This book - the first in the English language to contain an exhaustive collection of Japanese baseball data - presents basic statistical information and listings for every Japanese professional baseball season from 1936 through 1997. The first part contains yearly breakdowns of team standings; qualifiers for batting and earned run championships; leaders in home runs, runs batted in, wins and strikeouts; all-star game results; Japan Series results; Best Nine selections; Gold Glove selections; and award winners. Sections on career records and single-season records are provided in the second part of this work. Appendices list no-hit, no-run games, Japanese Hall of Famers, and records of foreign tours of Japan by professional teams.

The National Pastime's rich history and vast cache of statistics have provided fans and researchers a gold mine of narrative and data since the late 19th century. Many books have been written about Major League Baseball's most famous games. This one takes a different approach, focusing on MLB's most historically significant games. Some will be familiar to baseball scholars, such as the October afternoon in 1961 when Roger Maris eclipsed Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, or the compelling sixth game of the 1975 World Series. Other fascinating games are less well known: the day at the Polo Grounds in 1921, when a fan named Reuben Berman filed a lawsuit against the New York Giants, winning fans the right to keep balls hit into the stands; the first televised broadcast of an MLB game in 1939; opening night of the Houston Astrodome in 1965, when spectators no longer had to be taken out to the ballgame; or the spectator-less April 2015 Orioles-White Sox game, played in an empty stadium in the wake of the Baltimore riots. Each game is listed in chronological order, with detailed historical background and a box score.

This book is about the realities baseball as an economic force and as a product of popular culture. Baseball does not happen only between the white lines or in the ballparks--it's in the media, bobblehead giveaways, and mobile device apps. Issues of globalization, race and ethnicity, nationality, legacy making, iconic value building, and marketing concerns are all essential to understanding the complex and global product that Major League Baseball is today. A rich...intersection shall we say of fan, corporate, player, media, and owner values exist in each of these parts of the whole. These parts combine in nearly countless ways.

When the 1949-1953 New York Yankees won an astounding five consecutive World Series, they did it without the offensive firepower that characterized so many of their championship teams before and after. The franchise came to rely instead on three aging pitchers, an unlikely trio that won 255 games during the five-year championship run.This book focuses on the close relationship and quiet achievement of Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Eddie Lopat. Soon after Robinson and the cross-town Dodgers had publicly confronted the issues of race and ethnicity, these men from very different backgrounds - Creek Indian, Italian and Polish - established a deep communion with each other, became lifelong friends, and over a handful of years re-wrote baseball history.This entry refers to the Large Print edition.

Heading into their ninth season, the expansion Washington Senators had never won more than 76 games in a season. The team even seemed to be backsliding, as the 1968 season brought 31 more losses than wins. Desperate to try something new, Senators owner Bob Short hired Hall of Famer Ted Williams to manage the team. Williams sparked the Senators to the best record for a Washington team since the old Senators (now the Minnesota Twins) had won 87 games in 1945. ""The Splendid Splinter"" oversaw dramatic improvements in both offense and pitching, with Dick Bosman even leading the league in ERA.The Senators' last winning season, 1969 was an unlikely high point in an otherwise lackluster 11 - year stay in the capital. Prior to that season, they'd been a perennial cellar dweller, and after 1969 the team would experience steep declines in attendance and wins, leading to an acrimonious departure to Texas. This book recounts that 1969 season in-depth.

"With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history. At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement. Baseball's Pivotal Era also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan--the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later. During these years, the game was led by A.B. ""Happy"" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the ""player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him.""

