Why We Love Baseball
A History in 50 Moments
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Narrated by:
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Joe Posnanski
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Ellen Adair
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Written by:
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Joe Posnanski
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES bestseller
Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year
National Sports Media Association Sports Book of the Year
An NPR "Book of the Day"
#1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Posnanski is back with a masterful ode to the game: a countdown of 50 of the most memorable moments in baseball’s history, to make you fall in love with the sport all over again.
Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It's Willie Mays’s catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters. But these are also moments raw with the humanity of the game, the unheralded heroes, the mesmerizing mistakes drenched in pine tar, and every story, from the immortal to the obscure, is told from a unique perspective. Whether of a real fan who witnessed it, or the pitcher who gave up the home run, the umpire, the coach, the opposing player—these are fresh takes on moments so powerful they almost feel like myth.
Posnanski’s previous book, The Baseball 100, portrayed the heroes and pioneers of the sport, and now, with his trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations, he gets at the real heart of the game. From nineteenth-century pitchers’ duels to breaking the sport’s color line in the ’40s, all the way to the greatest trick play of the last decade and the slide home that became a meme, Posnanski’s illuminating take allows us to rediscover the sport we love—and thought we knew.
Why We Love Baseball is an epic that ends too soon, a one-of-a-kind love letter to the sport that has us thrilled, torn, inspired, and always wanting more.
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The Baseball 100
- Written by: Joe Posnanski
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 30 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski that tells the story of the sport through the remarkable lives of its 100 greatest players. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than 200 years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?”
-
-
Great book
- By Francois Paquet on 2023-09-05
Written by: Joe Posnanski
-
Why We Love Football
- A History in 100 Moments
- Written by: Joe Posnanski
- Narrated by: Joe Posnanski
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After his bestselling home run books Why We Love Baseball and The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski turns from the national pastime to the number one sport in America. Why We Love Football is Posnanski’s newest must-have deep dive into the archives and legends of the sport, and the result is a rousing tale of the 100 greatest moments in football lore. This is the best kind of sports writing. Entertaining, enlightening, heartbreaking, hilarious, and always fascinating, these stories of the sport offer a panoramic look across its history.
Written by: Joe Posnanski
-
Gibby
- Tales of a Baseball Lifer
- Written by: John Gibbons, Greg Oliver, Josh Donaldson - foreword
- Narrated by: John Gibbons
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over eleven years and two separate managerial stints with the Toronto Blue Jays, John Gibbons endeared himself to fans with his folksy manner and his frequent battles with umpires: "Here comes Gibby!" Winning helped too. Under Gibbons's management, the Jays made the American League Championship Series in 2015, ending a twenty-two-year playoff drought; then they did it again in 2016. Along the way the team defied odds, won over a nation, and with one flip of a bat produced one of the most iconic moments in MLB history.
-
-
Excellent book
- By Anonymous User on 2023-09-01
Written by: John Gibbons, and others
-
The Soul of Baseball
- A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America
- Written by: Joe Posnanski
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Soul of Baseball is as much the story of Buck O'Neil as it is the story of baseball. Driven by a relentless optimism and his two great passions - for America's pastime and for jazz, America's music - O'Neil played solely for love. In an era when greedy, steroid-enhanced athletes have come to characterize professional ball, Posnanski offers a salve for the damaged spirit: the uplifting life lessons of a truly extraordinary man who never missed an opportunity to enjoy and love life.
Written by: Joe Posnanski
-
Moneyball
- The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
- Written by: Michael Lewis
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moneyball reveals a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.
-
-
I'm a slut for stats
- By Eric Cruickshank on 2020-08-16
Written by: Michael Lewis
-
The Inside Game
- Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves
- Written by: Keith Law
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, the ESPN baseball writer and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game....
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-
Headline Optional
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What the critics say
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WALL STREET JOURNAL BETSELLER
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year
Named One of the Best Baseball Books of 2023 by Sports Collectors’ Digest
One of AARP's "Books to Give and Get"
Kirkus' Best Nonfiction Book Out This Week
A Kirkus Most Anticipated Book of the Fall
"Mr. Posnanski is a bit like the guy telling baseball stories at a bar—if that guy is clever, funny, not averse to hyperbole, sentiment or numerology, willing to go to great lengths to track down a fact and possessed of a way with words...if you were that kid who felt a surge of gladness when Baseball Digest turned up in the mailbox, and if the game has continued to hold a place in your heart, well, I’ve got just the book for you." —Wall Street Journal
"Here's the thing about this book... One of the things that happens with sports writers and especially with baseball writers, is that it can get very purple. It can get very romantic. So what I love about this is a potential, like, weakness in sports writing is turned around to be a strength and to be something where you can just allow yourself the sentiment of loving a sport and loving to watch it and kind of this sense that, oh, my God, I love baseball so much. I have choked up multiple times while listening to this book." —Linda Holmes, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour
“Journalist Posnanski (The Baseball 100) hits it out of the park in this rousing celebration of baseball. With the colorful banter of a play-by-play announcer…Posnanski recounts the '50 most magical baseball moments' from across all levels of the game. This will have readers cheering from their seats.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)