It would require a complete team tear-down and turnover, a new farm system foundation of young talent which Epstein and Cubs GM Jed Hoyer gradually added to with gutsy trades and timely signings. After years of rebuilding, Epstein's crystalline vision has been unquestionably realized in the form of one of the most exciting and talented teams in baseball, led by heavyweights like Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant as well as visionaries like manager Joe Maddon. In The Plan, David Kaplan of CSN Chicago and ESPN Radio goes behind the scenes with the Cubs and their front office, walking the steps of their captivating rise to becoming 2016 World Series champions. Featuring exclusive interviews with Epstein, owner Tom Ricketts, and other team insiders, this is the definitive account of a new era on the North Side.

    The former and latter have been covered extensively. Yet there has never been a book detailing the biggest drug trials in baseball history. The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven tells the whole story in all its shocking details. The MLB participants were among the game's elite, as a virtual all-star team had come to Pittsburgh. Implicated as cocaine users: Keith Hernandez, Dave Parker, Lee Mazzilli, Dusty Baker, Lonnie Smith, Joaquin Andujar, John Milner, Dale Berra. Mentioned as using amphetamines: Willie Mays, Willie Stargell. But the guys who took the fall for these superstars were just average fans, not heavy hitters or major drug dealers, and this book reveals the often comic circumstances of how they set up deals--and how they got busted. In 1985, it seemed the league was poised to implement a drug testing policy for the players. Obviously, that didn't happen, and because of this inaction, the steroid era came along--and with it all of the broken records that transformed the sport. That's what makes this story so relevant today.

    This text presents an account of the epic Baseball World Series in 1966 between the celebrated Los Angeles Dodgers and the perennial underdog Baltimore Orioles.

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    Thomas, the grandson of Walter Johnson, lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is currently editing, for audio release, the interviews taped by Lawrence Ritter for his classic The Glory of Their Times. Shirley Povich died in 1998 at the age of 92 after seventy-five years as an award-winning sportswriter for the Washington Post.

    Written by A330 Captain, Bill Palmer, this book opens to understanding the actions of the crew, how they failed to understand and control the problem, and how the airplane works and the part it played. All in easy to understand terms.Addressed are the many contributing aspects of weather, human factors, and airplane system operation and design that the crew could not recover from. How each contributed is covered in detail along with what has been done, and needs to be done in the future to prevent this from happening again.Also see the book's companion website: UnderstandingAF447.com for supplemental materials referred to in the book or to contact the author.

    But the drive, which also included a remarkable escape and pass completion to unheralded receiver David Tyree, was the culmination of years of promise and development. After all, champion quarterbacks aren't made overnight.With Manning, the Super Bowl MVP, as its focal point, New York Daily News Giants beat writer Ralph Vacchiano's 'Eli Manning The Making of a Quarterback' is a fascinating insider's look at the National Football League, how stars are made and crushed, and how fortunes are won and lost on the performance of one man: the quarterback. From the bold draft day trade that brought Manning to New York, through his dramatic ups and downs on and off the field, his first training camp to his last-minute heroics in Super Bowl XLII, Vacchiano takes a candid and revealing look at the people and events that made Manning's and his 2007 Giants' success one of the greatest stories in modern sports history. Complete with exclusive interviews with NFL stars, coaches, and executives and a foreword by former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, Vacchiano uses his unfettered access to the world champion Giants to present a true, behind-the scenes look at the quarterback and team that defied all of the experts and oddsmakers to pull off one of the most phenomenal upsets in pro football history.

    In Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, Tygiel penned a classic work, a landmark book that towers above most writing about the sport. Now he ranges across the last century and a half in anintriguing look at baseball as history, and history as reflected in baseball.In Past Time, Tygiel gives us a seat behind home plate, where we catch the ongoing interplay of baseball and American society. We begin in New York in the 1850s, where pre-Civil War nationalism shaped the emergence of a national pastime. We witness the true birth of modern baseball with thedevelopment of its elaborate statistics--the brainchild of English-born reformer, Henry Chadwick. Chadwick, Tygiel writes, created the sport's historical essence and even imparted a moral dimension to the game with his concepts of errors and unearned runs. Tygiel offers equally insightfullooks at the role of rags-to-riches player-owners in the formation of the upstart American League and he describes the complex struggle to establish African-American baseball in a segregated world. He also examines baseball during the Great Depression (when Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail savedthe game by perfecting the farm system, night baseball, and radio broadcasts), the ironies of Bobby Thomson's immortal shot heard 'round the world, the rapid relocation of franchises in the 1950s and 1960s, and the emergence of rotisserie leagues and fantasy camps in the 1980s.In Past Time, Jules Tygiel provides baseball history with a difference. Instead of a pitch-by-pitch account of great games, in this groundbreaking book, the field is American history and baseball itself is the star.

