Character Is Not a Statistic: the Legacy and Wisdom of Baseball's Godfather Scout Bill Lajoie

Character Is Not a Statistic: the Legacy and Wisdom of Baseball's Godfather Scout Bill Lajoie PDF Author: Bill Lajoie
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1462825486
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Bill Lajoie just had it. When it came to drafting ballplayers and building a World Series club, few in baseball history can match his extraordinary success. The lessons of Lajoies illustrious career and the brilliance of his philosophy are put to print in Character is Not a Statistic. After a playing career that fell achingly short of the major leagues, Lajoie returned to Detroit to become a teacher in the mid-1960s. But his unyielding passion for baseball and desire to atone for a broken dream pulled him back to the game as a scout. From there, hed go on to build World Series Championships from scratch by finding players who possessed the very character he lacked as a young athlete. Starting as an area scout for the Cincinnati Reds in 1965, Lajoie later moved up the ladder with the Detroit Tigers and was the architect and general manager of their 1984 World Series crowning. Lajoie would then be instrumental as an assistant GM for two more franchises who dominated their decades with championships and titles; the 1990s Atlanta Braves and the 2000s Boston Red Sox. Perhaps no one alive has scouted more baseball over the last 50 years or has better stories to tell about finding the greats. Though the modern era has seen the depersonalization of scouting via statistics and radar gun readings, Lajoie was immensely successful through five decades by emphasizing what a player had inside him. His belief in a players humanity and character persists to this day. This book is not only a biography, but a collection of great baseball stories and a manual for the next generation of fans and scouts alike. Lajoie tackles such controversial issues as the Moneyball movement, the importance of a strong manager, scouting for makeup, making trades, preventing pitching injuries, running a farm system, and ranking both the best general managers and scouting directors of the modern era.

Baseball's Endangered Species

Baseball's Endangered Species PDF Author: Lee Lowenfish
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496214811
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
"A comprehensive look at professional baseball scouting from post WWII to the present day"--

Numbers Don't Lie: Tigers

Numbers Don't Lie: Tigers PDF Author: Danny Knobler
Publisher: Triumph Books
ISBN: 1633192091
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Tigers fans have witnessed improbable feats, extraordinary achievements, and unmatched performances during the team's 100-plus seasons. Numbers Don't Lie: Behind the Biggest Numbers in Tigers History details the numbers every Tigers fan—from the rookie attending his first game at Comerica Park to the veteran who recalls Denny McLain's days on the mound—should know. Author Danny Knobler tells the stories behind the most memorable moments and achievements in Tigers history, including 2: the number of no-hitters Justin Verlander has in his career; .366: Ty Cobb's career batting average, the highest in MLB history; and 1,918: the number of games played together by Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker as a record-setting, double-play combination. Featuring over 50 entries that span more than a century of Tigers magic, this fan book is an engaging, unique look back at the history of one of baseball's most entertaining franchises.

Character Is Not a Statistic: the Legacy and Wisdom of Baseball's Godfather Scout Bill Lajoie

Character Is Not a Statistic: the Legacy and Wisdom of Baseball's Godfather Scout Bill Lajoie PDF Author: Bill Lajoie
Publisher: Xlibris US
ISBN: 9781462825486
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Bill Lajoie just had it. When it came to drafting ballplayers and building a World Series club, few in baseball history can match his extraordinary success. The lessons of Lajoies illustrious career and the brilliance of his philosophy are put to print in Character is Not a Statistic. After a playing career that fell achingly short of the major leagues, Lajoie returned to Detroit to become a teacher in the mid-1960s. But his unyielding passion for baseball and desire to atone for a broken dream pulled him back to the game as a scout. From there, hed go on to build World Series Championships from scratch by finding players who possessed the very character he lacked as a young athlete. Starting as an area scout for the Cincinnati Reds in 1965, Lajoie later moved up the ladder with the Detroit Tigers and was the architect and general manager of their 1984 World Series crowning. Lajoie would then be instrumental as an assistant GM for two more franchises who dominated their decades with championships and titles; the 1990s Atlanta Braves and the 2000s Boston Red Sox. Perhaps no one alive has scouted more baseball over the last 50 years or has better stories to tell about finding the greats. Though the modern era has seen the depersonalization of scouting via statistics and radar gun readings, Lajoie was immensely successful through five decades by emphasizing what a player had inside him. His belief in a players humanity and character persists to this day. This book is not only a biography, but a collection of great baseball stories and a manual for the next generation of fans and scouts alike. Lajoie tackles such controversial issues as the Moneyball movement, the importance of a strong manager, scouting for makeup, making trades, preventing pitching injuries, running a farm system, and ranking both the best general managers and scouting directors of the modern era.

Headed Home

Headed Home PDF Author: Glenn Wilson
Publisher: Lucid Books
ISBN: 1935909312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Wilson, a first-round draft pick of the Detroit Tigers in 1980, played 10 seasons in Major League Baseball. Injuries and disappointment shortened his career, and when investments soured causing business ventures to fail, he found himself living in pain and misery. In that pain, he came to know what it meant to truly have a relationship with God.