In 2002, Tabitha Soren first began photographing a group of minor league draft picks for the Oakland A's-young men coming into the major league farm system straight from high school or college. Since then, she has followed the players through their baseball lives, an alternate reality of long bus rides, on-field injuries, friendships and marriages entered and exited, constant motion, and very hard work, often for very little return. Some of the subjects, like Nick Swisher and Joe Blanton, have gone on to become well-known, respected players at the highest level of the game. Some left baseball to pursue other lines of work, such as selling insurance and coal mining. Others have struggled with poverty and even homelessness. Fifteen years after that first shoot, Fantasy Life portrays a selection of these stories, gathering together a richly textured series of photographs taken on the field and behind the scenes at games, along with commentaries by each of the players and memorabilia from their lives-from kindergarten-age baseball cards to x-rays of player injuries. Dave Eggers contributes a five-part short story that compellingly condenses the roller-coaster ride of the minor-league everyman, from youthful pursuit of stardom through the slog of endless hardscrabble games, to that moment of realization that success may not be just around the corner after all. Additonally, a number of the featured players add their own real-life experiences of trying to make it to "The Show." Together, these elements evoke the enduring spirit of this quintessential American fantasy of making it in the major leagues.

Baseball is a readily quantifiable sport, and baseball historians, journalists and front office personnel often use sabermetric statistics to rank the perforemance of a particular player or team. To many, these statistics can be intimidating and unwieldy, and the reliance on numerical data to explain a cherished pastime often meets with skepticism and confusion. For researchers and for serious fans, however, the truth is in the numbers, and statistical rankings offer an easy and accurate way to understand the game. Covering a decade and a half, this work scrutinizes statistics from both leagues and proves just how useful and straightforward numerical rankings can be. It examines pitching, offense, defense, managers, acquisitions, and longevity and competition based on the information reflected in various stats. Many of these figures are explained, simplifying seemingly complex metrics while illuminating 15 years of baseball. Twenty-six appendices cover topics ranging from fielding averages, starting pitchers' won-loss records and leading closers' saves versus blown saves to total team offensive efficiency, quarterly standings in divisional races and composition of major leagues rosters by methods of player acquisition, among many other diverse categories.

In 1965 George Gmelch signed a contract to play professional baseball with the Detroit Tigers organization. Gmelch grew up sheltered in an all-white, affluent San Francisco suburb, and he knew little of the world outside. Over the next four seasons, he came of age in baseball's Minor Leagues through experiences ranging from learning the craft of the professional game to becoming conscious of race and class for the first time. Playing with Tigers is not a typical baseball memoir. Now a well-known anthropologist, Gmelch recounts a baseball education unlike any other as he got to know small-town life across the United States against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, and the emergence of counterculture. The social and political turmoil of the times spilled into baseball, and Gmelch experienced the consequences firsthand as he played out his career in the Jim Crow South. Playing with Tigers immerses the reader in the life of the Minor Leagues, capturing the gritty, insular, and humorous life and culture of Minor League baseball during a period when both the author and the country were undergoing profound changes.

They had two future Hall of Famers, the last pitcher to win thirty games, and a supporting cast of some of the most peculiar individuals ever to play in the majors. But more than that, the 1968 Detroit Tigers symbolize a lost era in baseball. It was a time before runaway salaries and designated hitters. Before divisional playoffs and drug suspensions. Before teams measured their well-being by the number of corporate boxes in their ballpark and the cable contract in their pocket. It was the last season of baseball's most colorful and nostalgic period. It was surely not a more innocent time. The 1968 Tigers were a team of hell-raisers, the second coming of the Gas House Gang. They brawled on the field and partied hard afterward. They bickered with each other and ignored their manager. They won game after game with improbable rallies on their last at-bat and grabbed the World Championship by coming back from a three games to one deficit to beat the most dominant pitcher in the World Series history in the deciding seventh game. Their ultimate hero, Mickey Lolich, was a man who threw left-handed, thought "upside down," and rode motorcycles to the ballpark. Their thirty-game winner, Denny McLain, played the organ in various night spots, placed bets over the clubhouse phone, and incidentally, overpowered the American League. Their prize pinch-hitter, Gates Brown, had done hard time in the Ohio Penitentiary. Their top slugger, Willie Horton, would have rather been boxing. Their centerfielder, Mickey Stanley, a top defensive outfielder, would unselfishly volunteer to play the biggest games of his life at shortstop, so that their great outfielder, Al Kaline, could get into the World Series lineup. The story of this team, their triumph, and what happened in their lives afterward, is one of the great dramas of baseball history. The Tigers of '68 is the uproarious, stirring tale of this team, the last to win a pure pennant (before each league was divided into two divisions and playoffs were added) and World Series. Award-winning journalist George Cantor, who covered the Tigers that year for the Detroit Free Press, revisits the main performers on the team and then weaves their memories and stories (warts and all) into an absorbing narrative that revives all of the delicious-and infamous-moments that made the season unforgettable. Tommy Matchick's magical ninth-inning home run, Jim Northrup's record-setting grand slams, Jon Warden's torrid April, Dick McAuliffe's charge to the mound, Denny McLain's gift to Mickey Mantle, the nearly unprecedented comeback in the World Series, and dozens more. The '68 Tigers occupy a special place in the history of the city of Detroit. They've joined their predecessors of 1935 as an almost mythic unit-more than a baseball team. The belief has passed into Detroit folklore. Many people swear, as Willie Horton says, that they were "put here by God to save the city." The Tigers of '68 will help you understand why.

