The Home Run Kings

The Home Run Kings PDF Author: Clare Gault
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780590455305
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
A brief biography emphasizing the careers of the two baseball players famous for their record number of home runs.

The Home Run Kings

The Home Run Kings PDF Author: Clare Gault
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780590455305
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Get Book Here

Book Description
A brief biography emphasizing the careers of the two baseball players famous for their record number of home runs.

Swing Kings

Swing Kings PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062872125
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
"The best baseball book I’ve read in years." — Sam Walker • "An exhilarating story of innovation." — Ben Reiter • "Swing Kings feels like a spiritual successor to Moneyball." — Baseball Prospectus From the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped them usher the game into a new age. We are in a historic era for the home run. The 2019 season saw the most homers ever, obliterating a record set just two years before. It is a shift that has transformed the way the game is played, contributing to more strikeouts, longer games, and what feels like the logical conclusion of the analytics era. In Swing Kings, Wall Street Journal national baseball writer Jared Diamond reveals that the secret behind this unprecedented shift isn’t steroids or the stitching of the baseballs, it’s the most elemental explanation of all: the swing. In this lively narrative romp, he tracks a group of baseball’s biggest stars—including Aaron Judge, J.D. Martinez, and Justin Turner—who remade their swings under the tutelage of a band of renegade coaches, and remade the game in the process. These coaches, many of them baseball washouts who have reinvented themselves as swing gurus, for years were one of the game’s best-kept secrets. Among their ranks are a swimming pool contractor, the owner of a billiards hall, and an ex-hippie whose swing insights draw from surfing and the technique of Japanese samurai. Now, as Diamond artfully charts, this motley cast has moved from the baseball margins to its center of power. They are changing the way hitting is taught to players of all ages, and major league clubs are scrambling for their services, hiring them in record numbers as coaches and consultants. And Diamond himself, whose baseball career ended in high school, enlists the tutelage of each swing coach he profiles, with an aim toward starring in the annual Boston-New York media game at Yankee Stadium. Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamond has written a masterful chronicle of America’s pastime at the crossroads.

Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues PDF Author: John B. Holway
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486136477
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The foremost historian of the "blackball" era spent nearly 10 years researching this acclaimed oral history, interviewing 17 outstanding players including Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, and Willie Wells. Over 80 vintage photographs.

Handsome Ransom Jackson

Handsome Ransom Jackson PDF Author: Ransom Jackson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442261552
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Millions of America’s youth dream of playing major league baseball or in a college bowl game on New Year’s Day. Growing up in Arkansas during the Great Depression, Ransom Jackson had no idea that one day he would not only play in back-to-back Cotton Bowls for two different colleges—the first and only player to do so—but that he would also become known as “Handsome Ransom,” all-star third baseman for the Chicago Cubs. He was in Chicago in 1953 when Ernie Banks became the first African American to play for the Cubs. He was in Brooklyn in 1956, the year Jackie Robinson retired. In 1957, Jackson was the last Brooklyn player to hit a home run before the team moved to LA. Jackson’s major league career spanned the entire decade of the 1950s, a time when the landscape of baseball changed dramatically as teams moved to new cities, built new stadiums, and integrated their rosters. Handsome Ransom Jackson: Accidental Big Leaguer is an autobiographical account of Jackson’s fascinating journey from his boyhood days in Arkansas to playing in the major leagues, where many of his teammates were future Hall of Famers. It’s a fun and nostalgic visit to the past, with Jackson sharing such memories as spring training with the Cubs on Catalina Island, befriending a Mafia boss in Massachusetts, batting behind Hank Sauer and getting knocked down by pitchers retaliating for Sauer’s home runs, rooming with Don Drysdale on an historic baseball tour of Japan, and sitting in the dugout in LA with Dodger teammates looking for movie stars in the stands. In addition, Jackson remembers being brought to Brooklyn to take over third base for the aging Jackie Robinson, and quickly discovering that nobody replaces a legend like Jackie. While many of the players from the 1950s are no longer with us, Jackson’s invaluable and timeless stories celebrate the greatness of the game and preserve a sliver of history from the heart of the golden age of baseball. Featuring many never-before-published photographs from Ransom Jackson’s personal collection, including photos of Dodger and Cub greats Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, Ralph Kiner, and Ernie Banks, Handsome Ransom Jackson will take the reader back to an era when baseball was truly the national pastime.

