Millions of fans have listened to Rose’s trademark calls over the years, and now, with his patented honesty and humor, he gives a firsthand account of the Amazins’—from the greatness of Tom Seaver to Johan Santana’s recent no-no. In addition to a personalized look at the rich history of the of the team, this work also features Rose’s thoughts and opinions on the current Mets team and roster and his thoughts on the future of the club.

    This New York Times Notable Book of the Year is a trip down memory lane to the days when baseball was king and baseball cards ruled the schoolyard. In fuller-than-living-color, the authors present more than two hundred baseball cards with outrageously funny bios, accompanied by definitive observations on trading, hoarding, collecting, flipping, "and other aberrations of the baseball card life." With a new introduction, this irreverent and affectionate look at baseball in the halcyon days of the 1950s ("before the graphics got better and the game got worse") is sure to appeal to even the most sober of baseball fans.

    I finished it as Casey Stengel."--The Cincinnati EnquirerTim McCarver, baseball's preeminent analyst, has set down all that he knows about how the game should be played and watched. With his trademark wit and style, McCarver explains the fundamentals and proper mechanics at the level necessary for success in the major leagues.         Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans is a gold mine for all fans, brain surgeons or otherwise, and anyone learning how to play or coach the game. (Even major leaguers will pick up some pointers.) After the wonderful 1998 season, America's pastime has never been more popular, and with the deeper knowledge and understanding of baseball that Brain Surgeons provides, any fan will be able to watch it like a pro.

    A lively, compact history of the game, including commentary on baseball in the 1990s.

    First identified as valuable in the 1930s, when the whole notion of card collecting was still young, the T206 Wagner has remained the big score for collectors who have scoured card shows, flea markets, estate sales, and auctions for the portrait of baseball's greatest shortstop.Only a few dozen T206 Wagners are known to still exist. Most, with their creases, stains, and dog-eared corners, look worn and tattered, like they've been around for almost a century. But one—The Card—appears to have defied the travails of time. Thanks to its sharp corners and its crisp portrait of Honus Wagner, The Card has become the most famous and desired baseball card in the world.Over the decades, as The Card has changed hands, its value has skyrocketed. It was initially sold for $25,000 by a small card shop in a nondescript strip mall. Years later, hockey great Wayne Gretzky bought it at the venerable Sotheby's auction house for $451,000. Then, more recently, it sold for $1.27 million on eBay. Today worth over $2 million, it has transformed a sleepy hobby into a billion-dollar industry that is at times as lawless as the Wild West. The Card has made men wealthy, certainly, but it has also poisoned lifelong friendships and is fraught with controversy—from its uncertain origins and the persistent questions about its provenance to the possibility that it is not exactly as it seems.Now for the first time, award-winning investigative reporters Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson follow the trail of The Card from a Florida flea market to the hands of the world's most prominent collectors. They delve into a world of counterfeiters and con men and look at the people who profit from what used to be a kids' pastime, as they bring to light ongoing investigations into sports collectibles. O'Keeffe and Thompson also examine the life of the great Honus Wagner, a ballplayer whose accomplishments have been eclipsed by his trading card, and the strange and fascinating subculture of sports memorabilia and its astonishing decline.Intriguing and eye-opening, The Card is a ground-breaking look at a uniquely American hobby.

    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? In Mint Condition, his fascinating, eye-opening, endlessly entertaining book, Jamieson finds the answer by tracing the complete story of this beloved piece of American childhood. Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector’s items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players association into one of the country’s most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the ’80s and ’90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors. Mint Condition is charming, original history brimming with colorful characters, sure to delight baseball fans and collectors.

    Part comedian, part feisty competitor, Berra is also the winningest player (fourteen pennants, ten World Series, three MVPs) in baseball history. In this revelatory biography, Allen Barra presents Yogi's remarkable life as never seen before, from his childhood in "Dago Hill," the Italian-American neighborhood in St. Louis, to his leading role on the 1949-53 Yankees, the only team to win five consecutive World Series, to the travails of the '64 pennant race, through his epic battles and final peace with George Steinbrenner. This biography, replete with nearly one hundred photos and countless "Yogi-isms," offers hilarious insights into many of baseball's greatest moments. From calling Don Larsen's perfect game to managing the 1973 "You Gotta Believe" New York Mets, Yogi's life and career are a virtual cutaway view of our national pastime in the twentieth century. 98 photographs

    And the moments are part of college basketball lore: the Sweater Game, Villanova Beats Georgetown, and Six Overtimes. But this is the story of the Big East Conference that you haven't heard before--of how the Northeast, once an afterthought, became the epicenter of college basketball.Before the league's founding, East Coast basketball had crowned just three national champions in forty years, and none since 1954. But in the Big East's first ten years, five of its teams played for a national championship. The league didn't merely inherit good teams; it created them. But how did this unlikely group of schools come to dominate college basketball so quickly and completely?Including interviews with more than sixty of the key figures in the conference's history, The Big East charts the league's daring beginnings and its incredible rise. It transports fans inside packed arenas to epic wars fought between transcendent players, and behind locker-room doors where combustible coaches battled even more fiercely for a leg up.Started on a handshake and a prayer, the Big East carved an improbable arc in sports history, an ensemble of Catholic schools banding together to not only improve their own stations but rewrite the geographic boundaries of basketball. As former UConn coach Jim Calhoun eloquently put it, "It was Camelot. Camelot with bad language."

