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2019 SABR Baseball Research Award Few people have influenced a team
as much as did Tom Yawkey (1903-76) as owner of the Boston Red Sox.
After purchasing the Red Sox for $1.2 million in 1932, Yawkey
poured millions into building a better team and making the
franchise relevant again. Although the Red Sox never won a World
Series under Yawkey's ownership, there were still many highlights.
Lefty Grove won his three hundredth game; Jimmie Foxx hit fifty
home runs; Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941, and both Williams and
Carl Yastrzemski won Triple Crowns. Yawkey was viewed by fans as a
genial autocrat who ran his ball club like a hobby more than a
business and who spoiled his players. He was perhaps too trusting,
relying on flawed cronies rather than the most competent executives
to run his ballclub. One of his more unfortunate legacies was the
accusation that he was a racist, since the Red Sox were the last
Major League team to integrate, and his inaction in this regard
haunted both him and the team for decades. As one of the last great
patriarchal owners in baseball, he was the first person elected to
the Baseball Hall of Fame who hadn't been a player, manager, or
general manager. Bill Nowlin takes a close look at Yawkey's life as
a sportsman and as one of the leading philanthropists in New
England and South Carolina. He also addresses Yawkey's leadership
style and issues of racism during his tenure with the Red Sox.
The 1954 Cleveland Indians were one of the most remarkable baseball
teams of all time. Their record for most wins (111) fell only when
the baseball schedule expanded, and their winning percentage, an
astounding .721, is still unsurpassed in the American League.
Though the season ended with a heartbreaking loss to the New York
Giants in the World Series, the 1954 team remains a favorite among
Cleveland fans and beyond. Pitching to the Pennant commemorates the
'54 Indians with a biographical sketch of the entire team, from the
"Big Three" pitching staff (Mike Garcia and future Hall of Famers
Bob Lemon and Early Wynn), through notable players such as Bobby
Avila, Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and Al Rosen, to manager Al Lopez,
his coaches, and the Indians' broadcast team. There are also
stories about Cleveland Stadium and the 1954 All-Star Game (which
the team hosted), as well as a season timeline and a firsthand
account of Game One of the World Series at the Polo Grounds.
Pitching to the Pennant features the superb writing and research of
members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR),
making this book a must for all Indians fans and baseball
aficionados.
By 1964 the storied St. Louis Cardinals had gone seventeen years
without so much as a pennant. Things began to turn around in 1953,
when August A. Busch Jr. bought the team and famously asked where
all the black players were. Under the leadership of men like Bing
Devine and Johnny Keane, the Cardinals began signing talented
players regardless of colour, and slowly their star started to rise
again. Drama and Pride in the Gateway City commemorates the team
that Bing Devine built, the 1964 team that prevailed in one of the
tightest three-way pennant races of all time and then went on to
win the World Series, beating the New York Yankees in the full
seven games. All the men come alive in these pages - pitchers Ray
Sadecki and Bob Gibson, players Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bobby
Shantz, manager Johnny Keane, his coaches, the Cardinals'
broadcasters, and Bill White, who would one day run the entire
National League - along with the dramatic events that made the 1964
Cardinals such a memorable club in a memorable year.
SABR 50 at 50 celebrates and highlights the Society for American
Baseball Research’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball
history. Established in 1971 in Cooperstown, New York, SABR has
sought to foster and disseminate the research of baseball—with
groundbreaking work from statisticians, historians, and independent
researchers—and has published dozens of articles with
far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the game. Among its current
membership are many Major and Minor League Baseball officials,
broadcasters, and writers as well as numerous former players. The
diversity of SABR members’ interests is reflected in this
fiftieth-anniversary volume—from baseball and the arts to
statistical analysis to the Deadball Era to women in baseball. SABR
50 at 50 includes the most important and influential research
published by members across a multitude of topics, including the
sabermetric work of Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and Bill James, along
with Jerry Malloy on the Negro Leagues, Keith Olbermann on why the
shortstop position is number 6, John Thorn and Jules Tygiel on the
untold story behind Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers,
and Gai Berlage on the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team in
the 1990s. To provide history and context, each notable research
article is accompanied by a short introduction. As SABR celebrates
fifty years this collection gathers the organization’s most
notable research and baseball history for the serious baseball
reader. Â Â
Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records is less a
standard history and more an idiosyncratic memoir written by one of
the three Rounder founders. Rounder Records was born in 1970, a
“hobby that got out of control,†a fledgling record company
more or less conceived when vinyl still reigned, while the Sixties
were still in flower, and which began publishing on a shoestring
budget of just over $1,000. Founded by three friends just out of
college, the Boston-area company produced over 3,000 record albums,
the most active company of the last half-century, specializing in
roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won fifty-six
Grammy Awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases
might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public.
It’s arguably a quintessentially American success story. This
book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder
evolved to a second stage, with a generational change that has kept
the label healthy and flourishing when so many other cultural
enterprises from the era have folded or gone dark. It includes
original photographs taken by the author or drawn from the Rounder
Records archives. It’s the story of three people with no
background in business who took an idea and, through hard work and
passion, built something of lasting cultural significance.
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One-Hit Wonders (Paperback)
Bill Nowlin, Len Levin, Carl Riechers
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R945
R787
Discovery Miles 7 870
Save R158 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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