The Love of Baseball PDF Download

Author: Paul Adomites
Publisher: Publications International
ISBN: 9781412719919
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Author: Larry King
Publisher: Phoenix Books
ISBN: 1614670676
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Larry King is a true-blue baseball fanatic. A lifelong love affair began the night he attended a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field as a kid in 1940s Brooklyn. That was a simpler era in our country’s history, a time when tickets to a game cost fifty cents and parish priests prayed for Gil Hodges to break out of a slump. In this heartfelt valentine to America’s favorite pastime, King recalls the many pleasures the game has brought him over the past sixty years. In the course of his broadcasting career King had the opportunity to meet and interview many of the legends of his youth. Jackie Robinson, Casey Stengel, Ted Williams, Leo Durocher, Stan Musial…they’re all here plus many, many more. From the golden days when Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Duke Snider were all playing center field for New York teams at the same time, to the Subway Series in 2000 and the stirring first ballgame in New York after 9/11, this unique history is full of wonderful anecdotes. Friends and fellow baseball fanatics Bob Costas, Charlie Bragg and Herb Cohen have contributed essays on their love for the game, and King discusses his favorite books, movies and songs about the sport. This ode to baseball is a must for all fans and will be treasured by lovers of the game everywhere.

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

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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: John McCollister
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493048880
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Why do we sometimes refer to a left-handed pitcher as a “southpaw?” Why are major league pitchers normally limited to 100 pitches per game? Why was Jack Roosevelt Robinson the first African-American ever to play as part of an official lineup for a team in Major League Baseball? Why is a baseball field sometimes referred to as a diamond? This book provides over 100 questions and detailed answers concerning the traditions, rules, and history of the national pastime. Organized by the sport’s five eras—Dead Ball, Live Ball, Golden Age, Expansion, and Steroid Era—it answers questions about hitting, pitching, fielding, base running, managing, scouting and ownership that vex even the most ardent fans of the game. Moreover, this book is an appreciation of how baseball’s traditions began.

Author: Jake Gronsky
Publisher: Sunbury Press, Inc.
ISBN: 1620060221
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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No parent is ever ready for a terminal diagnosis of their child. No mother should see the day where turning off your son's ventilator is the only option to end his pain. And no grandfather should see the day when your grandchild is scheduled to die in his mother's arms. But on September 10, 2005, this was the harsh reality facing our family, and this was the day we’d never forget. I am no pastor; nor a preacher. I am no miracle worker, nor a missionary. I am a struggling husband, a decent father, a survivor of brutal child abuse, and from the miraculous survival and extraordinary life of a Progeria child, I am a believer saved by the Grace of God through Jesus Christ. In A Short Season: Faith, Family, and a Boy's Love for Baseball, Dave Bohner, the story’s narrator and Grandfather to Josiah, and Jake Gronsky, former professional baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals organization, tell the powerful story of Josiah Viera’s fight for life that not only sparked a family's journey towards healing but inspired a generation of baseball players from one of the most historic organizations in Major League Baseball. A Short Season is a story of hope; a story of acceptance; and a story of faith based on the idea that sometimes a person’s only journey to peace is first trekked through pain. A Short Season is a family’s journey through sorrow and joy, it is a baseball team’s inspiration, and it is the story of one exceptional child’s ray of hope that changed all of their lives forever.

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

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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: Dale Tafoya
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
ISBN: 161234383X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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The legacy of power baseball.

Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300235402
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

Author: Joe Posnanski
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060854030
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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When Legendary Negro League player Buck O'Neil asked sports columnist Joe Posnanski how he fell in love with baseball, Posnanski had to think about it. From that question was born the idea behind BASEBALL AND JAZZ. Posnanski and the 94 year old O'Neil decided to spend the 2005 baseball season touring the country in hopes of stirring up the love that first drew them to the game. This book is just as much the story of Buck O'Neil as it is the story of baseball. In a time when disillusioned, steroid–shooting, money hungry athletes define the sport, Buck O'Neil stands out as a man that truly played for the love of the game. Posnanski writes about that love and the one thing that O'Neil loved almost as much as baseball: jazz. BASEBALL AND JAZZ is an endearing step back in time to the days when the crack of a bat and the smoky notes of a midnight jam session were the sounds that brought the most joy to a man's heart.

Author: Alva Noë
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190928182
Category : SPORTS & RECREATION
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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"...Philosopher and baseball fan Alva Noë explores the many unexpected ways in which baseball is truly a philosophical kind of game. For example, he ponders how observers of baseball are less interested in what happens, than in who is responsible for what happens; every action receives praise or blame. To put it another way, in baseball - as in the law - we decide what happened based on who is responsible for what happened. Noe also explains the curious activity of keeping score: a score card is not merely a record of the game, like a video recording; it is an account of the game. Baseball requires that true fans try to tell the story of the game, in real time, as it unfolds, and thus actively participate in its creation. Some argue that baseball is fundamentally a game about numbers. Noe's wide-ranging, thoughtful observations show that, to the contrary, baseball is not only a window on language, culture, and the nature of human action, but is intertwined with deep and fundamental human truths."--Dust jacket flap.