Sports Softball

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. Pursuit of Pennants examines and analyzes a number of compelling, winning baseball teams over the past 100-plus years, focusing on their decision making and how they assembled their championship teams.

Written by former a NCAA head coach and most importantly a baseball dad, The Process shares with you what it takes to get there from little league ages through high school. Walter is a baseball dad who played and coached for the last 40 years and helped develop both of his sons to play in college and helped his son Tyler play for the San Francisco Giants. Having lived through the entire process as a student athlete, college head coach, and father, Walter knows what matters most for your child.

Winning at modern baseball is nothing like it was even twenty years ago. In the years since the famous Moneyball revolution, baseball has grown to look less like a sport than a Wall Street firm that traded its boiler room for a field. Teams relentlessly chase every tiny advantage to win games and make money, even as it hurts fans, TV ratings, and players, courting bigger problems in the long run. This dramatic and insightful book takes you into the clubhouse with the championship players, as well as into the offices where teams constantly seek new ways to win.

Are the 1932 Yankees the greatest team of all time? This is the story of their remarkable season, led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, toward one of the most lopsided and talked-about World Series in baseball history. At the outset of the Great Depression, as FDR campaigned to replace Herbert Hoover, a baseball season was played across America.

The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And not once in Major League Baseball's 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant.

It's 1948, and the National League certified since 1903 Boston Braves haven't won a pennant in 20 years. But from out of nowhere, newcomer Jason Stiller looks to change all that. All Jason wants is to go out and hit the ball a mile, but with the Braves' star pitcher as a rival, the steely-eyed manager watching him like a hawk, and the beautiful owner's daughter about to cause The Kid to go head over heels...what's a rookie to do? And then with the World Series in sight, when Braves owner Robert P. Germane decides to really throw The Kid a curveball.

The 1947 World Series was "the most exciting ever" in the words of Joe DiMaggio, with a decade's worth of drama packed into seven games between the mighty New York Yankees and underdog Brooklyn Dodgers. It was Jackie Robinson's first Series, a postwar spectacle featuring Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, and President Harry Truman in supporting roles. It was also the first televised World Series - sportswriters called it "Electric October".

The fascinating story of baseball's most legendary "Iron Men", Cal Ripken Jr. and Lou Gehrig, who each achieved the coveted and sometimes confounding record of most consecutive games played.

Essential for armchair umpires and scorekeepers, this guide challenges aficionados on every significant part of the Official Baseball Rules. Few sports lovers are as obsessed with rules and statistics as baseball fans. In So You Think You Know Baseball?, lifelong baseball enthusiast Peter E. Meltzer catalogues every noteworthy baseball rule from the Major League rulebook and illustrates its application with actual plays, from the historical to the contemporary. You can listen to the book from start to finish or consult it while watching a game to understand the mechanics of a play or how it should be scored.

What’s it really like to wear the pinstripes? This riveting account from New York Post writer Michael Morrissey takes listeners inside the clubhouse of the 2006 New York Yankees and reveals what really goes on behind the hype, the media glare, and the roar of the fans surrounding the most fabled organization in the world of professional sports. The New York Yankees began the 2006 season with baseball’s highest payroll and sky-high expectations - and more challenges than other any Yankee team in history.

Critically acclaimed writer Tom Adelman is hailed as a renegade by the Village Voice Literary Supplement for his aggressive, no-holds-barred style. The Long Ball is his dynamic re-telling of baseball's thrilling 1975 season.

Havana Heat transports readers to 1911 America, where real-life pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor is trying to work his arm back into fighting shape. Though deaf, Taylor helped lead John McGraw's New York Giants to the pennant, winning 115 games between 1900 and 1908. But an injury relegates him to the minors, and he dreams of one last shot at the big barnstorming trip to Cuba.

In "one of the funniest and most heartfelt baseball stories in recent memory" (Publishers Weekly), Howard Frank Mosher returns to Kingdom Common, Vermont, to spin a touching coming-of-age tale in an America that has almost disappeared. From this remote village, noted for its fervent devotion to the Red Sox, comes Ethan “E. A.” Allen, a young man with a chance to change baseball history. Homeschooled, fatherless, and living on the wrong side of the tracks, E. A. is haunted by a dark mystery in his family’s past until a drifter named Teddy arrives in his life, determined to teach E. A. everything he knows about baseball.

In 2010 the New York Mets were in trouble. One of baseball's most valuable franchises, they had recently suffered an embarrassing September collapse and two bitter losing seasons. Their GM had made costly mistakes. And their principle owners were embroiled in the largest financial scam in American history. To whom did they turn? Sandy Alderson, a former marine who served in Vietnam and graduated from Harvard Law.

Few men in sports history have accomplished more than Yogi Berra: three MVP Awards, 21 World Series appearances as a player, coach, and manager, and a plaque in Cooperstown honoring him as arguably the greatest catcher to ever play the position. Off the field, the man often derided for his appearance has become one of the most beloved and enduring sports figures of all time, as well as a successful pitchman and the source of some of the most-repeated expressions in the English language.

Don Zimmer had his first taste of baseball glory in 1948 as a member of a national champion American Legion team. He was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, only to have his career—and life—threatened when he was beaned in a minor league game in 1953.

Roger Kahn is one of America's foremost sportswriters. After successful seasons as a newspaperman and magazine writer, he burst onto the national scene in 1972 with his memorable bestseller, The Boys of Summer, a work that went beyond sports and captured the minds and hearts of millions across the country. Now in his eighth decade, Kahn has again written a book for the hearts and minds of his readers.

Change Up is every fan’s box-seat ticket to a remarkable baseball event: a round-table conversation among the participants themselves about pivotal developments that changed the game, from the 1960s to today. Here, through the eyes and words of star players like Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Ichiro Suzuki, baseball legends like Cal Ripken, Earl Weaver, and Jim Bouton, and award-winning writers like David Marainiss, Bob Lipsyte, and Robert Whiting who reported the stories, are vivid and very personal accounts of some of the most important happenings in the history of the sport.

From the first pitch of April until the final out in October, the 1962 Dodgers and Giants staged a furious pennant fight that was every bit the equal of the fractious feuds waged during the rivalry's New York heyday of bench-clearing brawls.

Before the "Bronx Zoo" of George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, there were the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s, one of the most successful, most colorful - and most chaotic - baseball teams of all time. They were all of those things because of Charlie Finley. Not only the A's owner, he was also the general manager, personally assembling his team, deciding his players' salaries, and making player moves during theseason - a level of involvement no other owner, not even Steinbrenner, engaged in.