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Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist-Athlete (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
Par Professor Abraham Iqbal Khan. 2012
Curt Flood in the Media examines the public discourse surrounding Curt Flood (1938–1997), the star centerfielder for the St. Louis…
Cardinals throughout the sixties. In 1969, Flood was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, all Major League Baseball players were subject to the reserve clause, which essentially bound a player to work in perpetuity for his original team, unless traded for another player or sold for cash, in which case he worked under the same reserve conditions for the next team. Flood refused the trade on a matter of principle, arguing that Major League Baseball had violated both US antitrust laws and the 13th Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude. In a defiant letter to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asking for his contractual release, Flood infamously wrote, “after twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Most significantly, Flood appeared on national television with Howard Cosell and described himself as a “well-paid slave.” Explosive controversy ensued. Khan examines the ways in which the media constructed the case and Flood's persona. By examining the mainstream press, the Black press, and primary sources, including Flood's autobiography, Khan exposes the complexities of what it means to be a prominent Black American athlete—in 1969 and today.Smart Ball: Marketing the Myth and Managing the Reality of Major League Baseball
Par Robert F. Lewis II. 2010
Smart Ball follows Major League Baseball's history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business.…
MLB's challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy.Baseball researcher Robert F. Lewis II argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status through arrogant treatment of its fans and players and static management of its business. As its privileged position eroded eroded in the face of increased competition from other sports and union resistance, it awakened to its perilous predicament and began aggressively courting athletes and fans at home and abroad.Using a detailed marketing analysis and applying the principles of a "smart power" model, the author assesses MLB's progression as a global business brand that continues to appeal to a consumer's sense of an idyllic past in the midst of a fast-paced, and often violent, present.Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar
Par Roberta J. Newman, Joel Nathan Rosen. 2014
Winner of the 2014 Robert W. Peterson Award for Excellence in Negro League Research from the Jerry Malloy Negro League…
Conference, sponsored by Negro Leagues Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research Roberta J. Newman and Joel Nathan Rosen have written an authoritative social history of the Negro Leagues. This book examines how the relationship between black baseball and black businesses functioned, particularly in urban areas with significant African American populations—Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, and more. Inextricably bound together by circumstance, these sports and business alliances faced destruction and upheaval. Once Jackie Robinson and a select handful of black baseball’s elite gained acceptance in Major League Baseball and financial stability in the mainstream economy, shock waves traveled throughout the black business world. Though the economic impact on Negro League baseball is perhaps obvious due to its demise, the impact on other black-owned businesses and on segregated neighborhoods is often undervalued if not outright ignored in current accounts. There have been many books written on great individual players who played in the Negro Leagues and/or integrated the Major Leagues. But Newman and Rosen move beyond hagiography to analyze what happens when a community has its economic footing undermined while simultaneously being called upon to celebrate a larger social progress. In this regard, Black Baseball, Black Business moves beyond the diamond to explore baseball’s desegregation narrative in a critical and wide-ranging fashion.Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line
Par Emily Ruth Rutter. 2018
Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American…
Baseball Research Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend
Par James S. Hirsch. 2010
The “enormously entertaining and wide-ranging” (Seattle Times) authorized, definitive, New York Times bestselling biography of Willie Mays, the most complete…
