The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.

    Now Kahn does the same for players whose moment in the sun has not yet arrived. Good Enough to Dream is the story of his year as owner of the Class A, very minor league Utica Blue Sox. Most of the Blue Sox will never make it to the majors, but they all share the dream that links the small child in the sandlot with the bonus baby who has just smacked one out of the stadium. It’s a dream Kahn learned from his father and, in the course of a season, passes on to his daughter—hours of practice for a moment of poetry; a hard living but a touch of legend.Good Enough to Dream presents baseball unadorned, a game still sweet enough to lure grown men to leagues where first-class transportation is an old school bus and the infield is likely to be the consistency of thick soup. It is a funny and poignant story of one season and one special team that will make us hesitate before we ever call anything “bush league” again.

    

    A timeless baseball classic and a must read for any fan worthy of the name, Nine Innings dissects a single baseball game played in June 1982 -- inning by inning, play by play. Daniel Okrent, a seasoned writer and lifelong fan, chose as his subject a Milwaukee BrewersBaltimore Orioles matchup, though it could have been any game, because, as Okrent reveals, the essence of baseball, no matter where or when it's played, has been and will always be the same. In this particular moment of baseball history you will discover myriad aspects of the sport that are crucial to its nature but so often invisible to the fans -- the hidden language of catchers' signals, the physiology of pitching, the balance sheet of a club owner, the gait of a player stepping up to the plate. With the purity of heart and unwavering attention to detail that characterize our national pastime, Okrent goes straight to the core of the world's greatest game. You'll never watch baseball the same way again.

    

    Organized by year, you get over 21,000 full color reproductions of Topps cards using a high-quality facsimile reproduction process especially developed for this purpose. Here are the lifetime statistics of over 4,000 baseball playersinformation on virtually every member of every team from 1951. And the authors have compiled year-end quizzes to test your knowledge of the sport and its cards. From the glory days of all-time great sluggers like Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial and pitching heroes like Whitey Ford and Sandy Koufax, to Reggie Jackson, Fernando Valenzuela, Dwight Gooden, and Pete Rose.

    The Artful Dodger

    He realized that he'd never again coach one of his children, and he began wondering whether his coaching system, developed over 15 years of coaching (and three sons), would be of use to other parent/coaches. Three years later, Managing Little League Baseball was born. From start to finish, McIntosh stresses the need to make baseball fun for the players, all the while developing the skills players need to win. From choosing players (use your returning players as scouts) to making sure they all play (a Little League rule) to designing effective practices, McIntosh outlines the techniques that have made his teams successful--for 15 straight winning seasons. Chapters outline drills for hitting, base running, defense, and pitching, while a special section focuses on handling overbearing parents. This otherwise fine book is flawed by too few illustrations (a problem remedied by McIntosh's later book, Little League Drills and Strategies), but Managing Little League Baseball is a great resource for coaches old and new. --Sunny Delaney

    Louis Browns won their only pennant during World War II, while Williams, DiMaggio, Feller and other stars were in uniform fighting--or playing ball--for Uncle Sam. This is the hilarious history of that era.

    Rich in anecdote and illustrated with more than ninety photographs of Monarchs players and scenes, this book is both a tribute to and a celebration of the top all-black team of all time.

    

    Describes the life of the great baseball player, from his childhood as the only son of German immigrants to his triumph as star of the New York Yankees.