. . the untold story of baseball's ORIGINAL SCANDALDid the Chicago Cubs throw the World Series in 1918--and get away with it?Who were the players involved--and why did they do it?Were gambling and corruption more widespread across the leagues than previously believed?Were the players and teams "cursed" by their actions?Finally, is it time to rewrite baseball history?With exclusive access to surprising new evidence, Sporting News reporter Sean Deveney details a scandal at the core of baseball's greatest folklore--in a golden era as exciting and controversial as our sports world today. This inside look at the pivotal year of 1918 proves that baseball has always been a game overrun with colorful characters, intense human drama, and explosive controversy.The Original Curse is not just about baseball. It is a sweeping portrait of America at war in 1918. . . . In the end, the proper question is not, 'How could a player from that era fix the World Series?' It's, 'How could he not?'" --Ken Rosenthal, FOX Sports, from the IntroductionSean Deveney plays connect-the-dots in this intriguing account of a possible conspiracy to throw the 1918 World Series. Thoroughly researched and well written, The Original Curse is a must-read for baseball fans and anyone who loves a good mystery. Is Max Flack the Shoeless Joe of the 1918 Cubs? Deveney lays out the case and let's readers decide if the fix was in. --Paul Sullivan, Cubs beat writer, Chicago TribuneThis book gives the reader a fun and honest look at baseball as it used to be-- the good guys, the gamblers, the cheaters, the drunks, the inept leaders. But, more than that, it puts those characters into the context of Chicago, Boston and America at the time of World War I, and you wind up with a unique way to explain the motivations of those characters. --David Kaplan, host, Chicago Tribune Live and WGN's Sports Central"Deveney's painstaking study of the 1918 World Series between the Cubs and Red Sox argues that the Black Sox scandal was not an aberration and might have had an antecedent. Deveney's scholarship does not detract from his ability to spin a good tale: his tendency to imagine players' conversations will remind readers of Leigh Montville's The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth.... A welcome companion to Susan Dellinger's Red Legs and Black Sox: Edd Roush and the Untold Story of the 1919 World Series, Deveney's book contributes greatly to our understanding of this decisive period in baseball and American morals. --Library Journal

    Down ten and a half games with little more than a month to play, the Cardinals had long been ruled out as serious postseason contenders. Yet in the face of those steep odds, this team mounted one of the most dramatic and impressive comebacks in baseball history, making the playoffs on the night of the final game of the season and going on to win the World Series despite being down to their last strike—twice.Now La Russa gives the inside story behind this astonishing comeback and his remarkable career, explaining how a team with so much against it was able to succeed on baseball's biggest stage. Opening up about the devastating injuries, the bullpen struggles, the crucial games, and the players who made it all possible, he reveals how the team's character shaped its accomplishments, demonstrating how this group came together in good times and in bad to become that rarest of things: a team that actually enjoyed it when the odds were against them.But this story is much more than that of a single season. As La Russa, the third-winningest manager in baseball history, explains, their season was the culmination of a lifetime spent studying the game. Laying bare his often scrutinized and frequently misunderstood approach to managing, he explains his counterintuitive belief in process over result, present moments over statistics, and team unity over individual talent. Along the way he shares the stories from throughout his career that shaped his outlook—from his first days managing the Chicago White Sox to his championship years with the Oakland A's, to his triumphant tenure as St. Louis's longest-serving manager. Setting the record straight on his famously intense style, he explores the vital yet overlooked role that his personal relationships with his players have contributed to his victories, ultimately showing how, in a sport often governed by cold, hard numbers, the secret to his success has been surprisingly human.Speaking candidly about his decision to retire, La Russa discusses the changes that he'd observed both in the game and in himself that told him, despite his success, it was time to hang up his spikes. The end result is a passionate, insightful, and remarkable look at our national pastime that takes you behind the scenes of the comeback that no one thought possible and inside the mind of one of the game's greatest managers.

