Author: Stacey May Fowles
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771038712
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
National Bestseller A Globe and Mail Best Book A National Post Best Book of the Year A passionate ode to baseball, its culture, and its community, which both celebrates and challenges the game – and reminds us why it really matters. For Stacey May Fowles, the game of baseball is one of "long pauses punctuated by tiny miracles." In this entertaining and thoughtful book, Fowles gives us a refreshingly candid and personal perspective on subjects ranging from bat flips to bandwagoners, from the romance of spring training to the politics of booing, from the necessity of taking a hard look at players' injuries and mental health issues to finding solace at the ballpark. Fowles confronts head-on the stereotype that female fans lack real knowledge about the game, and also calls out the "boys will be boys" attitude and its implications both on and off the field. She also shares her reverence for the no-hitter, her memories of going to the ballpark with her dad, and the challenges of falling in love with someone who didn't like baseball. Throughout the book, she offers exhilarating snapshots of the Toronto Blue Jays' 2015 and 2016 seasons, and gathers a selection of inspiring "baseball life advice" quotes from players and others that provide unexpected insight into how we could all live better lives. With remarkable verve, intelligence, and an unabashed enthusiasm, Fowles explores how we can use the lens of baseball to examine who we are. And in this passionate ode to the game, its culture, and its community, she reminds us that although baseball can break your heart, it will always find a way to make it whole again.
Author: Dan Blewett
Publisher: Dan Blewett
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
What Does it Take to Have a Great Baseball Career? You daydream about one day seeing your face on a baseball card. You live for pressure and the green grass beneath your cleats. But as your career progresses, the game gets harder. You slump and struggle. You get injured and overlooked. Your confidence plummets. Can you keep improving? Are your big dreams still within reach? A Handbook for the Dedicated Player Clean Your Cleats is filled with stories and advice learned the hard way, over a long career on the diamond. Develop better routines and improve your consistency. Handle the ups and downs with confidence and resolve. Strengthen relationships with teammates, parents and coaches. Learn mindset strategies to become the best version of you. Dan Blewett, in this practical guide, helps players understand all the little things in baseball that make a huge difference over a long career. Why clean your cleats? Because every detail matters.
Author: Augie Garrido
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439186944
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A successful college baseball coach recounts his transition from a fear-based life to a rewarding career of passionate motivation, outlining the lessons he has learned about opportunity, courage, and failure.
Author: John Sexton
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101609737
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.
Author: Shawn Green
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439191204
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Major League All-Star Green shares how his baseball career has taught him to live life being fully present in every moment.
Author: Dirk Hayhurst
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 0806534877
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
"The best writer in a baseball uniform." --Tyler Kepner, The New York Times After nearly a decade in the minors, Dirk Hayhurst defied the odds to climb onto the pitcher's mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Newly married, with a big league paycheck and a brand new house, Hayhurst was ready for a great season in the Bigs. Then fate delivered a crushing hit. Hayhurst blew out his pitching shoulder in an insane off-season workout program. After surgery, rehab, and more rehab, his major-league dreams seemed more distant than ever. From there things got worse, weirder, and funnier. In a crazy world of injured athletes, autograph-seeking nuns, angry wrestlers, and trainers with a taste for torture, Hayhurst learned lessons about the game--and himself--that were not in any rulebook. Honest, soul'searching, insightful, hilarious, and moving, Dirk Hayhurst's latest memoir is an indisputable baseball classic. Praise for The Bullpen Gospels and Out of My League "Dirk Hayhurst writes about baseball in a unique way. Observant, insightful, human, and hilarious." --Bob Costas "A fun read. . .This book shows why baseball is so often used as a metaphor for life." --Keith Olbermann "Entertaining and engaging. . .reminiscent of Jim Bouton's Ball Four." --Booklist "A rare gem of a baseball book." --Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated "A humorous, candid, and insightful memoir of Hayhurst's rookie season in the majors. . .Grade: Home Run." --Cleveland Plain Dealer
Author: Bob Feller
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 9780809298433
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Bob Feller is a true baseball icon. Along with such legends as Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Ted Williams, he is recognized as one of the greatest players of the twentieth century. In fact, he was voted the greatest right-handed pitcher in the history of baseball. But Bob Feller is known for his quick wit as much as for his fastball. In Bob Feller's Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom, the sharp-tongued Hall of Famer offers philosophical, anecdotal, and candid reflections on baseball and everyday American life. In the process he introduces us to such legends as Jackie Robinson, Ralph Kiner, and Joe DiMaggio the way he knew them--as baseball rivals, fellow sportsmen, and good friends. Bob Feller's Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom is a treasure trove of down-to-earth advice for baseball fans of any generation.
Author: Chad Harbach
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316192163
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Kansas City Star, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others. "First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." --Jonathan Franzen
Author: Dan Blewett
Publisher: Dan Blewett
ISBN: 1727813936
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Dear Baseball Gods, Why didn't you look out for him? Didn't he deserve better? He hustled, competed, and played the game the right way. What happened wasn't fair. A Second Comeback Dan sat by a tree, staring at the ground trying to decide what he would do next. The doctor had just explained that everything he worked for was now ruined. A second Tommy John surgery? Does anyone come back from that? Is my career over? Is this it? A Winding Road to the Top As a walk-on in college, Dan had to earn everything. He pitched on three hours sleep, lived in the clubhouse, played for a team that collapsed mid-season, and endured more arm pain than any kid should. A Way to Move On When finally forced to hang up his cleats, Dan looked in the mirror and didn't recognize the man peering back. If no longer a ballplayer...what would he do? What had been the point of it all? Who was he? The Deeper Side of Life as an Athlete In this philosophical memoir, written as a series of letters, you'll learn that the pinstripes don't wash off so easily.
Author: Jonah Keri
Publisher: ESPN
ISBN: 0345517652
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
What happens when three financial industry whiz kids and certified baseball nuts take over an ailing major league franchise and implement the same strategies that fueled their success on Wall Street? In the case of the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays, an American League championship happens—the culmination of one of the greatest turnarounds in baseball history. In The Extra 2%, financial journalist and sportswriter Jonah Keri chronicles the remarkable story of one team’s Cinderella journey from divisional doormat to World Series contender. When former Goldman Sachs colleagues Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman assumed control of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005, it looked as if they were buying the baseball equivalent of a penny stock. But the incoming regime came armed with a master plan: to leverage their skill at trading, valuation, and management to build a model twenty-first-century franchise that could compete with their bigger, stronger, richer rivals—and prevail. Together with “boy genius” general manager Andrew Friedman, the new Rays owners jettisoned the old ways of doing things, substituting their own innovative ideas about employee development, marketing and public relations, and personnel management. They exorcized the “devil” from the team’s nickname, developed metrics that let them take advantage of undervalued aspects of the game, like defense, and hired a forward-thinking field manager as dedicated to unconventional strategy as they were. By quantifying the game’s intangibles—that extra 2% that separates a winning organization from a losing one—they were able to deliver to Tampa Bay something that Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” had never brought to Oakland: an American League pennant. A book about what happens when you apply your business skills to your life’s passion, The Extra 2% is an informative and entertaining case study for any organization that wants to go from worst to first.
