K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches PDF Download

Author: Tyler Kepner
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385541023
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From The New York Times baseball columnist, an enchanting, enthralling history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching, based on years of archival research and interviews with more than three hundred people from Hall of Famers to the stars of today. The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating. In K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart. Filled with priceless insights from many of the best pitchers in baseball history--from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw--K will be the definitive book on pitching and join such works as The Glory of Their Times and Moneyball as a classic of the genre.

Author: Daniel Okrent
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618056682
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
THE ULTIMATE BASEBALL BOOK has more than lived up to its name. Spanning the complete history of the sport from the fledgling leagues in the late 1870s to the powerhouses of the 1990s and revealing in the process what a remarkable effect baseball has had on our collective experience, this is THE book for any and all baseball fans, certain to grace coffee and bedside tables alike. Designed with that wonderful nostalgia that the sport itself so often evokes, THE ULTIMATE BASEBALL BOOK combines timeless images with a sweeping narrative history as well as essays on various idols and icons by such heavy hitters as Red Smith, Wilfrid Sheed, Roy Blount, Jr., Tom Wicker, and Geoge Will. This new edition covers baseball through the nineties, the decade when home run records fell and the sport reclaimed its hold on America, and celebrates the national game in ultimate style.

Author: The Editors of Sports Illustrated Kids
Publisher: Sports Illustrated Kids
ISBN: 9781618930064
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Get everything you ever wanted to know about America's pastime in FULL COUNT: TOP 10 LISTS OF EVERYTHING IN BASEBALL . Presented in the format of Top 10 lists, this book is a comprehensive yet fun look at the greatest aspects of the game. From the top World Series moments to the most colorful characters, SI Kids ranks a variety of topics from the baseball diamond. Readers are guaranteed to love the big, exciting action photos from the Sports Illustrated collection and the insider knowledge of SI Kids. Filled with trivia and information, this dynamic book will be the definitive kids book on baseball. Top 10 Rankings include: Hardest throwers Slickest infielders Powerful sluggers Loveable losers Fastest base stealers Best ballparks

Author: Brad Herzog
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
ISBN: 1585365971
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Following his H is for Home Run: A Baseball Alphabet, Brad Herzog once again steps to the plate to bring the game of baseball to fans of every age. Using numbers as its backdrop, Full Count: A Baseball Number Book goes behind the batter's box and into the dugout to explain game basics and showcase historic moments. Starting with the signal for a fastball (1), to the miles-per-hour speed on some of the fastest pitches ever thrown (100+), Full Count counts out the players, the plays, and pulse-stopping moments in America's favorite sport. Brad Herzog has won several awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He has published more than two dozen books, including his sports alphabet books, H is for Home Run: A Baseball Alphabet and K is for Kick: A Soccer Alphabet. Brad lives on California's Monterey Peninsula. Following successful careers as a commercial illustrator and a wildlife artist, Bruce Langton started illustrating children's books. His books include P is for Putt: A Golf Alphabet and Win One for the Gipper: America's Football Hero. Bruce lives in Granger, Indiana.

Author: Joe Posnanski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982180609
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 702

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.

Author: Kevin Cook
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250182034
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The dramatic story of a legendary 1979 slugfest between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, full of runs, hits, and subplots, at the tipping point of a new era in baseball history It was a Thursday at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, mostly sunny with the wind blowing out. Nobody expected an afternoon game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs on May 17, 1979, to be much more than a lazy early-season contest matching two teams heading in opposite directions—the first-place Phillies and the Cubs, those lovable losers—until they combined for thirteen runs in the first inning. “The craziest game ever,” one player called it. “And then the second inning started.” Ten Innings at Wrigley is Kevin Cook’s vivid account of a game that could only have happened at this ballpark, in this era, with this colorful cast of heroes and heels: Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Bruce Sutter, surly slugger Dave Kingman, hustler Pete Rose, unlucky Bill Buckner, scarred Vietnam vet Garry Maddox, troubled relief pitcher Donnie Moore, clubhouse jester Tug McGraw, and two managers pulling out what was left of their hair. It was the highest-scoring ballgame in a century, and much more than that. Bringing to life the run-up and aftermath of a contest The New York Times called “the wildest in modern history,” Cook reveals the human stories behind the game—and how money, muscles and modern statistics were about to change baseball forever.

Author: Nate LeBoutillier
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1429654678
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
When was the first World Series played? What MLB pitcher holds the league record with seven no-hitters? Which player stole home 54 times during his career? Learn the answer to these questions and more in The Best of Everything Baseball Book.

Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 044655698X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.

Author: John Sexton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101609737
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.

Author: Ken Rappoport
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 146460214X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Who are the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball? Who are the greatest pitchers pitching today? What makes a pitcher great? From the heroes of yesterday like Cy Young to modern superstars like Mariano Rivera, author Ken Rappoport looks at ten of the greatest ballplayers (Grover Cleveland Alexander, Lefty Grove, Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Christy Mathewson, Satchel Paige, Mariano Rivera, Nolan Ryan, Warren Spahn, Cy Young) to ever stand atop a major-league pitcher's mound.