Robinson's time, this biography examines the legacy of a man who forever changed baseball. A timeline, statistical appendix, bibliography of print and electronic sources for further reading, and photographs enhance this biography.

Early in the history of America's favorite pastime, trading baseball players was almost as easy as trading baseball cards. This was before the end of the reserve clause and the advent of arbitration, free agency, gargantuan salaries, and no-trade contracts. Fran Zimniuch takes an in-depth look at trading throughout the years, profiling many of infamous players who teams regrettably traded and getting insiders' perspectives from the general managers and the players themselves. With a foreword by former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers Fred Claire, Going, Going, Gone is a must-read for baseball fans.

Shortened Seasons recounts the stories of some of the baseball players who never made it back for the next game, who died with the suddenness of a walk-off homerun. For them, there was no next year. From Hall of Fame caliber players such as Roberto Clemente, Thurman Munson, and Ed Delahanty to players who were still finding their niche in the game like Ken Hubbs, Lyman Bostoc, and Darryl Kile, this book explores the lives and deaths of ball players of all categories and abilities who were struck down at the height of their careers.