Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Baseball & Softball

Talking on Air: A Broadcaster's Life in Sports highlights the 40-year career of Ken Coleman. The audiobook details a broadcasting life seen not only from inside the booth, but also from inside the minds and throughout the experiences of many of sports' greatest names.

Eddie and the Gun Girl is the true story of the shooting of Philadelphia Phillies All-Star first baseman Eddie Waitkus by a deranged female admirer in 1949. While such incidents would become commonplace in ensuing years, as stars of every persuasion would surround themselves with bodyguards and live in increasing fear of unannounced assailants, the events of that June 14 at the elegant Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago were unprecedented.

As Donald Honig points out in his introduction, "Every World Series in itself is a tale with beginning, middle, and end, and because there must be a winner, there must be a hero." Tales of Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays are related by the star players who knew them. Those players recall vivid moments from their World Series games, stretching from 1912 to 1974.

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.

Donald Honig crossed the country to meet and interview former big-league ball players. They shared their memories with him and the result is a book packed with nostalgia, statistics, action, revelations - an extraordinary oral history of baseball in the halcyon days beween the two world wars. Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Dizzy Dean, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig, and many others are brought to life through the recollections of Wes Ferrell, Charlie Gehringer, Elbie Fletcher, Bucky Waters, Billy Herman, and more.

Here is the exciting story of baseball during and after World War II - when clubs still traveled by train, when night games and artificial lighting began to replace hot afternoons at the ball park, when the major leagues finally took on the talent that had been restricted to the Negro leagues, and when baseball started to become big business. In this companion volume to Baseball When the Grass Was Real, Donald Honig collects the reminiscences of nineteen players.

It may be America's game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply - until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball's origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings.

The philosopher Jacques Barzun thought that "whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball". And whoever wants to know baseball had better learn about umpires. As Larry Gerlach points out in The Men in Blue, these arbiters transform competitive chaos into organized sport. They make it possible to "play ball", but nobody loves them.Considering the abuse meted out by fans and players, why would any sane person want to be an umpire? Many reasons emerge in conversations with a dozen former major-league arbiters.

For nearly 15 years NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture has been a leading scholarly journal of baseball history. Covering the cultural and historical implications of America’s national pastime, NINE has explored baseball from the earliest matches and little-known players of the 1800s to the modern billion-dollar industry and its superstars of today. Here, gathered for the first time, are the best essays from NINE that center on the complex and multifaceted topic of African Americans in baseball.

Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes of making it to "The Show." The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world, producing one out of every six major league players. Over the last decade, baseball's hard truths became evident for the Chatham stars who went on to play professionally, and the final chapter of their story can now be written.

In the pageantry of baseball, one select group is virtually unknown in the outside world, derided by fans, faced with split-second choices that spell victory or defeat. These men are up-close observers of the action, privy to inside jokes, blood feuds, benches-clearing brawls, and managers’ expletive-filled tirades. In this wonderful memoir, Hall of Fame umpire Doug Harvey takes us within baseball as you’ve never seen it, with unforgettable inside stories of baseball greats such as Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Whitey Herzog.

Jackie Robinson heroically broke the color barrier in 1947. But how—and, in practice, when—did the integration of the sport actually occur? Bill Madden shows that baseball’s famous black experiment” did not truly succeed until the coming of age of Willie Mays and the emergence of some star players—Larry Doby, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks—in 1954. And as a relevant backdrop off the field, it was in May of that year that the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation be outlawed in America’s public schools.

One of the most endearing of American heroes, Casey Stengel guided the New York Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons. Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked - the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking.

Robert Creamer shows us Casey at twenty-two, famous from his very first day in the big leagues. We see Casey's playing career fall apart as he is traded, shunted to last-place teams, hampered by injuries, considered finished - until he bats a glorious home run in the 1923 World Series.

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.

In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a "national pastime." We witness the true birth of modern baseball with the development of its elaborate statistics - the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's "historical essence" and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of "errors" and "unearned" runs.

Herschel Cobb's moving account of his relationship with his legendary grandfather reveals a side of Ty Cobb that few people ever saw, that of loving nurturer. A baseball icon and arguably the best player who ever lived, Ty Cobb's infamously cold, competitive nature allowed him to excel on the ball field but undermined his relationship with his children. Devastated by the untimely death of two of his sons, Cobb relished the opportunity to reconnect the broken family ties when young Herschel and his siblings visited him during the summers.

What is it about a quality fastball that brings us to the edge of our seats? How is it humanly possible to throw more than 100 mph? And the big question: Who is the fastest pitcher ever?Drawing on interviews with current and former players, managers, scouts, experts, and historians, Tim Wendel delivers the answers to some of the most intriguing questions about the fastball, providing insight into one of baseball’s most exhilarating yet mystifying draws. In High Heat he takes us on a quest to separate verifiable fact from baseball lore, traveling from ballparks across the country to the Baseball Hall of Fame, piecing together the fascinating history of the fastball.

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.

Want to know what really happened? Stan Isaacs knows. He was there! "The Shot Heard Round the World," in 1951. "The Fight of the Century," in 1971. The horror of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Secretariat's legendary win at the 1973 Belmont Stakes. Stan Isaacs saw them all live. Isaacs covered thousands of sports stories in his more than fifty years as a journalist. But ten moments stand out in his memory. Ten Moments That Shook the Sports World offers Isaacs' eyewitness accounts of the events that changed sports history.

Tales from the Angels Dugout is a humorous and fascinating look at the lighter side of 41 years of frustration, followed by the excitement of 2002. Author Steve Bisheff reminds us of those colorful days with original owner Gene Autry and the struggles under the ownership of Walt Disney Co., as well as the curses, hexes, and tragedies that haunted the Angels for so long. Tales from the Anaheim Angels Dugout is just what Angels fans have been waiting for!