    But what's the real story of Moonlight Graham? In Chasing Moonlight, the authors follow Graham's life from his youth spent with his younger brother, Frank Porter Graham, who became the president of the University of North Carolina and a United States Senator; through his career as a medical student in Baltimore and New York while he played baseball at the same time; through his minor league successes in Scranton, Pennsylvania; to his one and a half innings in a major league game. In Graham's Minnesota years, the authors reveal a man whose pioneering research on children's blood pressure is still used at institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and whose quiet philanthropy made him beloved in his community.

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    Feldman has penned the inside story of the Miami Hurricanes--the college football dynasty they call the Miami Vice.

    Over six feet tall, clean cut, and college educated, he didn't pitch on the Sabbath and rarely spoke an ill word about anyone. He also had one of the most devastating arms in all of baseball. New York Giants manager John McGraw, by contrast, was ferocious. The pugnacious tough guy was already a star infielder who, with the Baltimore Orioles, helped develop a new, scrappy style of baseball, with plays like the hit-and-run, the Baltimore chop, and the squeeze play. When McGraw joined the Giants in 1902, the Giants were coming off their worst season ever. Yet within three years, Mathewson clinched New York City's first World Series for McGraw's team by throwing three straight shutouts in only six days, an incredible feat that is invariably called the greatest World Series performance ever. Because of their wonderful odd-couple association, baseball had its first superstar, the Giants ascended into legend, and baseball as a national pastime bloomed.

    By the time he reached his 50th birthday his career was everything he'd ever hoped it would be. With a sports column in a major paper, winning APSE's Best Sports Columnist in Texas four times, and a daily spot on ESPN's highly successful show, "Around the Horn," Cowlishaw had pursued and conquered nearly everything he ever desired professionally. However, the pursuit of that success nearly cost him his life.DRUNK ON SPORTS is more than simply a memoir by one of America's most well-known sportswriters. Behind his happy-go-lucky public persona was a man with a considerable (but well-disguised) drinking problem. For years, Cowlishaw believed that his ability to drink with the best of them helped in his development of sources and pursuit of stories and, unfortunately, he was right. Among others, the relationship he built while sitting on a barstool next to Cowboys Coach Jimmy Johnson allowed him to get where other reporters couldn't. As all hell broke loose between Johnson and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in 1994, Cowlishaw was right next to Coach Johnson every step (and beer) along the way. In DRUNK ON SPORTS, Cowlishaw recounts first-hand stories never told and quotes never shared from the bizarre breakup of one of the NFL's most successful dynasties.As he points out in the introduction, this is not an anti-drinking book. Cowlishaw loved alcohol for 35 years. If anything, this is a how-not-to book more than a how-to book. Along the way, Cowlishaw takes readers inside some of the biggest stories in sports. He joined ESPN in 2002 as a regular on Around the Horn and discusses life behind the scenes at the Worldwide Leader candidly and at length. Cowlishaw writes and talks and, at times, drinks his way into the sports world's fast lane - what else would you call getting hammered on vodka with Denny Hamlin at the Daytona 500 - before realizing the only way to continue was to call a halt to the partying.The story of his rise and fall is more insightful and humorous than it is preachy as Cowlishaw examines some of the flawed decisions he made throughout his lifetime in sports. DRUNK ON SPORTS is a cautionary yet entertaining tale of never before told stories featuring some of the most recognizable personalities in sports, and if it causes some readers to reexamine their own lives, then it will have gone above and beyond its intended purpose.

    In the summer of 1977, entrepreneurial Warner Brothers chairman Steve Ross assembled the best soccer players from across the globe to play for the Cosmos. Pele, the German superstar Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Neeskens, Giorgio Chinaglia, Brazil's 1970 World Cup-winning captain Carlos Alberto, Werner Roth, Roberto Cabanas, and many others all donned Cosmos jerseys and became instant celebrities in the process. The Cosmos quickly became the hottest ticket in town and the Cosmos players soon became enmeshed in a world of millionaires, gangsters, groupies, glamour, power struggles, alcoholic excess, drugs, and fistfights.Published to coincide with the World Cup in June 2006, Once in a Lifetime is the thrilling story of America's first flirtation with the world's most popular game.