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An essential experience of being a baseball fan is the hopeful
anticipation of seeing the hometown nine make a run at winning the
World Series. In "Paths to Glory," Mark L. Armour and Daniel R.
Levitt review how teams build themselves up into winners. What
makes a winning team like the 1900 Brooklyn Superbas or the 1917
White Sox or the 1997 Florida Marlins? And how are these teams
different? What makes each championship team a unique product of
its time? Armour and Levitt provide the historical context to show
how the sport's business side has changed dramatically but its
competitive environment remains the same.Utilizing new statistics
to evaluate a player's value and career patterns, Armour and Levitt
explore the teams that took risks, created their own opportunities,
and changed the game. How did the Washington Senators achieve the
unthinkable and blow past Babe Ruth's Yankees in 1924 and 1925? How
did the 1965 Minnesota Twins quickly rise to the top and why did
they just as suddenly fall? Did Charlie Finley assemble the last
old-fashioned championship team before free agency, or was the
Moustache Gang another example of winning by building from within?
Why did the star-laden Red Sox of the 1930s keep falling short? In
exploring these teams and more, Armour and Levitt analyze the
players, the managers, and the executives who built teams to win
and then lived with the consequences.
Before the feuding owners turned to Ed Barrow to be general manager
in 1920, the Yankees had never won a pennant. They won their first
in 1921 and during Barrow's tenure went on to win thirteen more as
well as ten World Series. This biography of the incomparable Barrow
is also the story of how he built the most successful sports
franchise in American history. Barrow spent fifty years in
baseball. He was in the middle of virtually every major conflict
and held practically every job except player. Daniel R. Levitt
describes Barrow's pre-Yankees years, when he managed Babe Ruth and
the Boston Red Sox to their last World Series Championship before
the "curse." He then details how Barrow assembled a winning Yankees
team both by purchasing players outright and by developing talent
through a farm system. The story of the making of the great Yankees
dynasty reveals Barrow's genius for organizing, for recognizing
baseball talent, and for exploiting the existing economic
environment. Because Barrow was a player in so many of baseball's
key events, his biography gives a clear and eye-opening picture of
how America's sport was played in the twentieth century, on the
field and off. A complex portrait of a larger-than-life character
in the annals of baseball, this book is also an inside history of
how the sport's competitive environment evolved and how the Yankees
came to dominate it.
The 1936 Yankees, the 1963 Dodgers, the 1975 Reds, the 2010
Giants-why do some baseball teams win while others don't? General
managers and fans alike have pondered this most important of
baseball questions. The Moneyball strategy is not the first example
of how new ideas and innovative management have transformed the way
teams are assembled. In Pursuit of Pennants examines and analyzes a
number of compelling, winning baseball teams over the past
hundred-plus years, focusing on their decision making and how they
assembled their championship teams. Whether through scouting,
integration, instruction, expansion, free agency, or modernizing
their management structure, each winning team and each era had its
own version of Moneyball, where front office decisions often made
the difference. Mark L. Armour and Daniel R. Levitt show how these
teams succeeded and how they relied on talent both on the field and
in the front office. While there is no recipe for guaranteed
success in a competitive, ever-changing environment, these teams
demonstrate how creatively thinking about one's circumstances can
often lead to a competitive advantage.
In late 1913, the newly formed Federal League declared itself a
major league in competition with the established National and
American Leagues. Backed by some of America's wealthiest merchants
and industrialists, the new organization posed a real challenge to
baseball's prevailing structure. For the next two years the
well-established leagues fought back furiously in the press, in the
courts, and on the field. The story of this fascinating and complex
historical battle centers on the machinations of both the owners
and the players, as the Federals struggled for profits and status,
and players organized baseball's first real union. Award-winning
author Daniel R. Levitt gives the most authoritative account yet
published of the short-lived Federal League, the last professional
baseball league to challenge the National and American League
monopoly. This paperback edition was first printed in hardcover as
The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball. An eBook edition is also
available under the original title.
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