I grew up a Yankee fan during the Mickey Mantle era, traveling to the Bronx in my uncleâs canary-yellow Chrysler Imperial. Those early experiences set me on a trajectory to want to play baseball every chance I got, starting with Little League and ending up on my high schoolâs varsity squad. Fortunately, my high school was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where my family had moved in 1962, the same year that the Yankees began playing their pre-season games in the city, which meant when I wasnât playing baseball at school, I was hanging around Ft. Lauderdale Stadium watching the Yankees. Yes, the Pinstripe Nation was in my blood.
If you want a close-up look at the players who made up the early Yankee teams, this is the book for you. In Amoreâs book youâll learn about some key Yankeesâ players: Wee Willie Keeler, Frank Chance (of Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance fame), Hal Chase, Roger Peckinpaugh, Frank âHome Runâ Baker, and, of course, George Herman âBabeâ Ruth, among many others who populated the early New York Yankee teams.
2018 marks 115 years since the inception of the New York Yankees--and what a 115-year period it's been! But how did the team that has since won a league-leading 27 world championships get started? In A Franchise on the Rise, veteran sportswriter Dom Amore takes readers back in time to the first twenty years of the team's existence, from 1903 to 1923, focusing on all the major players and events, including their first ten years as the Highlanders, their move to Yankee Stadium, and their subsequent first World Series in 1923. In doing so, Amore successfully finds the characters' ownâŚ
My
novels explore women whose contributions to culture have been relegated to the
footnotes of mainstream history books, and in few areas have women been more
overlooked than in sports. Because of the achievements of todayâs female
athletes, ranging from the many athletic opportunities available to our young
daughters to the professional success of women like Serena Williams, itâs easy
to think that progress for womenâs sports has come a long wayâand in many ways, it has, thanks to legislative protections like Title IXâbut these achievements reflect
over a centuryâs worth of sacrifice by many unheralded women athletes. Here are
five books that highlight this journey.
These days Gertrude Ederle is unfamiliar to many of us, but a century ago she was an athletic champion whose celebrity rivaled Babe Ruthâs. In 1926, two years after winning three medals at the Paris Olympics, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, an amazing feat of endurance and perseverance that took 14 hours and 37 minutes, a time almost two hours faster than the speediest of the five men who had gone before her. Along with recreating Ederleâs harrowing Channel journey in vivid detail, renowned sportswriter Glenn Stout infuses life back into Ederle and shows us why President Coolidge called her âAmericaâs Best Girl.â
The exhilarating true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, and inspire a "wave of confidence and emancipation" for women in sports (Parade).
By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She'd won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge remained: the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy's failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers believed: No woman could possibly accomplish suchâŚ
I have been motivated to be the best version of myself for as long as I can remember and that has included reading a ton of books, pushing my own limits on what I was capable of (Ironman triathlons and a cross-country bicycle ride), tapping into my own creativity as well as taking it to the next step and sharing what I have learned through my own books and TEDx presentation. I believe we have so much more inside of us than we realize and I love to share and see others reach their goals and dreams.
This book is wonderful. While it isnât your typical self-improvement book, reading it made me want to be a better person. Buck OâNeilâs attitude is amazing despite all of the hardships he endured. He is an inspiration to everyone. No matter where we are or when we are born, we are all "right on time,â and hopefully striving to serve a purpose for a greater good. A good attitude and lots of gratitude are so important for our self-awareness journey and Buck had it in truckloads. Please read this book.
From Babe Ruth to Bo Jackson, from Cool Papa Bell to Lou Brock, Buck O'Neil has seen it all. As a first baseman and then manager of the legendary Kansas City Monarchs, O'Neil witnessed the heyday of the Negro leagues and their ultimate demise. In I Was Right on Time, he charmingly recalls his days as a ballplayer and as an African-American in a racially divided country. Whether he's telling of his barnstorming days with the likes of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson or the day in 1962 when he became the first African-American coach in the major leagues, O'NeilâŚ
I have been a professional business writer with a keen interest in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey since the early 1960s. My life was literally changed on January 12, 1969, when the New York Jets shocked me and the world with their upset victory in Super Bowl III. For over 40 succeeding years, I was beyond curious about the under-publicized players on that Jets team (aside from Joe Namath) and what they experienced and felt that day and season. Iâm especially proud that the VP of Public Relations for that Jet team read and praised my book for bringing exposure to all âthe other guys.â
Babe Ruth's status as baseball's greatest all-around player (hitterâ714 home runs, 342 batting average, a . 474 on-base percentageâand pitcherâ94-46, 2.28 ERA, 147 Games Started, 107 CG, 17 Shutouts) remains cemented among historians (until Shohei Ohtani potentially proves himself the Babe's equal over time).
Creamer's book overflows with anecdotes about the many memorable moments in Ruth's gaudy career.
In The Big Bam Montville peels back the onion of legend and apocryphal stories to tell us the story â warts and booze and babes and all â of one of the most important figures of the 20th century... not just in sports, but in America.
This book is more than just the stories or the anecdotes. This book is a joy because of the way Montville writes. He is lyrical and poetic without being syrupy. Honest and probing without being cruel. When I grow up, I want to write like Leigh Montville.
He was the Sultan of Swat. The Caliph of Clout. The Wizard of Whack. The Bambino. And simply, to his teammates, the Big Bam.
