Sports & Recreation : Baseball

Offering tips for every level of player, from little league to the major leagues, this guide not only shows players how to hit but also shows parents and coaches how to teach hitting. Presenting techniques drawn from the author's years of experience as a coach and a Major League baseball player, the manual provides an in-depth description of the drills, habits, and lessons critical to a successful future. In addition to providing highly detailed instruction on the fundamentals, the guide reveals how to develop a good mental approach and confidence in every hitter. more...

Price: $15.95

The thrilling inside story behind a crucial chapter in Red Sox lore and a turbulent time in a troubled city. George Steinbrenner called it the greatest game in the history of American sports. On a bright October day in 1978, the Boston Red Sox met the New York Yankees for an epic playoff game that would send one team to the World Series, and render the other cursed for almost a quarter of a century. In this book, award-winning sports columnist Bill Reynolds masterfully tells the story of the tea more...

Price: $24.95

An inside look at three of baseball's best pitchers through the course of the 2004 season The Oakland As, the subject of last year's bestselling Moneyball by Michael Lewis, are home to three of baseball's top pitchers. more...

Price: $24.95

It was an epic downfall. In twenty-four seasons pitcher Roger Clemens put together one of the greatest careers baseball has ever seen. Seven Cy Young Awards, two World Series championships, and 354 victories made him a lock for the Hall of Fame. But on December 13, 2007, the Mitchell Report laid waste to all that. more...

Price: $26.95

Millions of American baseball fans know, with absolute certainty, that umpires are simply overpaid galoots who are doing an easy job badly. Millions of American baseball fans are wrong.As They See 'Em is an insider's look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America's favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true. Bruce Weber, a New York Times reporter, not only interviewed dozens of professional umpires but entered their world, trained to become an umpire, and then spent a season working games from Little League to big league spring training.As They See 'Em is Weber's entertaining account of this experience as well as a lively exploration of what amounts to an eccentric secret society, with its own customs, its own rituals, its own colorful vocabulary. (Know what a "whacker" is? A "pole bender"? "Rat cheese"? Think you could "strap it on" or "take the stick"?) He explains the arcane set of rules by which umps work and details the exasperating, tortuous path that allows only a select few to graduate from the minor leagues to the majors. He describes what it's like to work in a ballpark where not only the fans but the players, the managers and coaches, the announcers, the team owners, and even the league presidents, resent them -- and vice versa. And he asks, quite sensibly, why anyone would do a job that offers the chance to earn only blame and never credit.Weber reveals how umps are tutored to work behind the plate, what they learn to watch for on the bases, and how proper positioning for every imaginable situation on the field is drilled into them. He describes how they're counseled to respond -- or not -- to managers who are screaming at them from inches away with purposeful inanity, and tells us exactly which "magic" words result in an automatic ejection. Writing w more...

Price: $26.00