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.

     The biggest paradox in golf is that the harder you try to "hit" the ball, the worse you do so. In The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, Michael McTeigue offers a simple system of sequential body movements that produces a true swinging motion with every club in the bag. The result is increased distance and greater accuracy for all sizes, shapes, and ages of golfers for a minimum of investment in learning time. The clarity and simplicity of McTeigue's frill-free approach to the golf swing leads the reader to a new experience of power and effortlessness. He truly shows "how to build a swing you can trust and keep for life."

    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.

    Now completely updated to include statistics and photographs from the 1987-88 season, Bird on Basketball puts fans right on the court. With over 100 dramatic action photos, charts, and diagrams, this how-to guide covers all the building blocks of the game—passing, shooting, defense, dribbling, and rebounding—from a champion's point of view. But as every fan knows, Larry Bird doesn't just play basketball—he wins. Bird pounds the boards, charges fearlessly to the hoop, and plays a bruising brand of defense. Yet his true strength is his mastery of the game's subtle elements. In Bird on Basketball he emphasizes the little things that add up to big victories with tips on moving without the ball, rebound positioning, court sense, being a team player, and training. Bird on Basketball is an all-out effort to give fans and students of the game an inside look at how basketball should be played.

    

    

    This reference book is jam-packed with all the facts and figures a football fan would ever want--including all-time records, team rosters and schedules, past standings, Super Bowl results, and more.

    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.

    Signed and inscribed by Mary Lou Retton on the free endpaper.

    

    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.

    English-language translation by NRA.

    Originated as the traditional Korean martial art and now an official sport in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, Taekwondo has been a world sport practiced in almost every country in the world.Taekwondo is one of the most popular sports among many foreigners in the world as well as Korean people. It is a sport contributing to health and fitness, both in body and spirit. It lacks written material for learners to refer to, even though it is a worldwide renowned sport.Author Kyong Myong Lee sums up the unique internal dynamism of his sport: "The ultimate winner is the one who can conquer himself." Dynamic Taekwondo presents all you need to know about Taekwondo, from its historical background to the basic Taekwondo stance and many of the moves and skills employed.

    With his commitment to football came a secret determination to be a head coach by the time he reached age 35. Little did he know that his goal would chart his course toward becoming one of the nation's premier coaches.Six years later, in 1972, Osborne's knowledge and experience in athletics, plus his hard work as assistant coach, gave Devaney the confidence to name Osborne as his successor as head coach. Tom had been an outstanding athlete in his own right, playing three sports during high school and later at Hastings College. He won the honor of Nebraska "Athlete of the Year" in his senior year of high school and twice won State College "Athlete of the Year"--a feat no one else had accomplished. he then went on to play professional football and to earn his master's and doctorate in educational psychology.Throughout all these years in sports, he was developing his unusual and inspiring philosophy of coaching. He saw it wasn't winning that mattered so much as the process of athletics. He also realized early on that a coach can't define personal success by a winning record alone."It really isn't so much achieving the end result--the national championships and the trophies," Osborne says. "I love the process--the preparation, the effort, the strategy, the players, the games."In More Than Winning, Tom Osborne gives an in-depth personal account of his life--the forces that shaped his values, his own accomplishments in sports, and his experiences as a coach at Nebraska. He shares personal perspectives on football greats such as Turner Gill, Johnny Rodgers, Mike Rozier, Dave Rimington, and others. He gives his view of key Nebraska games such as the quest for the national title against Miami in 1984. Throughout, he maintains that his strength and success come from a deep faith in God and a desire to honor Him with his talents.

    This book offers descriptions and illustrations of plyometric exercises for nearly every sport and every part of the body.

    Uitgeversmaatschappij Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    Contains black-and-white illustrations. "Written with gusto and enthusiam.... Most welcome."—School Library Journal “A thoughtful, well-rounded, and highly readable portrait guaranteed to spark interest in Babe Didrikson and other women athletes, past and present.”—Booklist About the Women of Our Time series:International in scope, the Women of Our Time series of biographies cover a wide range of personalities in a variety fields. More than a history lesson, these books offer carefully documented life stories that will inform, inspire, and engage.

    

    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

    The Artful Dodger

    

    

    Where did the truth lie?But what started as an inquiry into a local incident grew into a history of bitter conflict that smouldered and flared across England for two centuries - the poaching wars between peasant and landowner in which men were murdered, transported and executed for the sake of a rabbit or pheasant. The game-law struggle engaged English writers from Crabbe to Kipling and politicians from Cobbett and Bright to Joseph Chamberlain and Lloyd George. Focusing on social rank and landed power, the conflict throws a penetrating light on shifting patterns of power and class alliance in Britain, and on the often harsh realities of rural life and justice in the last two centuries.