Babe Ruth was more than baseballâs original superstar. For eighty-five years, he has remained the sportâs reigning titan. He has been named Athlete of the Century . . . more than once. But who was this large, loud, enigmatic man? Why is so little known about his childhood, his private life, and his inner thoughts? In The Big Bam, Leigh Montville, whose recent New York Times bestselling biography of Ted Williams garnered glowing reviewsâŚ
I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseballâs efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
Peterson was a magazine writer in the 1960s who became curious about those Black baseball teams he saw play in the Pennsylvania town where he grew up. He set out with his tape recorder to track down and interview many Negro League figures, and dove into library newspaper collections to find the facts to back up their reminiscences. First published in 1970 and still in print, this is the first comprehensive history of Black professional baseball, the history of which was in serious danger of being lost to modern memory when the Negro Leagues were put out of business in the 1950s following Major League integration. Many of us who write about Black ball read this book first.
Early in the 1920s, the New York Giants sent a scout to watch a young Cuban play for Foster's American Giants, a baseball club in the Negro Leagues. During one at-bat this talented slugger lined a ball so hard that the rightfielder was able to play it off the top of the fence and throw Christobel Torrienti out at first base. The scout liked what he saw, but was disappointed in the player's appearance. "He was a light brown," recalled one of Torrienti's teammates, "and would have gone up to the major leagues, but he had real rough hair." SuchâŚ
I have been privileged to cover sports for the Boston Globe for the last 40-plus years. It is the best place in the country to do what I do. New England has tradition, smart readers, historic teams, and a great deal of success, especially in this century. As an author of 14 books, it's nice to bring some sports to the conversation on this site.
Anything by Hall of Fame baseball scribe Roger Angell could be on this list. The author saw Babe Ruth play and was still writing about baseball after turning 100 years old. Feel free to skip ahead and read "Not So Boston,'' the tale of the Red Sox's hideous loss to the Mets in the 1986 World Series.
Offering a unique perspective on the ins and out of baseball, the author examines in detail the job of the catcher, pitchers' strategies, and the intricate play of infielders, discussing the best players of the past five seasons and their greatest moments
I grew up a Yankee fan during the Mickey Mantle era, traveling to the Bronx in my uncleâs canary-yellow Chrysler Imperial. Those early experiences set me on a trajectory to want to play baseball every chance I got, starting with Little League and ending up on my high schoolâs varsity squad. Fortunately, my high school was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where my family had moved in 1962, the same year that the Yankees began playing their pre-season games in the city, which meant when I wasnât playing baseball at school, I was hanging around Ft. Lauderdale Stadium watching the Yankees. Yes, the Pinstripe Nation was in my blood.
Fischerâs Miracle Moments in New York Yankees History is aptly divided into five parts, the first of whichââBirth of a Dynastyââis the most relevant for the current topic. It covers the âHilltop Highlanderâ years (1903-1913), the Yankeesâ decade at the Polo Grounds as tenants of their arch-rival, the National Leagueâs New York Giants (1913-1922), the sale of the Yankees to Ruppert and Huston (1914-1915), the acquisition of Babe Ruth (1919-1920), and their move to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and their first World Series title (1923). But FischerâsMiracle Moments has much more to offer than these early days as it provides a panoramic view of the entire Yankeesâ franchise from 1903 to the present.
Throughout its illustrious history, the New York Yankees have produced some of the most memorable highlights in baseball annals. Babe Ruth's "called shot" home run, Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Derek Jeter's amazing "Flip Play." Most Yankees fans have seen newsreel footage of Lou Gehrig's farewell speech, watched highlights of a young Mickey Mantle, and have heard the story of Billy Martin's five managerial hirings and firings. But what makes the Yankees the world's most celebrated sports franchise goes beyond sheer headlines? it is the stories of the men behind the headlines who have thrilled and enchanted New York fansâŚ
I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseballâs efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
Charleston is one of the very best to ever play in the Negro Leagues. He entered Black baseball even before the first Negro League was started and played 27 seasons up to World War II. He managed in the Negro Leagues for 15 seasons, his gigs including the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s, one of the best professional teams of all time. Beerâs award-winning book tells the whole life of this Hall of Famer and straightens out historical misconceptions, for example showing that his reputation for dirty play and a terrible temper is ill-founded (âWhile he was happy to join fights in progress, he did not usually start themâ).
Winner of the SABR Seymour Medal
Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine
Winner of SABR's Larry Ritter and Robert Peterson Awards Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one." Among experts he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.
In a long career spanning from 1915 to 1954, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, andâŚ
Iâm a baseball history fanatic who writes on a wide range of topics for work and pleasure, which Iâm glad to say often are the same thing. Iâve been a journalist for many years, even covered a few World Series, and Iâve written stories for books published by the Society for American Baseball Research. Iâve also written a lot about music, science, business, and politics, for newspapers and magazines. Iâve been a playwright, fortunate to have seen my work staged in different venues. And I also wrote a book called, The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography, which Iâm really excited to tell you about in the next section!
In the 1960s, Ritter interviewed a bunch of guys who played major league ball in the early days, from the 1890s through the 1930s (or so), with lots of stuff from the Deadball Era. The result is this marvelous book filled with priceless tales told by the men who knew, played with (and occasionally fought with) Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Nap Lajoie, and the immortals from that era. Anyone who wants to understand what baseball was like in 1903, or there-and-then-about, must read this book. Reading this book is like sitting on a porch in a rocking chair next to grandpa while he tells stories that you actually want to hear.
âEasily the best baseball book ever produced by anyone.â âCleveland Plain Dealer
âThis was the best baseball book published in 1966, it is the best baseball book of its kind now, and, if it is reissued in 10 years, it will be the best baseball book.â â People
From Lawrence Ritter (The Image of Their Greatness, The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time), comes one of the bestselling, most acclaimed sports books of all time, The Glory of Their Timesânow a Harper Perennial Modern Classic.
Baseball was different in earlier daysâtougher, more raw, more intimateâwhen giants like Babe RuthâŚ