Baseball Memoirs

Mickey Mantle was the ideal batter for the atomic age, capable of hitting a baseball harder and farther than any other player in history. He was also the perfect idol for postwar America, a wholesome hero from the heartland. In A Season in the Sun, acclaimed historians Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith recount the defining moment of Mantle's legendary career: 1956, when he overcame a host of injuries and critics to become the most celebrated athlete of his time.

From the author of Pitching Around Fidel and Far Afield comes a tragic but ultimately uplifting account of the accidental death of minor league first base coach Mike Coolbaugh, illustrating the many ways in which baseball still has a hold on America.

Drawing on interviews with surviving players, sportswriters, and eyewitnesses, as well as newly discovered material from archives around the country, Jonathan Eig presents a fresh portrait of a ferocious competitor who embodied integration's promise and helped launch the modern civil-rights era. Full of new details and thrilling action, Opening Day brings to life baseball's ultimate story.

For decades he traveled miles and miles with college teams on buses and witnessed the transformation in athletics from the introduction of Title IX to today’s “get-back” coaches. Only Andy Solomon could have done these things. And more. A career athletics administrator shares his favorite stories, accounts and anecdotes from his working career at five South Carolina colleges, a world-class resort and minor league baseball. And while most of the games were fun, the people he met along the way were indeed funner.

No immortal in the history of baseball retired so young, so well, or so completely as Sandy Koufax. After compiling a remarkable record from 1962 to 1966 that saw him lead the National League in ERA all five years, win three Cy Young awards, and pitch four no-hitters including a perfect game, Koufax essentially disappeared. Save for his induction into the Hall of Fame and occasional appearances at the Dodgers training camp, Koufax has remained unavailable, unassailable, and unsullied.

Shattered is part sports audio book, because you’ll go on road trips, enter clubhouses, and walk on the fields of professional baseball. It’s part romantic novel, because you’ll journey with two young kids who fall in love and eventually elope, evading not only her family, but the law as well - for she was only 16. It’s also a story of brokenness, betrayal, and burn-out. If you were raised in a dysfunctional family, if you’ve ever had your dreams fall apart, been betrayed by close friends, or hit the psychological “wall” in your professional career, this is your audio book too.

Documenting multiple challenges at every turn - as a target for racism from society at large and sexism both inside and outside of the Negro League - this is the unique story of the first woman to play professional baseball on a men's team, breaking barriers in sports while believing, "There's got to be a first in everything. Maybe it will be me." The text explains that as players began to leave the Negro League for major league teams, Toni Stone seized her only opportunity to play professional ball and replaced Henry Aaron on the Negro League's top team.

In 2012 the Los Angeles Dodgers were bought out of bankruptcy in the most expensive sale in sports history. Los Angeles icon Magic Johnson and his partners hoped to put together a team worthy of Hollywood. By most accounts they have succeeded, if not always in the way they might have imagined.

Bucky Veil was a professional baseballer who played the game in the early years of the 20th century, a time when baseball was beginning to evolve into America's national pastime. As a 22-year-old rookie with the 1903 Pittsburg Pirates, he pitched in the first world series of modern major league baseball, thus witnessing firsthand an important milestone in the history of the sport.

Making My Pitch tells the story of Ila Jane Borders, who, despite formidable obstacles, became a Little League prodigy, MVP of her otherwise all-male middle school and high school teams, the first woman awarded a baseball scholarship, and the first to pitch and win a complete men’s collegiate game.

In 1986, the bad guys of baseball won the World Series. Now, Erik Sherman, the New York Times best-selling coauthor of Mookie, profiles key players from that infamous Mets team, revealing never-before-exposed details about their lives after that championship year...as well as a look back at the magical season itself. For some of them - known as the “Scum Bunch” - their debauchery off the field was even more awe-inspiring. But when that golden season ended, so did their aura of invincibility.

In The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra, author Phil Pepe takes Yogi from St. Louis to New York's Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, including all the stops along the way - from the days he put soles on women's shoes to his induction into the Baseball's Hall of Fame, when he coined one of his most remembered phrases: "I thank everybody for making this day necessary." Phil Pepe explores Yogi Berra as a boy, player, hero, coach, manager, husband, and father, a buffoon and a human being. He relates all of the Berraisms in an absorbing treatment that is simultaneously comical, thoughtful, and biographical.

The 15 major-league managers interviewed in The Man in the Dugout represent six decades of baseball - men like Joe McCarthy of the New York Yankees and Walter Alston of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Each oral history, steeped in nostalgia and confidentiality, is a record of the triumphs and defeats of the man carrying the prime responsibility of a multimillion-dollar franchise. Here the manager is revealed as a strategist, tactician, peacemaker, politician, ego-soother, and builder of self-confidence.

Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball, and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.

On July 10, 1981, David Mellor was just a baseball-crazed kid, a star high school pitcher preparing to go to college and dreaming of one day taking the mound in Fenway Park for his beloved Boston Red Sox. His dream was derailed as he crossed the parking lot of a McDonald’s, where a car sent him flying through the air and into a wall. In the wake of the accident, even as he reached the major leagues as a groundskeeper, David was tortured by the aftermath of his injuries. One Base at a Time recounts in vivid detail his subsequent 29-year struggle with PTSD.

En 2007, Mike Lowell, el jugador de tercera base de los Red Sox, llevó a su equipo a ganar la Serie Mundial por segunda vez en cuatro años. Para lograrlo, tuvo que vencer una multitud de obstáculos.Cómo pudo triunfar es una gran historia de superación, un modelo a seguir ante la adversidad que ha experimentado a lo largo de su vida Mike Lowell, y el éxito al ser unos de los mejores jugadores de beisbol de los últimos tiempos.

Soon to be a major motion picture, Seeing Home: The Ed Lucas Story is the incredible true tale of a beloved Emmy-winning blind broadcaster who refused to let his disability prevent him from overcoming many challenging obstacles and achieving his dreams.

When Charlie Finley bought the A's in 1960, he was an outsider to the game - an insurance businessman with a larger-than-life personality. He brought his cousin, Carl, on as his right-hand man, moved the team from Kansas City to Oakland, and pioneered a new way to put together a winning team. With legendary players like Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue, the Finleys' Oakland A's won three straight World Series and riveted the nation.

In The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I), sportswriter Tom Callahan brings to life the most fascinating - and often least understood - figures in the world of sports. This is the ultimate collection of Callahan’s sports profiles, with subjects ranging from Muhammad Ali to Pete Rose, and Joe Montana to Michael Jordan. Based on decades of sports reporting as well as featuring material original to this book, The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I) takes athletes we thought we knew and reveals how wrong we often are. This is a rare and surprising work of reportage that will appeal to sports fans and non–sports fans alike.

If it was not all so true, you’d think it was a fairy tale. A seventeen-year-old from Queens spray paints graffiti on Yankee Stadium and gets nabbed by George Steinbrenner himself. Contrary to his gruff public image, the Boss—driven by a compassionate inner voice—reclaims the teen at a time when the Bronx is literally burning.