Sporting House

An ex-Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball’s famed sabermetrics to place bets that would beat the Vegas odds on Major League Baseball games - with a 41 percent return in his first year. Trading Bases explains how he did it. After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta was out of a job. He found a new one but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down. In search of a way to cheer himself up while he recuperated, Peta started watching baseball again. That’s when inspiration hit: Why not apply his outstanding risk-analysis skills to improve on sabermetrics, the method made famous by Moneyball?

The Winners Manual: For the Game of Life shares Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel's "Big Ten" fundamentals for success: Attitude, Discipline, Faith, Handling Adversity & Success, Excellence, Love, Toughness, Responsibility, Team, and Hope. Peppered with personal stories from Tressel's storied coaching career, the book shares the fundamental lessons that he has been imparting to his players for the past 20 years.

The man who invented shock rock tells the amazing and, yeah, shocking story of how he slayed his thirsty demons with a golf club. It started one day when Cooper was watching a Star Trek rerun between concerts, bored and drunk on a quart-of-whiskey-a-day habit. A friend dragged the rocker out of his room and suggested a round of golf. Cooper has been a self-confessed golf addict ever since.

Star point guard Mack Morris’s senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of Mack’s father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. Playing side by side for their high school basketball team, Mack and Liv discover an electrifying, game-winning chemistry on the court. Off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship—one that feels out-of-bounds in their small Pennsylvania town. Mack teeters on the precipice of adulthood as desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline.

College football has never been more popular - or more chaotic. Millions fill 100,000-seat stadiums every Saturday; tens of millions more watch on television every weekend. The 2013 Discover BCS National Championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama had a viewership of 26.4 million people, second only to the Super Bowl. Billions of dollars from television deals now flow into the game; the average budget for a top-ten team is $80 million; top coaches make more than $3 million a year; the highest paid, more than $5 million.

Genius? Tyrant? Power broker? Enzo Ferrari is the impressively researched, fully detailed biography of one of the most powerful men of the twentieth century. Brock Yates penetrated Ferrari’s inner circle and reveals everything, from his early days in the town of Modena to his bizarre relationship with his illegitimate son; from his fanatic passion for speed to his brilliant marketing of the famous Ferrari image; from his manipulative but enormously effective management tactics to his own frustrated dreams. Fast, fun, and scandalous, Enzo Ferrari more than lives up to its remarkable subject.

Originally drawn to the game by his father, Carl Hiaasen wisely quit golfing in 1973. But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years - and memories of shanked 7-irons - faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the dreaded driving range, this time as the father of a five-year-old son -and also as a grandfather.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

Coming into 2016, the Americans had lost an astounding six out of the last seven Ryder Cup matches, and tensions were running high for the showdown that took place in October 2016 in Hazeltine, Minnesota, just days after American legend Arnold Palmer had died. What resulted was one of the most raucous and heated three days in the cup's long history. Award-winning author John Feinstein takes listeners behind the scenes, providing an inside view of the dramatic stories as they unfolded.

In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and found himself at Princeton Theological Seminary’s “Farminary”—a twenty-one-acre working farm where students learn to cultivate the earth while examining life’s biggest questions. Now, he unpacks what he learned about creating “good soil,” both literally and figuratively, drawing lessons from the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land. In gorgeous, transporting reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers.

Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates Diego and MJ attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.

This audiobook is the window into the underground world of cheating at the highest levels, which set off a frenzy of activity and hand-wringing in the offices of Major League Baseball and Congress. Through the authors' pursuit of sources and documents, they were able to open for public view a world in which elite athletes trade money and risk their health for the edge that will allow them to run faster, hit harder, and compete longer, and then cash in on the fame and wealth.

November 1958: the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Into the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and tradition comes the most unlikely of horses - a drab white former plow horse named Snowman - and his rider, Harry de Leyer. They were the longest of all longshots - and their win was the stuff of legend.

Gonzalo Zapata es el más grande de los maratonistas amateur de Chile. Tras un cambio en su vida, pasó de trabajar siete días a la semana a encontrar el equilibrio a través de la práctica del running. Se plateó un desafió singular: correr, durante un año, las seis grandes maratones del mundo. A través del relato de su experiencia en Tokio, Boston, Londres, Berlín, Chicago y New York, nos comparte su testimonio y además, nos entrega las claves para abandonar la vida sedentaria y atreverse a experimentar el placer del running

Recently retired WWE superstar AJ Mendez Brooks is a powerhouse - strong, quirky, and totally confident. But that wasn’t always the case. With humor and tremendous heart, she opens up for the first time about her harrowing struggle to understand her demons and the diagnosis that helped her gain control over her life.

Over its seventy-plus years of history, Formula 1 racing has grown from a niche motorsport with just a few events per season into a global phenomenon followed by more than a billion fans. With just twenty drivers competing at speeds of over 220 miles per hour on more than twenty of the world’s most glamorous and challenging racetracks, Formula 1 is the ultimate test of machine and humankind. To become a champion means to be counted among the most elite athletes the world has ever known.

Through extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders, Britain’s most celebrated investigative biographer, Tom Bower, has unearthed a succession of revelations that give surprising insight into the reality of ‘Brand Beckham’. Exploring the couple’s relationship, and the truth about their football and fashion careers, their finances and their new life in Miami, The House of Beckham unravels the extraordinary reality of the business-savvy cultural icons to tell an engrossing, often astonishing story of money, sex and power.

Rick Reilly has been a senior sports writer for Sports Illustrated for the past 17 years, and has been named "Sports Writer of The Year" seven times. Now, he pokes his nose into the world of golf. How does he do it? By caddying ("looping") for top players, celebrities, and some really bad run-of-the-mill golfers, Reilly gains insight into the minds of golfers, their winning or less-than-winning ways, and what they actually mutter when they're in the middle of play.

Life is going pretty well for Raymond "Stick" Hart. He's happily married to the former Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Club assistant pro, the beauteous Cajun firecracker Dannie, raising his rambunctious son, Charlie, and getting by writing smart-mouthed greeting cards for 50 bucks a pop. Then, one disaster of a day, Stick's world does a 10-car pile-up. Luckily, Stick has a solution to all his problems. He'll qualify for the British Open.

Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die.