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.

A three-time World Series winner and an early inductee into the Hall of Fame, lauded by Babe Ruth as the finest defensive outfielder he ever saw, and described as "perfection on the field" by the great Grantland Rice, Tris Speaker enjoys the peculiar distinction of being one of the least-known legends of baseball history. Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend is the first book to tell the full story of Speaker's turbulent life and to document in sharp detail the grit and glory of his pivotal role in baseball's dead-ball era. Playing for the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians in the early part of the twentieth century, Tris "Spoke" Speaker put up numbers that amaze us even today: his record for career doubles-792-may never be approached, let alone broken. Timothy M. Gay gives a rousing account of some of the best baseball ever played-and of some of the darkest moments that ever tainted a game and hastened the end of a career. Gay's four years of research on Speaker unearthed a document that suggests that cheating induced by gambling was far more widespread in early baseball than officials have acknowledged. Gay's book captures the bygone spirit of the big leagues' rough-and-tumble early years and restores one of baseball's true greats-and a truly larger-than-life personality-to his rightful place in the American sports pantheon.

Ernie, Gabby, Billy, Fergie, Cap and Hack, Rhino and Santo, Andre and Sammy, Wrigley, the ivy. Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, tossing back opposing team's homers, the Billy Goat Curse, Bartman's ball. Sixteen National League pennants, two World Series crowns, but...95 years and counting. Cubs Pride spans 129 years of Chicago Cubs ups, downs, and almosts. Extolled are the great legends, the lustrous lore, and the fabled futility of the Windy City's favorite nine. It's certain to work up a case of diamond fever for Cubs fans and baseball enthusiasts everywhere. In 2003 the Cubs were just five outs away from their first World Series appearance since 1945, but the mysterious forces of fate intervened once again, and a late-game eight-run-rally by the Florida Marlins ended the dream. Such mishaps have made the Cubs America's "favorite losers," according to Chicago TV station WGN, owned by the same company that owns the Cubs. The team's perennial failings and underdog status have created a national following. Cubs Pride provides firsthand accounts of the great Cubs players; the intense rivalries; the testaments to Cubs character; the great moments in Cub history; all 16 National League pennant-winning rosters; the all-time Cubs team; and even a shrine to No. 14, the immortal Ernie Banks. All are told by the players themselves, managers and coaches, Cubs' opponents, and members of the media.

The baseball glove is a ubiquitous item, a crucial piece of equipment in the game of baseball, and it offers the opportunity to examine the production of material culture and social practice at numerous levels. Where and how is a glove made, and how does its manufacture square with the narratives surrounding its place in American cultural life? What are the myths, superstitions, and beliefs surrounding its acquisition, care, use, and significance? How does a glove function as the center of a web of cultural practices that illustrate how individuals relate to a consumer good as a symbol of memory, personal narrative, and national identity? How do the manufacturers of baseball gloves draw upon, promote, and in some sense create these practices? How do these practices and meanings change in other national and cultural contexts? The Baseball Glove offers students the opportunity to examine these questions in an engagingly written and illustrated book that promotes hands-on interaction with a quintessential item of material culture. At the same time, the book gives students the space for critical self-reflection about the place of material goods like sporting equipment in their lives, and it provides the chance to learn different methodological approaches to studying everyday objects.

