World Baseball

Amid strict new rules and coronavirus outbreaks on other teams that wreaked havoc on the schedule, the Dodgers maintained a laser focus as a team and organization, and, ultimately, won the first bubbled playoffs in the history of Major League Baseball. In COVID Curveball, author and Dodgers’ broadcaster Tim Neverett takes us through this unprecedented season, offering exclusive access and firsthand, edge-of-your-seat play-by-play coverage of the surreal days and weeks that led up to the dramatic championship climax.

In Beep, David Wanczyk illuminates the sport of blind baseball to show us a remarkable version of America’s pastime. With balls tricked out to squeal three times per second, and with bases that buzz, this game of baseball for the blind is both innovative and intense. And when the best beep baseball team in America, the Austin Blackhawks, takes on its international rival, Taiwan Homerun, no one’s thinking about disability. What we find are athletes playing their hearts out for a championship.

Updated with the historic 2023 World Series victory, this deep dive on the Texas Rangers captures all the drama, humor, craziness and pathos. And tells how Jim Reeves, an award-winning, ex-sports columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, got his riveting stories. Reeves brings forth all the drama, heartbreak and sheer craziness that filled more than 50 years of Texas Rangers baseball. Starting when sportswriters embedded themselves with a team, Reeves experienced behind-the-scenes access most journalists likely will never see again. Not only from the press box but from the dugout and the ...

A succinct history of baseball, newly revised and updated. In this third edition of his lively history of America's game, widely recognized as the best of its kind, Benjamin G. Rader expands his scope, covering record crowds and record income, construction of new ballparks, a change in the strike zone, a surge in recruiting Japanese players, and an emerging cadre of explosive long-ball hitters. The book is published by The University of Illinois Press.

Forbidden love, forgotten horror, murder, deceit, a prohibited alliance spurs a young couple's intense desire to escape the upland coteau, which masks the 1920's sinister veil of the Klan's Invisible Empire. Based upon actual events, the story begins with the murder of Fr. Arthur Belknap, a young priest serving in the South Dakota Black Hills, then sears across the state to the Prairie Coteau, considered the birthplace of the South Dakota Klan, at a blazing cross cut deep upon the earth that teared the eye of God. The ominous cross of terror still survives to this day, untouched by a ...

Critically acclaimed writer Tom Adelman is hailed as a renegade by the Village Voice Literary Supplement for his aggressive, no-holds-barred style. The Long Ball is his dynamic re-telling of baseball's thrilling 1975 season.

War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And not once in Major League Baseball's 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant.

There’s no crying in baseball. But there is murder. And when the World Series is fought between two teams both from New York City, millions of dollars are bet. And lives are at risk. When a young man from the Yankees and a young woman from the Giants are found dead, the Press sniffed about a tragic accident. Thoughts and prayers were sent. When Dr. Tabitha Stancović examined the bodies in her pathology lab, she knew it was murder. So, she and her assistant, Sergeant Johan Klassen, are forced into action before more victims—possibly even the members of the teams—are killed. The story ...

When a cosmic anomaly disrupts the championship baseball game between Earth and Mars, reclusive trillionair Xan Ruiz-Harlow takes the bold step of shifting the contest into an artificial "Infinite Plane" existing outside of normal space-time. Now the elite players of the Earth Raptors and Mars Thunderbolts must adapt to playing in a dimension where the laws of physics are constantly warped in bizarre ways - balls defying gravity, trajectories altering inexplicably, and the very fabric of reality threatening to unravel with each pitch. As the greatest stars from both worlds employ innovative...

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The year is 1918. An influenza epidemic imperils the world. A world war rages, igniting protests on the American homefront and threatening to end professional baseball. Labor unrest is everywhere. The Red Sox are struggling to reach the World Series. Will Beaman is asked to investigate the disappearance of a derelict who has been hanging around Fenway Park bragging about becoming rich on fixed games. Will's search for the missing man triggers threats on his life, plunks him into the midst of Boston's volatile gambling community, identifies a host of rough-and-tumble suspects, and draws him ...

The Wizard of Oz, manager of the Marvels baseball team, wants desperately to play against the Serpents, led by Evillene, their manager, who is also known as the Wicked Witch of the West. But these two teams live on opposite sides of the Dimensional Gates, and have never met. Every day the Wizard pleads to the Great Wind, the tornado that controls the Gate, and begs the Wind to allow this to happen. Until finally the two teams, and the two most powerful entities on the planet, get to meet. Learn what happens when Dorothy from Kansas, along with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion play the ...

When Christine, an idealistic young American teacher, meets and marries Hideki Yamada, an aspiring Japanese high school baseball coach, she believes that their love with be enough to sustain them as they deal with cultural differences. However, Hideki's duties, and the team of fit, obedient boys whom he begins to think of as a surrogate family, take up more and more of his time, just as Christine is struggling to manage the needs of their multiply-disabled daughter and their sensitive son. Things come to a head when their son is the victim of bullies.

In the aftermath of the global conflict of World War II, few events in the United States were as eagerly awaited as baseball's spring training. But the national pastime was as unsettled as the rest of the country. Had some of the stars seen their careers ended by their service? How would wartime players fare against returning veterans?

The San Antonio Alamos, Major League Baseball’s latest expansion team, are in an exciting chase for their first division title when tragedy strikes. Their plane goes down in a storm and everyone thinks it is the end for the Alamo’s. However, with some “Divine Intervention”, the team is allowed to return in the bodies of their minor league affiliate, the Columbus Gunboats, who will play the rest of their season. There is a catch (there always is in baseball). To get their old lives back, the Alamos must win all the way to the World Series and not lose it. Can they, playing through ...

Luis Tiant is one of the most charismatic and accomplished players in Boston Red Sox history - a cigar-chomping maestro who was the heart and soul of Boston's teams in the 1970s. Nobody was a tougher competitor on the diamond, and few were as successful. There may be no more qualified pitcher not yet enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In Son of Havana, Tiant puts his huge heart on his sleeve and describes his road from fields strewn with rocks and rubbish in Havana to the pristine lawns of Major League ballparks.

When Father Bredder gets involved with murder—Heaven only knows what will happen next... When a baseball player is shot in the middle of a big game, Father Bredder is hired by the team to solve the case. Before he is done, he has to clear the name of a murdered priest accused of dealing drugs and save the soul of a young girl—all before the opening pitch of the World Series. “You can get hooked on God,” Father Bredder says, “like you can on heroin. You can’t get away from Him.” Named “A Red Badge Novel of Suspense” alongside Agatha Christie, Michael Innes, and Hugh ...

The 1947 World Series was "the most exciting ever" in the words of Joe DiMaggio, with a decade's worth of drama packed into seven games between the mighty New York Yankees and underdog Brooklyn Dodgers. It was Jackie Robinson's first Series, a postwar spectacle featuring Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, and President Harry Truman in supporting roles. It was also the first televised World Series - sportswriters called it "Electric October".

Love them or hate them, the New York Yankees have been an American institution for nearly a century. With their rich history and colorful cast of characters, the Yankees never fail to inspire or provoke. In this exciting compendium, some of today's most acclaimed writers - including Pete Dexter, Colum McCann, Roy Blount, Jr., Dan Barry, Jane Leavy, Charles P. Pierce, J. R. Moehringer, Daniel Okrent, Frank Deford, Bill James, and many more - step up to the plate to take their cuts. The result is a collection of original essays as idiosyncratic and expansive as the team that has inspired them.