baseball player of all time.Willie Mays is arguably the greatest player in baseball history, still revered for the passion he brought to the game. He began as a teenager in the Negro Leagues, became a cult hero in New York, and was the headliner in Major League Baseball’s bold expansion to California. He was a blend of power, speed, and stylistic bravado that enraptured fans for more than two decades. Now James Hirsch reveals the man behind the player. Mays was a transcendent figure who received standing ovations in enemy stadiums and who, during the turbulent civil rights era, urged understanding and reconciliation. More than his records, his legacy is defined by the pure joy that he brought to fans and the loving memories that have been passed to future generations so they might know the magic and beauty of the game. With meticulous research and drawing on interviews with Mays himself as well as with close friends, family, and teammates, Hirsch presents a brilliant portrait of one of America’s most significant cultural icons.The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City
Par Kevin Baker. 2024
A hugely entertaining history of baseball and New York City, bursting with larger-than-life figures and fascinating stories from the game&’s…
beginnings to the end of World War II.Baseball is &“the New York game&” because New York is where the diamond was first laid out, where the bunt and the curveball were invented, and where the home run was hit. It&’s where the game&’s first stars were born, and where everyone came to play or watch the game. With nuance and depth, historian Kevin Baker brings this all vividly back to life: the still-controversial, indelible moments—Did the Babe call his shot? Was Merkle out? Did they fix the 1919 World Series? Here are all the legendary players, managers, and owners, in all their vivid, complicated humanity, on and off the field. In Baker&’s hands the city and the game emerge from the murk of nineteenth-century American life—driven by visionaries and fixers, heroes and gangsters. He details how New York and its favorite sport came to mirror one another, expanding, bumbling through catastrophe and corruption, and rising out of these trials stronger than ever. From the first innings played in vacant lots and tavern yards in the 1820s; to the canny innovations that created the very first sports league; to the superb Hispanic and Black players who invented their own version of the game when white baseball sought to exclude them. And all amidst New York&’s own, incredible evolution from a raw, riotous town to a new world city. The New York Game is a riveting, rollicking, brilliant ode to America&’s beloved pastime and to its indomitable city of origin.Overtime: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football
Par John U. Bacon. 2019
NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom the “poet laureate of Michigan football," a riveting inside chronicle of the Jim Harbaugh era, and "an unprecedented look at the…
inner workings" (Sporting News) of a big-time college football programJohn U. Bacon received rare access to Head Coach Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players, and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals, and classes. Overtime captures this storied program at the crossroads, as the sport’s winningest team battles to reclaim its former glory. But what if the price of success today comes at the cost of your soul? Do you pay it, or compete without compromising?In the spirit of HBO’s Hardknocks, Overtime delivers a deeply reported human portrait that follows the Wolverine coaches, players, and staffers. Above all, thisis a human story. In Overtime we not only discover what these public figures are like behind the scenes, we learn what the experience means to them as they go through it – the trials, the triumphs, and the unexpected answers to a central question: Is it worth it?From the “poet laureate of Michigan football” (according to New York Times’s Joe Drape), and one of the keenest observers of college football, Overtime offers a window into a legendary program and the sport itself that only John U. Bacon could deliver.Baseball America 2024 Prospect Handbook Digital Edition
Par The Editors at Baseball America. 2023
The 2024 Prospect Handbook is your guide to the next wave of MLB stars The 2024 Prospect Handbook is your guide…
to the next wave of MLB stars. With complete scouting reports on more than 900 prospects, the Prospect Handbook is a must-have for superfans as well as fantasy players. Dominate your dynasty league and be the first to know about the stars of the 2020s and early 2030s.The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers: An Historical Compendium of Pitching, Pitchers, and Pitches
Par Bill James, Rob Neyer. 2004
Preeminent baseball analyst Bill James and ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer compile information on pitches and their origins, nearly two…
