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Baseball is much more than the national pastime. It has become an emblem of America itself. From its initial popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, the game has reflected national values and beliefs and promoted what it means to be an American. Stories abound that illustrate baseball's significance in eradicating racial barriers, bringing neighborhoods together, building civic pride, and creating on the field of play an instructive civics lesson for immigrants on the national character. In A People's History of Baseball, Mitchell Nathanson probes the less well-known but no less meaningful other side of baseball: episodes not involving equality, patriotism, heroism, and virtuous capitalism...
Dick Allen is considered by some to be the best baseball player not in the Hall of Fame and by others to be the game's most destructive and divisive force—ever. God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen unveils the strange and maddening career of a man who fulfilled and frustrated expectations all at once.
"Bouton examines the remarkable life of a player and an author who forever changed the way we view not only sports books but professional sports as a whole"--
Each year, thousands of men and women make a decision that will ultimately change not only the course but the quality of the rest of their lives: they decide to become lawyers. From the moment that thick congratulatory envelope arrives, accepting and welcoming them to law school, they begin their journey down a road they hope will lead them to a life of worth and personal satisfaction. Unfortunately, for most of them, this road leads only to misery and despair which oftentimes plummets to depths that eventually cause them to leave the practice of law or, more often, remain, resigned to spend their entire professional lives working for people they do not like and on issues for which they have...
In 2007, the Mitchell Report shocked traditionalists who were appalled that drugs had corrupted the "pure" game of baseball. Nathan Corzine rescues the story of baseball's relationship with drugs from the sepia-toned tyranny of such myths. In Team Chemistry , he reveals a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from the day the first pitch was thrown. Indeed, throughout the game's history, stars and scrubs alike partook of a pharmacopeia that helped them stay on the field and cope off of it: In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived "elixir" to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games. Sandy Koufax needed Codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch th...
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The decades between the late 1960s counterculture and the advent of steroid use in the late 1980s bought tumult to Major League Baseball. Dock Ellis (Pirates, Yankees) and Dick Allen (Phillies, Cardinals, Dodgers, White Sox) epitomized the era with recreational drug use (Ellis), labor strife (Allen), and the questioning of authority. Both men were Black Power advocates at a time when the movement was growing in baseball. In the 1970s and 1980s, Marvin Miller and the Major League Baseball Players Association fought numerous, mostly victorious battles with MLB and team owners. This book chronicles a turbulent period in baseball, and in American life, that led directly to the performance-enhancing drug era and the dramatically changed nature of the game.
In the spring of 1964, the Nankai Hawks of Japan’s Pacific League sent nineteen-year-old Masanori Murakami to the Class A Fresno Giants to improve his skills. To nearly everyone’s surprise, Murakami, known as Mashi, dominated the American hitters. With the San Francisco Giants caught in a close pennant race and desperate for a left-handed reliever, Masanori was called up to join the big league club, becoming the first Japanese player in the Major Leagues. Featuring pinpoint control, a devastating curveball, and a friendly smile, Mashi became the Giants’ top lefty reliever and one of the team’s most popular players—as well as a national hero in Japan. Not surprisingly, the Giants of...
Focusing on the ten most influential baseball books of all time, this volume explores how these landmark works changed the game itself and made waves in American society at large. Satchel Paige's Pitchin' Man informed the dialog surrounding integration. Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al changed the way Americans viewed their baseball heroes and influenced the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Bill James's Baseball Abstract transformed the way managers--including those in fields other than baseball--analyzed numbers. Pete Rose's My Story and My Prison Without Bars exposed and deepened a cultural divide that paved the way for Donald Trump.
On October 7, 1977, the Philadelphia Phillies lost a playoff game to the Dodgers, a game that began so hopefully and ended so disastrously that it has become known in Philadelphia simply as "Black Friday." As a season of rare hope and unity crashed to a painful end in a ten-minute sequence of bad plays, so too did the city's urban renaissance falter and an old sense of inferiority return. This ambitious examination of the relationship between the team and city delves deep into Philadelphia's social and baseball history to reveal how the disillusionment of Black Friday affected Philadelphia's self image and fans' relationship to the team they both love and love to hate.