Curse of the Black Bambino

Curse of the Black Bambino PDF Author: Anup Sinha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615900148
Category : African American athletes
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Curse of the Black Bambino looks at the reasons why Black athletes are choosing to play football and basketball over baseball and what can be done to bring African-American athletes back to the game of baseball.

Unruly Media

Unruly Media PDF Author: Carol Vernallis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199767009
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Unruly Media is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across media and platform. It includes new theoretical models and close readings of current media as well as the oeuvre of popular and influential directors.

The Norton Reader

The Norton Reader PDF Author: Melissa A. Goldthwaite
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393617412
Category : College readers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATE. The classic reader that has introduced millions of students to the essay as a genre--available in a concise edition.

The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych

The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych PDF Author: Doug Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250004926
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Lanky, mop-topped, and nicknamed for his resemblance to Big Bird on Sesame Street, Fidrych exploded onto the national stage during the Bicentennial summer as a rookie with the Detroit Tigers. He won over fans nationwide with his wildly endearing antics, but quickly emerged as one of the best pitchers in the game. Fidrych was named starting pitcher in the All-Star Game as a rookie and became the first athlete to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Wilson recounts Fidrych's meteoric rise, his heartbreaking fall after a torn knee ligament and then rotator cuff, and captures Fidrych's post-baseball life to his death in a freak accident in 2009.

Mr Playboy

Mr Playboy PDF Author: Steven Watts
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 0470501359
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
The real Hugh Hefner-the extraordinary inside story of an American icon "Riveting... Watts packs in plenty of gasp-inducing passages."-Newark Star Ledger "Like it or not, Hugh Hefner has affected all of us, so I treasured learning about how and why in the sober biography."-Chicago Sun Times "This is a fun book. How could it not be? Watts aims to give a full account of the man, his magazine and their place in social history. Playboy is no longer the cultural force it used to be, but it made a stamp on society."-Associated Press "In Steven Watts' exhaustive, illuminating biography Mr. Playboy, Hefner's ideal for living -- marked by his allegiances to Tarzan, Freud, Pepsi-Cola and jazz -- proves to be a kind of gloss on the Protestant work ethic."-Los Angeles TimesGorgeous young women in revealing poses; extravagant mansion parties packed with celebrities; a hot-tub grotto, elegant smoking jackets, and round rotating beds; the hedonistic pursuit of uninhibited sex. Put these images together and a single name springs to mind-Hugh Hefner. From his spectacular launch of Playboy magazine and the dizzying expansion of his leisure empire to his recent television hit The Girls Next Door, the publisher has attracted public attention and controversy for decades. But how did a man who is at once socially astute and morally unconventional, part Bill Gates and part Casanova, also evolve into a figure at the forefront of cultural change?In Mr. Playboy, historian and biographer Steven Watts argues that, in the process of becoming fabulously wealthy and famous, Hefner has profoundly altered American life and values. Granted unprecedented access to the man and his enterprise, Watts traces Hef's life and career from his midwestern, Methodist upbringing and the first publication of Playboy in 1953 through the turbulent sixties, self-indulgent seventies, reactionary eighties, and traditionalist nineties, up to the present. He reveals that Hefner, from the beginning, believed he could overturn social norms and take America with him.This fascinating portrait illustrates four ways in which Hefner and Playboy stood at the center of several cultural upheavals that remade the postwar United States. The publisher played a crucial role in the sexual revolution that upended traditional notions of behavior and expectation regarding sex. He emerged as one of the most influential advocates of a rapidly developing consumer culture, flooding Playboy readers with images of material abundance and a leisurely lifestyle. He proved instrumental-with his influential magazine, syndicated television shows, fashionable nightclubs, swanky resorts, and movie and musical projects-in making popular culture into a dominant force in many people's lives. Ironically, Hefner also became a controversial force in the movement for women's rights. Although advocating women's sexual freedom and their liberation from traditional family constraints, the publisher became a whipping boy for feminists who viewed him as a prophet for a new kind of male domination.Throughout, Watts offers singular insights into the real man behind the flamboyant public persona. He shows Hefner's personal dichotomies-the pleasure seeker and the workaholic, the consort of countless Playmates and the genuine romantic, the family man and the Gatsby-like host of lavish parties at his Chicago and Los Angeles mansions who enjoys well-publicized affairs with numerous Playmates, the fan of life's simple pleasures who hobnobs with the Hollywood elite.Punctuated throughout with descriptions and anecdotes of life at the Playboy Mansions, Mr. Playboy tells the compelling and uniquely American story of how one person with a provocative idea, a finger on the pulse of popular opinion, and a passion for his work altered the course of modern history. Spans from Hefner's childhood to the launch of Playboy magazine and the expansion of the Playboy empire to the present Puts Hefner's life and work into the cultural context of American life from the mid-twentieth-century onwards Contains over 50 B/W and color photos, including an actual fold-out centerfold