thousand pitchers, and more in this comprehensive guide.Pitchers, the pitches they throw, and how they throw them—they&’re the stuff of constant scrutiny, but there's never been anything like a comprehensive source for such information…until now. Bill James and Rob Neyer spent over a decade compiling the centerpiece of this book, the Pitcher Census, which lists specific information for nearly two thousand pitchers, ranging throughout the history of professional baseball. Their guide also includes a dictionary describing virtually every known pitch, biographies of great pitchers who have been overlooked, and top ten lists for fastballs, spitballs, and everything in between. James and Neyer also weigh in on the debate over pitcher abuse and durability, offer a formula for predicting the Cy Young Award winner, and reveal James&’s Pitcher Codes. Learn about the origins and development of baseball&’s most important pitches and more knuckleballers and submariners than you ever thought existed! Baseball&’s action always starts with the pitchers. Begin to understand them and join in on entertaining debates while having a great deal of fun with the history of the game that captivates so many with this one-of-a-kind guide.The Sweet Science
Par A. J. Liebling. 2004
A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as…
it once was. The Sweet Science depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.The never-before-told story of the momentous season torn in half by the bitter players strike. Sourcing incredible and extensive interviews…
with almost all of the major participants in the strike, Split Season: 1981 returns us to the on- and off-field drama of an unforgettable baseball year. 1981 was a watershed moment in American sports, when players turned an oligarchy of owners into a game where they had a real voice. Midway through the season, a game-changing strike ripped baseball apart, the first time a season had ever been stopped in the middle because of a strike. Marvin Miller and the MLB Players Association squared off against Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the owners in a fight to protect players rights to free agency and defend America's pastime.Though a time bomb was ticking as the 1981 season began, the game rose to impressive---and now legendary---heights. Pete Rose chased Stan Musial's National League hit record and rookie Fernando Valenzuela was creating a sensation as the best pitcher in the majors when the stadiums went dark and the players went on strike.For the first time in modern history, there were first- and second-half champions; the two teams with the overall best records in the National League were not awarded play-off berths. When the season resumed after an absence of 712 games, Rose's resumption of his pursuit, the resurgence of Reggie Jackson, the rise of the Montreal Expos, and a Nolan Ryan no-hitter became notable events. The Dodgers bested their longtime rivals in a Yankees-Dodgers World Series, the last classic matchup of those storied opponents.Planet of the Umps: A Baseball Life from Behind the Plate
Par Ken Kaiser, David Fisher. 2003
For twenty-five years, Ken Kaiser was the most colorful umpire in the major leagues. Planet of the Umps is his…
sidesplitting tale of life behind the plate."Two things nobody wants to grow up to be are an umpire and broke. Thanks to my career in baseball, I got both."After calling balls, strikes, and outs for thirty-six baseball seasons and more than three thousand major-league games, umpire Ken Kaiser finally called it a career. From the first day he hit a minor-league catcher with a pool table to the fateful day baseball called him out on a strike, Kaiser was one of the game's most popular and colorful characters. And in this autobiography--written with the coauthor of Ron Luciano's classic bestseller The Umpire Strikes Back--Kaiser brings to life his wild adventures from the pro-wrestling arena to the baseball diamond.This is the hysterically true story of four decades of baseball as lived and loved on the playing field, from Ted Williams and Billy Martin to Derek Jeter and Mark McGwire, from one-eyed umpires to space-age technology. As he did throughout his long and sometimes controversial career, the larger-than-his-chest-protector Kaiser calls 'em as he saw 'em.Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
Par Eliot Asinof. 1963
First published in 1963, Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out has become a timeless classic of a scandalous world series.The headlines…
proclaimed the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up as "the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America!" Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties.Tampa Spring Training Tales: Major League Memories (Sports)
Par Rick Vaughn. 2024
Since 1913, Tampa has provided the background for some of the Major League Baseball's most iconic spring moments led, of…
course, by the longest home run of Babe Ruth's career. Tampa was the scene of the Grapefruit League's first no-hitter and the only spring time All-star Game. It was the first gathering place of the Big Red Machine and the Core Four. Well over 125 Hall of Famers honed their craft among the city's three major league ballparks: Plant Field, Al Lopez Field and Steinbrenner Field. All of it resulted from a diverse city's love of the game that began with baseball-crazed cigar factory workers before the turn of the 20th century .Under Jackie's Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind
Par Mitchell Nathanson. 2024
Under Jackie&’s Shadow is a portal to the hidden world of Minor League baseball in the era just after Jackie…
Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. What was it like to be Black and playing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1965, or Memphis, Tennessee, in 1973? What was it like to play for white coaches and scouting directors from the Jim Crow South who cut their professional teeth in the segregated game before Jackie Robinson ushered in the sport&’s integration? Or to be called into the clubhouse with your Black teammates one spring training morning in 1969 and told that to make the ballclub you&’d have to beat out the Black men in that room, because none of you were ever going to beat out a white player, regardless? Or to spend a staggering eight seasons playing A-ball in the Midwest League, even winning a triple crown, while watching less-talented white teammates get promoted each year while you stayed behind? The thirteen players in Under Jackie&’s Shadow are going to tell you. The players&’ experiences in baseball&’s Minor Leagues in the 1960s and 1970s do not comport with the largely celebratory tales the leagues like to tell about themselves. The Black Minor League players remained largely invisible men—most of whom couldn&’t be named by even the most devoted baseball followers. Based on Mitchell Nathanson&’s interviews, Under Jackie&’s Shadow uses the players&’ own words to tell the unvarnished story of what it was like to be a Black baseball player navigating the wilds of professional baseball&’s Minor Leagues following the integration of the Major Leagues. Harrowing, beautiful, and maddening, these stories are vital to our understanding of race not only in baseball but in the United States as a whole.Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero
Par Waite Hoyt, Tim Manners. 2024
Waite &“Schoolboy&” Hoyt&’s improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior,…
for no pay and a five-dollar bonus. After nearly having both his hands amputated and cavorting with men twice his age in the hardscrabble Minor Leagues, he somehow ended up the best pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1920s. Based on a trove of Hoyt&’s writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend&’s untold story, entirely in Hoyt&’s own words. Schoolboy dives straight into early twentieth-century America and the birth of modern-day baseball, as well as Hoyt&’s defining conflict: Should he have pursued something more respectable than being the best pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, arguably the greatest baseball team of all time? Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 ⅔ innings—and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth. He also became a vaudeville star who swapped dirty jokes with Mae West and drank champagne with Al Capone, a philosophizer who bonded with Lou Gehrig over the meaning of life, and a funeral director who left a body chilling in his trunk while pitching an afternoon game at Yankee Stadium. Hoyt shares his thoughts on famous moments in the golden age of baseball history; assesses baseball legends, including Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, and Pete Rose; and describes the strategies of baseball managers John McGraw, Miller Huggins, and Connie Mack. He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed—and didn&’t—over his lifetime. After retiring from baseball at thirty-eight and coming to terms with his alcoholism, Hoyt found some happiness as a family man and a beloved, pioneering Cincinnati Reds radio sportscaster with a Websterian vocabulary spiked with a Brooklyn accent. When Hoyt died in 1984 his foremost legacy may have been as a raconteur who punctuated his life story with awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping anecdotes. In Schoolboy he never flinches from an unsparing account of his remarkable and paradoxical eighty-four-year odyssey.Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize
Par Jerry Grillo. 2024
Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball&’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny…
Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended tour of the expansive St. Louis Cardinals Minor League system. Mize then spent fifteen seasons terrorizing Major League pitchers as a member of those Cardinals, the New York Giants of Mel Ott and Leo Durocher, and finally with the New York Yankees, who won a record five straight World Series with Mize as their ace in the hole—the best pinch hitter in the American League. Few hitters have combined such meticulous bat control with brute power the way Mize did. Mize was a line-drive hitter who rarely struck out and also hit for distance, to all fields, and usually for a high average. Nicknamed the Big Cat, &“nobody had a better, smoother, easier swing than John,&” said Cardinals teammate Don Gutteridge. &“It was picture perfect.&” Tabbed as a can&’t-miss Hall of Famer, then all but forgotten, Mize spent twenty-eight years waiting for the call from Cooperstown before he was finally inducted in 1981, delighting fans with his straightforward commentary and sly sense of humor during a memorable induction speech. From the backroads of the Minor Leagues to the sunny Caribbean, where he played alongside the best Black and Latin players as a twenty-one-year-old, and to the Major Leagues, where he became a ten-time All-Star, home run champion, and World Series hero, Mize forged a memorable trail along baseball&’s landscape. This is the first complete biography of the Big Cat.The Fenway Effect: A Cultural History of the Boston Red Sox
