The fifty-eight year Easter Monday baseball rivalry between North Carolina State University and Wake Forest University had a the traditional fraternity celebration known as the PIKA Ball, held on the NC State campus, that followed it on Monday evening. Told from the view point of sports journalists, players, fans, and PIKA members, the narrative reveals the excitement and developing strategies as the contest traverses several baseball eras. At the height of its popularity, the game drew astonishingly large crowds of spectators, many of whom were absentee government workers, providing the impetus for the North Carolina State Legislature to declare Easter Monday to be a state holiday.

The players of the independent Carolina League were outlaws. A diverse lot that included preachers and ex-cons, with many former and future Major Leaguers, they played ball during the desperate years of the Great Depression, when half of organized professional baseball's minor leagues went broke and ceased operations. Despite the number of defaulting leagues and teams, the players were held to their prior contracts, and many found themselves unemployed, unable to play without violating the reserve clause that bound them to their previous club. The threat of being blackballed by organized baseball notwithstanding, hundreds of players went to bat for the independent Carolina League, and their stories offer unique glimpses into the pastime's - and America's - most difficult years. This follow-up to the immensely popular and award-winning ""The Independent Carolina Baseball League, 1936-1938"" (McFarland, 1999) takes the story of outlaw baseball into extra innings, offering a wealth of previously unpublished interviews with the key players and personnel associated with the league. With outstanding coverage of nearly 20 players, including the notorious Edwin Collins ""Alabama"" Pitts and well-known Lawrence Columbus ""Crash"" Davis, this book also offers the unique perspectives of umpires, journalists and players' wives. Appendices include a Pitts family history, the Kannapolis Towelers team record book, player records, and the history of the Carolina Victory League.

In baseball, as in much poetry, beauty comes from tension. Groundrules and boundaries confine those who would play, but the best find ways to exploit their strictures, and just as the daring base runner takes second on a fly to right, the practiced poet trips the sleepy reader with a surprise rhyme, bold line break, or a jarring reversal of foot. Its no surprise, then, that hardball has a larger body of literature than other sports, or that aficionados are more likely than others to quote lines of verse in support of the game they love. This is Tim Peelers second book of poems from baseball. It contains some of his most moving and best-crafted poetry. Starting with time-honored themes--fathers and sons, baseball and time, memory and the nation, team and player and loyalty--the poet adapts the universal to the local and personal, proving that baseball, with its easy accommodation of reflection, remains a powerful tool for mining our individual and collective history.

Set on what remains of a small family farm in the Blue Ridge foothills of Western North Carolina, ROUGH BEAST depicts the quirky ascension of Larry Ledbetter from small-time country gangster to unwilling literary lion. Larry's voice is the engine that drives the sometimes comic but often violent narrative. In his attempt to come to grips with both personal tragedies and his inexplicable success, Larry reveals his vulnerability and shared humanity.