Burleigh Grimes--forever remembered as the ill-tempered spitballer with the perpetual five o'clock shadow. For nearly two decades, he brought his surly disposition to the pitcher's mound. His life-or-death mentality resulted in a reputation as one of the game's great competitors and a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Along the way he suited up for eight different ball clubs and played alongside a record 36 Hall of Famers. In all, Grimes spent over half a century in professional baseball as a player, manager, coach and scout. This biography covers all aspects of his life. From his early childhood in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, to his twilight years in that same town. In between are World Series highs and lows, brawls, five marriages, a near-death experience and 270 major league victories.

With more losses and last-place finishes than any other club in Major League Baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies have earned a reputation as one of the most unsuccessful teams ever to take the field. Even so, the Phillies have boasted many unforgettable players and achieved a number of notable triumphs. This history of the Phillies begins with the club's inception in 1883 and goes through the 2012 season, highlighting the team's finer moments and players but also covering less memorable times. Among the people and events it recounts are the great outfield of the 1890s, Chuck Klein's slugging feats, the 1980 World Series, the surprise 1993 pennant win, and the very successful years in Citizens Bank Park, including the world champions of 2008. An exploration of the Phillies' special relationship with Philadelphia and numerous historic photographs complete this comprehensive celebration of the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in professional sports history.

The Pacific Coast League enjoyed a reputation as one of the premier minor leagues in organized baseball. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Lefty Gomez, the Waner brothers and Ernie Lombardi were among the future Hall of Famers who played in its cozy parks. Legendary minor leaguers such as Smead Jolley, Buzz Arlett, Lefty ODoul and Frank Shellenback made their marks in the PCL. This reference work is a season-by-season guide to the glory days of the PCL. It includes a listing of starters and primary reserves for all teams from 1903 through 1957, as well as playoff results, managerial records, and statistical leaders for each season. Complete PCL records for over 500 of the circuits most notable players are also provided.

The Cincinnati Reds are recognized as one of the great teams in baseball history. Left fielder George Foster-an integral part of the Reds' back-to-back World Championships in 1975-1976-has never received proper credit for his contribution to their legacy. In 1977, Foster became the most feared slugger in the National League, batting .320, with 52 home runs and 149 runs batted in to win the NL MVP Award, establishing a new single-season home run record for the Reds' franchise that still stands. Yet Foster's big year was not enough to stem the emergence of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who roared out of the gate and ran away with the NL West Division pennant. This book tells the story of Foster's record-setting season and puts his pre-steroid era achievements in proper perspective. The author chronicles the subsequent decline of the Big Red Machine and the rest of Foster's big league career, including his disappointing tenure with the New York Mets.

Zack Wheat was long considered the greatest player in Dodgers history. The Missouri native parlayed his tenacious work ethic and raw skills into a major league career. For almost two decades, the mild-mannered outfielder was a mainstay for the Dodgers, bringing stability to a team that was at times unhinged. To this day, Wheat is the franchise leader in several batting categories. Greatly respected by his peers and adored by fans, Wheat served as Brooklyn's captain for several years, leading the club to two pennants (1916 and 1920). After his playing days, Wheat found difficulty working his way back into the game and was nearly killed in an automobile accident as a member of the Kansas City police force before finding redemption in election to the Hall of Fame in 1959.

