Sports Softball

Provides a brief introduction to the game of softball as intended to be played by children.

You’ll be given the ins and outs of recruiting to start stocking your team with premium players; an inside look at the most effective batting drills to ensure an offensive powerhouse; and proper fielding techniques and drills to reinforce the techniques.

Baseball statistics come to life. Listeners won't look at mathematics in the same way again.

This summer, Kate Kellner is firing on all cylinders. She was offered the chance to play summer softball with the Weatherfield Trailblazers, she’s reconciled with her best friend, Ty, and with Grady by her side, she feels like anything’s possible. But this outlook on life only takes her so far. After all, she can’t just become a new person overnight. Grady’s looking forward to spending a relaxing and lazy summer with Kate. He plans to work during the day, watch her softball games at night, and spend every available hour left just soaking up the sun and living his best life.

Four sports. Four friends. In Game Face, each girl gets to narrate her own story, focusing on their sport of choice. Whether it’s a softball tournament or a hockey tryout, Rana, Maya, Alana, and Louie each face their weaknesses and find their strengths. They’ll confront the overwhelming pressure of sports and the ups and downs of friendships. But with focus, perseverance, and support, these middle-schoolers won’t just win the big game, they’ll win over listeners!

From his perspective as a journalist and a true fan, Bob Costas, NBC's award-winning broadcaster, shares his views on the forces that are diminishing the appeal of Major League Baseball and proposes realistic changes that can be made to protect and promote the game's best interests. Costas answers each problem he cites with an achievable strategy for restoring genuine competition and rescuing fans from the forces that have diluted the sheer joy of the game.

Sports Card Collector 101 is jam-packed full of all of the content you could possibly desire to kick-start your collection on the right foot. As with collecting any types of cards, it is essential that you understand which cards carry the most value, and which ones are the rarest to find. This book will show you how to make sure your cards remain at the highest value possible, giving you the best chance of your investment paying off.

Discover the secrets to sports motivation that have helped countless athletes dominate their sport. Learn from the best in the business, and find the mental toughness you need to take your game to the next level.

Fernando Valenzuela was only twenty years old when Tom Lasorda chose him as the Dodgers' opening-day starting pitcher in 1981. Born in a remote Mexican town, the left-hander had moved to the US less than two years before. He became an instant icon and there hasn't been a player since who created as many Dodgers fans.

In The Team That Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates, veteran baseball writer Bruce Markusen tells the story of one of the most likable and significant teams in the history of professional sports. In addition to the fact that they fielded the first all-minority lineup in major league history, the 1971 Pirates are noteworthy for the team's inspiring individual performances.

Dean Evers, an elderly widower, sits in front of the television with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball. It’s Rays/Mariners, and David Price is breezing through the line-up. Suddenly, in a seat a few rows up beyond the batter, Evers sees the face of someone from decades past, someone who shouldn’t be at the ballgame, shouldn’t be on the planet. And so begins a parade of people from Evers’s past, all of them occupying that seat behind home plate. Until one day Dean Evers sees someone even eerier….

In the plainest of terms, baseball scouts are tasked with seeing the future—a distant future, at that. Baseball's long developmental arc leaves room for plenty of twists and turns on the way to The Show. Some prospects shoot like arrows toward their projected potential, while others fizzle out or chart an unexpected course. Smart, Wrong, and Lucky explores how first impressions measure up to their aftermaths: the draft, years of progression, and for a talented few, major-league success.

From 2004 to 2011, Terry "Tito" Francona managed the Boston Red Sox, the most talked about, scrutinized team in all of sports. In Francona the legendary manager opens up for the first time about his eight years there, as they went from cursed franchise to one of the most successful and profitable in baseball history. He takes readers inside the rarefied world of a 21st-century clubhouse, from 2004 when they won their first championship in 86 years, through another win in 2007, to the controversial September collapse just four years later.

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

When baseball fans voted on the top twenty-five players of the twentieth century in 1999, Stan Musial didn’t make the cut. This glaring omission—later rectified by a panel of experts—raised an important question: How could a first-ballot Hall of Famer, widely considered one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, still rank as the most underrated athlete of all time?

Every summer, college baseball teams from around the nation come to Omaha, Nebraska, to play pure move-the-man-over, run-manufacturing baseball in a series that's part college bowl game, part county fair. In the spirit of 3 Nights in August and The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty, veteran sports writer Ryan McGee goes behind the scenes, into the stands, and onto the field to reveal an exciting yet personal look at one of the hottest sports championships in the country - the College World Series. In 2008, the 10-day, eight-team tournament was the scene of one of the greatest series in its illustrious history.

Willie Mays is arguably the greatest player in baseball history, still revered for the passion he brought to the game. He began as a teenager in the Negro Leagues, became a cult hero in New York, and was the headliner in Major League Baseball's bold expansion to California. He was a blend of power, speed, and stylistic bravado that enraptured fans for more than two decades. Now, James Hirsch reveals the man behind the player.

John Feinstein is one of the most influential sportswriters of the last three decades. In his masterful new audiobook, Where Nobody Knows Your Name, Feinstein delivers a fascinating account of the mysterious proving ground of America’s national pastime, pulling back the veil on the minor leagues of baseball.

When Sports Illustrated was launched in 1954, baseball was, indisputable, the national pastime, its stars America's epic heroes, its rivalries the era's mythology. As baseballs fortunes rose and fell over the next 50 years - and then rose again to new heights, drawing more than 65 million fans to ballparks in 2004 - the game never failed to produce great drama and inspired storytelling.

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.