    He has ten of them, in fact. One for each and every finger.In Ten Rings, Yogi, for the first time, tells the stories behind each of those remarkable championship seasons, spanning 1947 through 1962, baseball's golden years. It was a time when players played for the love of the game, a time when dynasties were born and baseball became the national pastime. And what a pastime it was.With Yogi Berra at their heart, Casey Stengel's Yankees took on their heralded archrivals: the Cleveland Indians, the New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and, of course, the Boston Red Sox. And with those teams was Yogi's constellation of contemporaries, a who's who of the Hall of Fame: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Phil Rizzuto, and many others.Each season brought its own drama, and it's all brought to life by the man who witnessed it. Ten Rings is a one-of-a-kind story told by a one-of-a-kind guy, baseball's elder statesman, the beloved Yogi Berra.

    In "Hard Work," he tells the story of his life, from his turbulent childhood through a coaching career with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. With his new afterword, Williams takes us past the two NCAA championship titles to the subsequent 2010 season, its shake-up losses, the unexpected departure of key players, and on to a new season of coaching some of the most dazzling young players in the country--and a surprising ACC championship.Williams recounts his rough early years; his long tenure as head coach at the University of Kansas; how he recruits, teaches, and motivates his players; how he's shepherded teams through some of the most nail-biting games at both Kansas and UNC; and how he suffered through one of the roughest seasons of his tenure and came out on the other side to be awarded 2011 ACC Coach of the Year.

    No hits, no walks, no men reaching base. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in more than 130 years of Major League Baseball, it has only happened twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first perfect game. Except that’s not how it entered the record books.That’s because Jim Joyce, a veteran umpire with more than twenty years of big league experience, the man voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 by baseball’s players, missed the call on the final out at first base. “No, I did not get the call correct,” Joyce said after seeing a replay. But rather than throw a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound and took care of business. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said later in the locker room.In Nobody’s Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports up until this pivotal moment. It is an absorbing insider’s look at two lives in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of sportsmanship.

    5 towering brothers: Three who play in the NFL - a Denver Bronco, a Cleveland Brown and a record-breaking tight end with the New England Patriots, Rob Gronkowski, who is realizing a meteoric rise to a spot in NFL history. Another who played major league baseball. And the youngest, an up-and-coming Division 1 football player.  Growing Up Gronk takes readers behind the scenes to tell the Gronkowski's incredible story, revealing how they were raised, how they were motivated, how they trained, how they played, even how their mother kept them fed. It all started with their father, Gordy, under whose tutelage this collection of giants has broken every rule about how 21st century athletic success functions. Beyond their monstrous size, physicality, and raw talent, Papa Gronk recognized early on that a clear commitment to fitness, health, and determination would give his boys a leg up in a way other families simply couldn’t match.  This unique story of the NFL's new first family reveals the secrets to the Gronkowski's collective success and opens the door a one-of-a-kind household, a veritable incubator of athletic greatness.

    The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was . . . just beauty, you know?" Sullivan didn't know, not really: the track had always been a place his father disappeared to once a year on business, a source of souvenir glasses and inscrutable passions in his Kentucky relatives. But in 2000, Sullivan, an editor and essayist for Harper's, decided to educate himself. He spent two years following the horse-both across the country, as he watched one season's juvenile crop prepare for the Triple Crown, and through time, as he tracked the animal's constant evolution in literature and art, from the ponies that appeared on the walls of European caves 30,000 years ago, to the mounts that carried the Indo-European language to the edges of the Old World, to the finely tuned but fragile yearlings that are auctioned off for millions of dollars apiece every spring and fall. The result is a witty, encyclopedic, and in the end profound meditation on what Edwin Muir called our "long-lost archaic companionship" with the horse. Incorporating elements of memoir and reportage, the Wunderkammer and the picture gallery, "Blood Horses "lets us see--as we have never seen before--the animal that, more than any other, made us who we are.