Visualizing Baseball provides a visual exploration of the game of baseball. Graphical displays are used to show how measures of performance, at the team level and the individual level, have changed over the history of baseball. Graphs of career trajectories are helpful for understanding the rise and fall of individual performances of hitters and pitchers over time. One can measure the contribution of plays by the notion of runs expectancy. Graphs of runs expectancy are useful for understanding the importance of the game situation defined by the runners on base and number of outs. Also the runs measure can be used to quantify hitter and pitch counts and the win probabilities can be used to define the exciting plays during a baseball game. Special graphs are used to describe pitch data from the PitchFX system and batted ball data from the Statcast system. One can explore patterns of streaky performance and clutch play by the use of graphs, and special plots are used to predict final season batting averages based on data from the middle of the season. This book was written for several types of readers. Many baseball fans should be interested in the topics of the chapters, especially those who are interested in learning more about the quantitative side of baseball. Many statistical ideas are illustrated and so the graphs and accompanying insights can help in promoting statistical literacy at many levels. From a practitioner's perspective, the chapters offer many illustrations of the use of a modern graphics system and R scripts are available on an accompanying website to reproduce and potentially improve the graphs in this book.

The story of the 1914 “Miracle” Boston Braves is one of the most memorable in baseball history, but less well known is what the club did after that spectacular season. They didn't “flash and disappear”, as sports writer John Kieran put it. In 1915, they were strong contenders for the National League pennant, and almost won it again in 1916. This book is the first to look at the “Miracle” Braves in a larger context. Under the innovative manager George Stallings, the Braves won Boston's first National League pennant in 17 years. Their startling sweep of the mighty Philadelphia Athletics was their league's only World Series victory from 1909 to 1919. The Braves of those years - like the hot-tempered Georgian who managed them - were a roistering, pugnacious crew that battled the opposition, the umpires and sometimes each other.

In the years following the decline of the New York Yankees dynasty that ended in 1964, three American League teams endeavored to stake their claim to the Junior Circuit's crown. From 1965 to 1975, the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, and Oakland Athletics emerged as the most significant AL clubs, but this trio achieved varying degrees of success. Through the prism of these three teams, this book will examine facets of the dynastic aspirations of each during this time: the way in which key personnel were assembled into a cohesive roster, the glory that was won by the clubs, and the factors leading to their decline. Drawing on a rich variety of primary and secondary sources, the story is told of vital players from Latin America who made their way to Minnesota, the select few who ventured from the Orioles' training facility in Thomasville, Georgia, to Baltimore, and the collegiate stars selected in the early years of the newly-created amateur draft who went on to help forge a dynasty in Oakland.

The celebrated home ballpark of the Baltimore Orioles, Camden Yards has become baseball's center stage, the main theater where many of the game's successes and woes have played out in recent years. Home of the Game celebrates the unique position Camden Yards holds as a symbol of the modern game and a prototype for new ballparks across the country. In his direct, engaging account, Thom Loverro examines the history of the park, its influence on the move to bring baseball back from the suburbs to the cities, and its far-reaching social and business impact on professional sports.

Combining old-fashioned architecture with modern convenience, Camden Yards represents the new trend in sports facilities that has touched not just baseball but all of professional sports: the ballpark as revenue producer. Despite Baltimore's relatively small population, the Orioles now sell out every game, which has allowed them to spend liberally on the acquisition of top-tier free agents. Such recruitment has resulted in a consistently competitive team that represents both the best, such as the retention of hometown hero Cal Ripken, and worst, such as the succession of talented managers driven off by owner Peter Angelos, in contemporary baseball.

Home of the Game reveals how this revolutionary ballpark has changed the face of baseball as a sport and a business.

During the second half of the twentieth century, Major League Baseball and its affiliated minor leagues evolved from local and regional entities governing the play America's favorite pastime to national business organizations. The relocation of teams, league expansion, the advent of free agency and an influx of international players has made baseball big business, on an increasingly global scale. Focusing on the last fifty years, this work examines the past and present commercial elements of organized baseball, emphasizing the dual roles - competitive sport and profitable business - which the sport must now fulfill. Twenty-five essays cover five areas integral to the economic side of baseball: business and finance, human resources, international relations, management and leadership and sports marketing. Detailed discussions of the redistribution of revenues, the history of player unionization, aggressive global marketing, strategies of franchise owners and an evaluation of fan costs, among other topics introduce the reader to the important issues and specific challenges professional baseball faces in an increasingly crowded - yet geographically expansive - sports marketplace. The work is also indexed.