    In keeping with his reputation for writing about big ideas in an illuminating and graceful way, he shows how sports respond to deep human needs; describes the ways in which baseball, football and basketball became national institutions and how they reached their present forms; and covers the evolution of rules, the rise and fall of the most successful teams, and the historical significance of the most famous and influential figures such as Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, and Michael Jordan. Whether he is writing about baseball as the agrarian game, football as similar to warfare, basketball as the embodiment of post-industrial society, or the moral havoc created by baseball's designated hitter rule, Mandelbaum applies the full force of his learning and wit to subjects about which so many Americans care passionately: the games they played in their youth and continue to follow as adults. By offering a fresh and unconventional perspective on these games, The Meaning of Sports makes for fascinating and rewarding reading both for fans and newcomers.

    Elfrink revealed that a Miami clinic, Biogenesis, had been supplying illegal performance enhancing drugs – PEDs – to many of the nation’s top baseball stars. One name stood out among all the others: Alex Rodriguez, the highest-earning player in the game.Over the next year and more the story would unravel with incredible details about tanning salon robberies, coded text messages, and furtive steroid injections in the men’s room. In late 2013 Alex Rodriguez would be hit with the longest suspension in MLB history, prompting an ugly fight between him and top league brass. Fourteen other players, including superstar Ryan Braun, were also given shorter suspensions. Tony Bosch, Biogenesis’s founder, would appear on 60 Minutes in an effort to tell his side of the story.What’s already been reported in the press has been fascinating; but the story behind the headlines that Elfrink and Newsday reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts have unearthed is even more dramatic and full of new, shocking details. Using exclusive documents, never-before-reported records and interviews with top sources, this book takes the reader inside drug deals, athletes’ mansions, and confidential suspension hearings to tell the true story behind the sport’s continuing PED crisis.Both news-breaking sports journalism and wild South Florida noir, Blood Sport is simultaneously a revelatory record of the steroid and PED era’s continuing evolution and a call to arms for how to end it – this time, for good.

    What begins as a fun-filled stunt, for the "average man" to pitch in the Big Leagues, comes to a nearly humiliating end. This honest and hilarious tale features Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, Richie Ashburn, and other baseball greats. What happens when America's favorite sports dilettante tries his arm against the likes of hall-of-fame baseball players recalls every young boy's forgotten dream of heroics on a baseball diamond; and for that fact alone, OUT OF MY LEAGUE remains one of George Plimpton's most beloved works.

    is a funny and moving memoir about Fathers, Fate and Field of Dreams. Dwier Brown played Kevin Costner's father for five minutes at the end of the movie Field of Dreams. Despite being an actor for 35 years and performing in hundreds of other films, plays and television shows, it was those five minutes that changed his life. Since the movie's release in 1989, Brown has been recognized by dozens of fans who have told him poignant stories about their fathers and how watching the film changed their lives. Their touching stories helped Brown put into perspective his own father's unexpected death just a month before he began filming Field of Dreams.

    The book chronicles the 2008 season, during which the team suffered its second worst record ever and Head Coach Phil Fulmer, the most beloved and recognized man in Tennessee, was fired. Author of Dixieland Delight, Clay Travis offers a fascinating inside look at the inner workings of a major college sports program, and chronicles a season of promise that went terribly wrong, ending a long, fabled era.

    Hoping for a new start, the Islanders swapped out their distinctive logo, which featured the letters NY and a map of Long Island, for a cartoon fisherman wearing a rain slicker and gripping a hockey stick. The new logo immediately drew comparisons to the mascot for Gorton’s frozen seafood, and opposing fans taunted the team with chants of “We want fish sticks!” During a rebranding process that lasted three torturous seasons, the Islanders unveiled a new mascot, new uniforms, new players, a new coach, and a new owner that were supposed to signal a return to championship glory. Instead, the team and its fans endured a twenty-eight-month span more humiliating than what most franchises witness over twenty-eight years. The Islanders thought they had traded for a star player to inaugurate the fisherman era, but he initially refused to report and sulked until the general manager banished him. Fans beat up the new mascot in the stands. The new coach shoved and spit at players. The Islanders were sold to a supposed billionaire who promised to buy elite players; he turned out to be a con artist and was sent to prison. We Want Fish Sticks examines this era through period sources and interviews with the people who lived it.