Thirty years into baseball's sabermetric revolution, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact of a major league umpire's ball-and-strike judgment on game results. This welcome study corrects this omission by profiling more than ninety current umpires, summarizing their professional history, and charting their performance at home plate from 2007 through 2010. Annual and four-season rankings place the umpires according to four categories: runs per nine innings, walks per nine innings, strikeouts per nine innings, and strikeout-to-walk ratio. The statistical analysis reveals that the home plate umpire's influence on a game can be huge, both in terms of runs scored and the distribution of walks and strikeouts. By introducing the umpires as individuals and encouraging rational, informed discussion of their work, this examination depicts umpires not as failed robots, but as dynamic actors whose impact on the game can be measured, analyzed, and enjoyed.

The Giants-Dodgers rivalry began in the 1840s, was considered to be the best in baseball by 1890, and continues to be the game's oldest and most storied rivalry today. Three reasons it has been the best are how often both teams have been good, how rarely they have been bad, and how tenaciously they have battled each other. At the rivalry's peak, from 1946 to 1971, the Giants and Dodgers finished either one - two or within five games of first place a remarkable nine times. This, the first book on the Giants-Dodgers saga in over forty years, is the definitive account of the rivalry from its beginning to the present. It covers both teams and their players, including all the greats, such as Wee Willie Keeler, John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Leo Durocher, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Ralph Branca, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal, Joe Morgan, Tommy Lasorda, and Barry Bonds, among many others. It also examines the two teams' four cities, and gives special attention to their moves to California in the 1950s. The rivalry arguably reached its apex in the years following the move.