Par David Krell. 2024
To be a part of Red Sox Nation is to be a hopeful romantic who neither betrays loyalty nor surrenders…
hope in the direst of circumstances. From Bangor to Back Bay, New Englanders endure in baseball matters. And life. The team&’s history has intersected with the history of Boston and well beyond it, through the Curse of the Bambino, the military service of Ted Williams during World War II, and the Boston Marathon bombing. The Fenway Effect chronicles these stories and others that have built the incredible saga of the Boston Red Sox. How did Cheers depict the passion of Boston&’s sports fans? Why is Narragansett beer so important to New England? What&’s the architectural impact of The Teammates—the statue of Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, Ted Williams, and Dom DiMaggio outside Fenway Park? What did the Boston press really think about Red Sox owner Harry Frazee selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees? What was the origin of Fenway Park&’s predecessor—Huntington Avenue Grounds? Even Yankees fans will tip their caps to the rich impact of the Red Sox on music, movies, branding, broadcasting, and more. Plus, there&’s a chapter focusing on the oral history of Red Sox fans, some of whom share here anecdotes that are funny, insightful, and heartwarming.Baseball Memories & Dreams: Reflections on the National Pastime from the Baseball Hall of Fame
Par National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc.. 2022
Discover What Made Baseball America’s Pastime #1 New Release in Baseball StatisticsBaseball Memories & Dreams celebrates the iconic moments, heroes, and trends…
that define baseball for its millions of fans This compendium of baseball writing covers it all—recollections of Hall of Famers and narratives from top baseball writers; stories on the rich iconography and history of the game across the full diversity of players, teams, and leagues; and reflections on the way America’s pastime has shaped our culture. Selected from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s member magazine, Baseball Memories & Dreams brings to life the best of baseball. More than just a baseball history book. Revel in America’s pastime and explore baseball history in articles written by notable sports writers, Hall of Famers, media personalities, and the Hall’s own expert historians. Baseball Memories & Dreams showcases the best of baseball facts, baseball biographies, and baseball media personalities into a robust catalogue of known and unknown information.Get the inside scoop into the lives of baseball giants like Johnny Bench, Peter Gammons, John Grisham, Tim Kurkjian, Ichiro Suzuki, Joe Torre, and more. From their stories, gain insight into each individual life to see just what trials and hardships made these men into the best baseball players in history. With Baseball Memories & Dreams in hand, you’ll see America’s pastime in a new light.Inside, you’ll find over 70 articles on America’s pastime, highlighting:Baseball facts, baseball biographies, stats, and artifacts—and the history and lore behind themCoverage of Black, Hispanic, and woman playersStories about baseball’s great players, teams, and rivalries, as well as the moments that trace the game’s wide-ranging history If you enjoy baseball books—best sellers like The Baseball 100, Cloudbuster Nine, or Talking to GOATS—you’ll love Baseball Memories & Dreams.I Live for This!: Baseball's Last True Believer
Par Bill Plaschke, Tommy Lasorda. 2009
An award-winning sportswriter teams up with LA Dodgers manager and Hall of Famer Tommy Lasorda to reveal the secrets of…
his unlikely success. Tommy Lasorda is baseball's true immortal and one of its larger than life figures. A former pitcher who was overshadowed by Sandy Koufax, Lasorda went on to a Hall of Fame career as a manager with one of baseball's most storied franchises. His teams won two World Series, four National League pennants, and eight division titles. He was twice named National League manager of the year and he also led the United States baseball team to the gold medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics. In I Live for This! award-winning sportswriter Bill Plaschke shows us one of baseball's last living legends as we've never seen him before, revealing the man behind the myth, the secrets to his amazing, unlikely success, and his unvarnished opinions on the state of the game. Bravely and brilliantly, I Live for This! dissects the personality to give us the person. By the end we&’re left with an indelible portrait of a legend that, if Tommy Lasorda has anything to say about it, we won&’t ever forget.