The Cup of Coffee Club

The Cup of Coffee Club PDF Author: Jacob Kornhauser
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538130823
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
“This is one of the very best baseball books in years.” Booklist, Starred Review Reaching the major leagues is a pipe dream for most young baseball players in America. Very few ever get to live it out. A select number of those players face the elation and frustration of getting to play in just one major league game. The Cup of Coffee Club: 11 Players and Their Brush with Baseball History tells the unique stories of eleven of these players. It details their struggles to reach the major leagues, their one moment in the limelight, and their struggles to get back. They include a former Major League Baseball manager, the son of a Baseball Hall of Famer, and two different brothers of Hall of Famers. Exclusive interviews with each of the players provide insight into what that single seminal moment meant and how they dealt with the blow of never making another major league appearance again. Spanning half a century of baseball, each player’s journey to Major League Baseball is distinct, as is each of their responses to having played in just a single game. The Cup of Coffee Club shares their unique perspectives, providing a better understanding of just how special each major league game can be.

Good Kings Bad Kings

Good Kings Bad Kings PDF Author: Susan Nussbaum
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616203366
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Bellwether Award winner Susan Nussbaum’s powerful novel invites us into the lives of a group of typical teenagers—alienated, funny, yearning for autonomy—except that they live in an institution for juveniles with disabilities. This unfamiliar, isolated landscape is much the same as the world outside: friendships are forged, trust is built, love affairs are kindled, and rules are broken. But those who call it home have little or no control over their fate. Good Kings Bad Kings challenges our definitions of what it means to be disabled in a story told with remarkable authenticity and in voices that resound with humor and spirit.

Home Run King

Home Run King PDF Author: Stella
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781985580848
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
My life was what country songs are made of: my Granny died, my girlfriend broke up with me, I knocked up her cousin, and I was inducted into the Major League Hall of Fame. Yup...just like every country song I've ever heard. But let me start over... My name is Gage Nix. That's all you need to know. Actually, there's a lot more to Gage than meets the eye. My name's Katie Crisp, and I had a front row seat and the inside scoop. In a moment of grief and desperation, I allowed the Home Run King to...well, hit a home run on my diamond. He not only knocked it out of the park, but he also knocked me up. Raising two babies-the one I was carrying, and Gage-wasn't what I signed up for. But he gave me no choice. I only wish I hadn't waited until the end of the season to see that he was my MVP. Oh, and the only hall of fame he's ever been inducted into is his own.

Kings of the Road

Kings of the Road PDF Author: Cameron Stracher
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054777396X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
For fans of The Perfect Mile and Born to Run, a riveting, three-pronged narrative about the golden era of running in America--the 1970s--as seen through the fascinating lives and careers of running greats, Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar.

The Way of Baseball

The Way of Baseball PDF 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.

The Sport of Kings

The Sport of Kings PDF Author: C. E. Morgan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715173
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction • A Recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction • A Finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence • One of New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Book Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly • GQ • The New York Times (Selected by Dwight Garner) • NPR • The Wall Street Journal • San Francisco Chronicle • Refinery29 • Booklist • Kirkus Reviews • Commonweal Magazine "In its poetic splendor and moral seriousness, The Sport of Kings bears the traces of Faulkner, Morrison, and McCarthy. . . . It is a contemporary masterpiece."—San Francisco Chronicle Hailed by The New Yorker for its “remarkable achievements,” The Sport of Kings is an American tale centered on a horse and two families: one white, a Southern dynasty whose forefathers were among the founders of Kentucky; the other African-American, the descendants of their slaves. It is a dauntless narrative that stretches from the fields of the Virginia piedmont to the abundant pastures of the Bluegrass, and across the dark waters of the Ohio River; from the final shots of the Revolutionary War to the resounding clang of the starting bell at Churchill Downs. As C. E. Morgan unspools a fabric of shared histories, past and present converge in a Thoroughbred named Hellsmouth, heir to Secretariat and a contender for the Triple Crown. Newly confronted with one another in the quest for victory, the two families must face the consequences of their ambitions, as each is driven---and haunted---by the same, enduring question: How far away from your father can you run? A sweeping narrative of wealth and poverty, racism and rage, The Sport of Kings is an unflinching portrait of lives cast in the shadow of slavery and a moral epic for our time.