Sports Baseball Biographies

In Playing Through the Pain, writer Dan Good seeks to make sense of MLB MVP Ken Caminiti's fascinating, troubled life. The story of Caminiti, the player who opened the lid on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, has never been properly told. Caminiti voluntarily admitted in a 2002 Sports Illustrated cover story that he used steroids during his career, including his 1996 season, and guessed that half of the players were using performance-enhancing drugs. Good's on-the-record sources include Caminiti's steroids supplier, people who attended rehab with him, and more.

Mike Piazza was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 62nd round of the 1988 baseball draft as a "courtesy pick". The Dodgers never expected him to play for them - or anyone else. Mike had other ideas. Overcoming his detractors, he became the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993, broke the record for season batting average by a catcher, holds the record for career home runs at his position, and was selected as an All Star 12 times. Mike was groomed for baseball success by his ambitious, self-made father in Pennsylvania, a classic father-son American-dream story.

Amid strict new rules and coronavirus outbreaks on other teams that wreaked havoc on the schedule, the Dodgers maintained a laser focus as a team and organization, and, ultimately, won the first bubbled playoffs in the history of Major League Baseball. In COVID Curveball, author and Dodgers’ broadcaster Tim Neverett takes us through this unprecedented season, offering exclusive access and firsthand, edge-of-your-seat play-by-play coverage of the surreal days and weeks that led up to the dramatic championship climax.

In the spring of 1977 Reggie Jackson should have been on top of the world. The best player of the Oakland A's dynasty, which won three straight World Series, he was the first big-money free agent, wooed and flattered by George Steinbrenner into coming to the New York Yankees, which hadn't won a World Series since 1962. But Reggie was about to learn, as he writes in this vivid and surprising memoir, that until his initial experience on the Yankees, "I didn't know what alone meant."

As the next generation of baseball superstars cement themselves, Ohtani, who can pitch a 100mph fastball and was a Top 3 home run leader at the end of the season, stands out amongst them all. Major League Baseball has found the new face of the sport. In Sho-time, Jeff Fletcher examines the player’s path from his early days in Japan, his transition to the MLB, and a start-to-finish inside look at his historic 2021 MVP season.

Before Chipper Jones became an eight-time All-Star who amassed Hall of Fame-worthy statistics during a 19-year career with the Atlanta Braves, he was just a country kid from small-town Pierson, Florida. A kid who grew up playing baseball in the backyard with his dad, dreaming that one day he'd be a major league ballplayer. With his trademark candor and astonishing recall, Chipper Jones tells the story of his rise to the MLB ranks and what it took to stay with one organization his entire career in an era of booming free agency.

This book isn't just another compilation of baseball statistics and records. It's a journey through the lives of legends like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and many others, showcasing how their trials and triumphs extend far beyond the baseball diamond.

Outfielder Christian Yelich joined Little League when he was four and never stopped playing. From traveling teams when he was young to being drafted as a professional player, baseball was a priority for Yelich. He was named the National League’s MVP in 2018.

David "Big Papi" Ortiz is a baseball icon and one of the most popular figures ever to play the game. As a key part of the Boston Red Sox for 14 years, David has helped the team win three World Series, bringing back a storied franchise from "never wins" to "always wins". He helped them upend the doubts, the naysayers, and the nonbelievers and captured the imagination of millions of fans along the way, as he launched balls into the stands again and again and again.

Mookie Betts started playing baseball as a child and has never looked back. Betts made his major-league baseball debut in 2014. In 2018, he won the American League MVP award and helped lead the Red Sox to a World Series win.

In this extraordinary autobiography, Felipe Alou tells of his real dream: to become a doctor. An uncle was funding his university education when an improbable turn of events intervened at the 1955 Pan American Games. There as a track and field athlete, Alou was pressed into service on the baseball field to replace a player sent home for disciplinary reasons. A scout noticed Alou and offered him two hundred pesos to sign a pro contract.

Journalist and baseball lover Ed Henry reveals for the first time the backstory of faith that guided Jackie Robinson into not only the baseball record books but the annals of civil rights advancement as well. Through recently discovered sermons, interviews with Robinson's family and friends, and even an unpublished book by the player himself, Henry details a side of Jackie's humanity that few have taken the time to see.

In 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won an astounding 59 games - more than anyone in major-league history ever had before, or has since. He then went on to win all three games of baseball's first World Series. Fifty-nine in '84 tells the dramatic story not only of that amazing feat of grit but also of big-league baseball two decades after the Civil War - a brutal, bloody sport played barehanded, the profession of uneducated, hard-drinking men who thought little of cheating outrageously or maiming an opponent to win.

Babe Ruth grew from his adolescence in a Baltimore orphanage into a baseball superstar and national treasure. But he was also a product of his time, the colorful 1920s and 1930s. A sparkling collage of narratives from “the Babe”, those who knew him, and the media makes this an exceptional biography as well as a work of cultural history.

John Arezzi was a lifelong Mets fan who dreamed of a job in baseball. In 1981, he took a job with the Mets Class A team in North Carolina. But Arezzi had another love: professional wrestling. Mat Memories is Arezzi's chance to hold the mic, and he holds nothing back - he names names and tells the untold behind-the-scenes stories: from the ring, the stage, and the diamond.

Considered by Ty Cobb as the "finest natural hitter in the history of the game," "Shoeless Joe" Jackson is ranked with the greatest players to ever step onto a baseball diamond. With a career .356 batting average - which is still ranked third all-time - the man from Pickens County, South Carolina, was on his way to becoming one of the greatest players in the sport's history. That is until the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, which shook baseball to its core.

Seventy baseball seasons ago, on a May afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio lined a hard single to left field. It was the quiet beginning to the most resonant baseball achievement of all time. Alongside the story of DiMaggio's dramatic quest, Kennedy deftly examines the peculiar nature of hitting streaks and with an incisive, modern-day perspective gets inside the number itself, as its sheer improbability heightens both the math and the magic of 56 games in a row.

Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended tour of the expansive St. Louis Cardinals Minor League system.

In the 34 years since his retirement, Henry Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude: He broke existing records (rbis, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least 30 home runs per season 15 times, becoming the first player in history to hammer 500 home runs and three thousand hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures.

Honus Wagner, whose career in baseball (most of it with the Pittsburgh Pirates) stretched from 1895 to 1917, was the first American sports superstar of the twentieth century. One of the first five players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in its first year (1939), he was probably the best shortstop in baseball's history.