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Three eras of baseball excellence are profiled in this history of the Oakland Athletics by respected columnist Glenn Dickey. From the Charles Finley years of the early 1970s—during which the A's won five straight divisional championships and three straight World Series—through the power years of Mark McGwire and José Canseco, to the “Moneyball” era of Billy Beane, this retrospective examines the characters and moments that contributed to the Oakland club's storied history. Fans of the A's will not want to miss out on this book that celebrates the glorious past of their favorite team and looks forward to a promising future.
San Diego Magazine gives readers the insider information they need to experience San Diego-from the best places to dine and travel to the politics and people that shape the region. This is the magazine for San Diegans with a need to know.
Meeting the Mets: A Quirky History of a Quirky Team is a volume one of a two-part retrospective on the history of the New York Mets, a team that is now in its fifty-second season of play. The author, Dr. Thomas A. Droleskey, attended over 1600 games at the Polo Grounds and William A. Shea Municipal Stadium between July 15, 1962, and July 16, 2002. While he has not attended games since that point for reasons that are described in the book, he was pretty visible in the stands as a very unofficial cheerleader for over a quarter of a century, known as "The Lone Ranger of Shea Stadium." Droleskey provides a personal retrospective on the origins of the Mets, highlighting some of the quirks of a quirky team, including memories of utterly meaningless games that might put a smile or two on the faces of those who have followed the team over the years. The books contains lots and lots of trivia about the Mets and baseball, interspersed with personal many bits of cultural trivia and history.
Baseball manager Larry Dierker chronicles the experiences he had during the five years he spent managing the Houston Astros.
Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco—the Bash Brothers—ushered in a new era of muscle-bound power hitters in baseball in the late 1980s. Suddenly balls were flying out of the parks like never before, and the rest of baseball stood up, took notice, and followed suit. Baseball’s bodybuilding revolution, with its resultant steroid infestation, was here to stay, and many experts today point to these two players as a large reason why. Author Dale Tafoya has interviewed more than 150 teammates, coaches, scouts, and friends who knew McGwire and Canseco during that era, including former A’s general manager Sandy Alderson, former team president Roy Eisenhardt, former commissioner Fay Vincent, Hall-o...
The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science is loaded with entertaining tales of both successful and misguided approaches to interpreting data, both grand successes and epic failures.
The bestselling annual baseball preview from the smartest analysts in the business Now in its 19th edition, the Baseball Prospectus annual shows once again how it became the industry leader: The 2014 edition includes key stat categories, more controversial player predictions, and the kind of wise, witty baseball commentary that makes this phone-book-thick tome worth reading cover to cover. Baseball Prospectus 2014 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with prescient PECOTA projections, which Sports Illustrated has called "perhaps the game's most accurate projection model." Still, stats are just numbers if you don't see the larger context, and Baseball Prospectus brings together an elit...
If an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball’s great umpire baiters, such as Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, and Dick Williams, while ejecting any number of the game’s elite—once tearing a hamstring in the process. He was the first Jewish umpire in American League history, and probably the first to eject his own father from the officials’ dressing room. But whatever Clark was doing—officiating at Nolan Ryan’s three hundredth win, Cal Ripken’s record breaker, or the “earthquake” World Series of 1989, or braving a labor dispute, an anti-Semitic tirade by a Cy Young Award winner, or a legal imbroglio—it makes for a good story. Called Out but Safe is Clark’s outspoken and often hilarious account of his life in baseball from umpire school through the highlights to the inglorious end of his stellar career. Not just a source of baseball history and lore, Clark’s book also affords a rare look at what life is like for someone who works for the Major Leagues’ other team.