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

Every spring, Little Leaguers across the country mimic his stance and squabble over the right to wear his number, 2, the next number to be retired by the world’s most famous ball team. Derek Jeter is their hero. He walks in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, and someday his shadow will loom just as large. Yet he has never been the best player in baseball. In fact, he hasn’t always been the best player on his team. But his intangible grace and Jordanesque ability to play big in the biggest of postseason moments make him the face of the modern Yankee dynasty, and of America’s game.

The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" ( Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man.

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.

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.

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.

When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four.

Has anyone ever told you that baseball is more than a game, that it's really a metaphor for life? Have you ever wondered what they meant? This story imagines the answer. A single mother moves to Kansas City with her young daughter and notices that everyone she meets - her new colleagues, neighbors, even the mailman - can't stop talking about baseball. "It's more than just a game," they tell the mother. "It's so much more. What you need is to come to a game and experience it."

Here is a wonderful collection of 20 revealing essays on the national pastime. Featuring contributions from Roger Angell, John Thorn, Frank Deford, George Plimpton, Stefan Fatsis, and others (plus a foreword by the legendary Yogi Berra), the stories are united by the authors’ fervent love of the game.

Chris Von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the St. Louis Browns, the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important - and funniest - figures in the game’s history.

In The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra, author Phil Pepe takes Yogi from St. Louis to New York's Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, including all the stops along the way - from the days he put soles on women's shoes to his induction into the Baseball's Hall of Fame, when he coined one of his most remembered phrases: "I thank everybody for making this day necessary." Phil Pepe explores Yogi Berra as a boy, player, hero, coach, manager, husband, and father, a buffoon and a human being. He relates all of the Berraisms in an absorbing treatment that is simultaneously comical, thoughtful, and biographical.

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.

In A False Spring, Pat Jordan traces the falling star of his once-promising pitching career, illuminating along the way his equally difficult personal struggles and quest for maturity. When the reader meets Jordan, he is a hard-throwing pitcher with seemingly limitless potential, one of the first "bonus babies" for the Milwaukee Braves organization.

During his 24-year career, Ty Cobb was an MVP, a Triple Crown-winner, and a 12-time batting champion and was elected in the inaugural ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame (along with Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson). As someone who retired from the game over 85 years ago, he is still the leader for career batting average; second in runs, hits, and triples; and a mainstay in dozens of other categories.

For 53 years, San Francisco waited. Waited for a team like the 2010 Giants to come along. Waited for a team that could end a title drought that started in New York and carried on for more than five decades after a move to the West Coast. Waited for that one magical postseason run that could unleash more than a half-century of pent-up frustration. At long last, the 2010 Giants hopped on that magic carpet and made it happen. San Jose Mercury News beat reporter Andrew Baggarly captured the 2010 Giants' incredible run through the regular season, playoffs and World Series in his new book.

Red Sox Nation is the finest, most comprehensive history of this storied franchise, told from the point of view of the people who lived it. From every disappointment to each triumph, culminating with the 2004 World Championship, Red Sox Nation takes you into the dugout and onto the field to relive each moment.

When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson's parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he rediscovered a prized boyhood possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time to cash in on the investments of his youth. But all the card shops had closed, and cards were selling for next to nothing online. What had happened?

Pete Rose played baseball with a singular and headfirst abandon that endeared him to fans and peers, even as it riled others--a figure at once magnetic, beloved and polarizing. Rose has more base hits than anyone in history, yet he is not in the Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years ago he was banished from baseball for gambling, then ruled ineligible for Cooperstown; today, the question "Does Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame?" has evolved into perhaps the most provocative in sports, a layered, slippery and ever-relevant moral conundrum.

Charles Albert “The Old Roman” Comiskey was a larger-than-life figure - a man who had precision in his speech and who could work a room with handshakes and smiles. Through rigorous research from the National Archives, newspapers, and various other publications, Tim Hornbaker not only tells the full story of Comiskey’s incredible life and the sport at the time, but also debunks the “Black Sox” controversy, showing that Comiskey was not the reason that the Sox threw the 1919 World Series.

huge treasury to delight Red Sox Nation. Founded in 1901, the Boston Red Sox have been making history for over a century. The passion of the players, the tragedy and triumph of the “Bambino’s Curse” - the Boston spirit comes alive in this collection of stories and anecdotes from Fenway Park. Any baseball fan will find this book irresistible.

In this stirring account, award-winning sports writer John Eisenberg brings to life the epic saga of baseball's winningest franchise from 1960 to 1997. In From 33rd Street to Camden Yards, the Orioles' story is told using the voices of the players, managers, coaches, owners, and fans who helped make the Baltimore Orioles a secular religion in the city that calls itself Baseball City USA.