    Baseball, almost from the first moment Robinson saw it, was more than a sport. It was history, a nearly infinite ocean of information that begged to be organized. He realized that understanding the game, which he fell in love with as an adult, would never be possible just through watching games and reading articles. He turned his obsession into a dizzyingly entertaining collection of graphics that turned into an Internet sensation. Out of Robinson's Web site, www.flipflopflyball.com, grew this book, full of all-new, never-before-seen graphics. Flip Flop Fly Ball dives into the game's history, its rivalries and absurdities, its cities and ballparks, and brings them to life through 120 full-color graphics. Statistics-the sport's lingua franca-have never been more fun. (By the way, the answers: about 26,000 miles, at least if the team in question is the 2008 Kansas City Royals; 3,178 miles; they were the artists atop the Billboard Hot 100 when Ryan first and last appeared in MLB games.) Craig Robinson is, among other things, an Englishman and a New York Yankees fan with a soft spot for the Colorado Rockies and a man-crush on Ichiro. Last season he played outfield for the Prenzlauer Berg Piranhas in the Berlin Mixed Softball League (.452/.548/.575). His previous books include Atlas, Schmatlas: A Superior Atlas of the World and Fun Fun Fun.

    His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.But Cobb was also one of the game's most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to "create a mental hazard for the other man,"; he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster - a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb's journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time, to America's first true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his times - a man we thought we knew but really didn't.

    In The Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing substitute on the streets of Southern California beach towns more than forty years ago and has evolved over the decades to become a fixture of urban youth culture around the world. Merging the historical development of the sport with passages about his own skating adventures in such wide-ranging places as Hawaii, Germany, and Cameroon, Weyland gives a fully realized portrait of a subculture whose love of free-flowing creativity and a distinctive antiauthoritarian worldview has inspired major trends in fashion, music, art, and film. Along the way, Weyland interweaves the stories of skating pioneers like Gregg Weaver and the Dogtown Z-Boys and living legends like Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. He also charts the course of innovations in deck, truck, and wheel design to show how the changing boards changed the sport itself, enabling new tricks as skaters moved from the freestyle techniques that dominated the early days to the extreme street-skating style of today. Vivid and vibrant, The Answer Is Never is a fascinating book as radical and unique as the sport it chronicles.

    Widely acclaimed sports writer Nunyo Demasio touches on some of the biggest NFL franchises in history, including the New York Giants, New England Patriots, New York Jets, and Dallas Cowboys.Bill Parcells may be the most iconic football coach of our time. During his decades-long tenure as an NFL coach, he turned failing franchises into contenders. He led the ailing New York Giants to two Super Bowl victories, turned the New England Patriots from a team best known for their drug scandals into an NFL powerhouse, reinvigorated the New York Jets, brought the Dallas Cowboys back to life, and was most recently enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He changed the way the game was played, reimagining his teams with ferocious defenses and smashmouth offenses that spawned such great players as Hall of Famers Lawrence Taylor and Curtis Martin. Beloved and controversial but always respected, this is a rare inside look at one of football's greatest minds at the most reflective time in his career.

    Now, with the help of New York Times bestselling author Peter Golenbock, the complete story of one of the most controversial teams in baseball history comes to life. Told from the voices of the men who experienced it firsthand, this compulsively readable account gives baseball fans the inside scoop on one of baseball's most popular teams. This is the true story of a group of men who won the hearts and shattered the dreams of generations.Utilizing dozens of personal interviews with players, coaches, fans, and sportswriters, Amazin' takes readers on a journey from the Mets' bumbling days as a new team in 1962, to their stunning World Championships in 1969 and 1986, right up through to today. In time for the fortieth anniversary of the New York Mets, Amazin' is rich with unforgettable personalities and wondrous stories both funny and poignant.

    From the first day he hit a minor league catcher with a pool table to the fateful day baseball called him out on a strike, Kaiser was one of the game's most popular and colorful characters. And in this autobiography-written with the co-author of Ron Luciano's classic bestseller The Umpire Strikes Back - Kaiser brings to life his wild adventures from the pro wrestling arena to the baseball diamond.This is the hysterically true story of four decades of baseball as lived and loved on the playing field, from Ted Williams and Billy Martin to Derek Jeter and Mark McGwire, from one-eyed umpires to space-age technology. And as he did throughout his long and sometimes controversial career, the larger-than-his-chest-protector Kaiser called 'em as he saw 'em.

    Book by Meltzer, Dave

    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.