"The inside-the-clubhouse story of two tumultuous years when the Los Angeles Dodgers were re-made from top to bottom, from the ownership of the team to management to the players on the field, becoming the most talked-about and most colorful team in baseball"-- In 2012, an investment group bought the Los Angeles Dodgers from Frank McCourt, who had driven the team into bankruptcy in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. They spent more than double the...

It took 108 years, but it really happened. The Chicago Cubs are once again World Series champions. How did a team of untested young players and carefully selected veterans come together to break the longest championship drought in professional sports? Beginning with Theo Epstein's first season as team president in 2012, sportswriter Tom Verducci shows how Epstein went beyond "Moneyball" thinking when planning the path to a championship. Epstein focused...

"The fascinating story of baseball's most legendary "Iron Men," Cal Ripken Jr. and Lou Gehrig, who each achieved the coveted and sometimes confounding record of most consecutive games played. When Cal Ripken Jr. began his career with the Baltimore Orioles at age twenty-one, he had no idea he'd beat the historic record of playing 2,130 games in a rowset by Lou Gehrig, the fabled "Iron Horse" of the New York Yankees.When Ripken beat that record by 502...

"The Year of the Pitcher is the story of the remarkable 1968 baseball season, which culminated in one of the greatest World Series contests ever, with the Detroit Tigers coming back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the Cardinals in Game Seven of the World Series. In 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's...

"The legendary achievements of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig are undeniable hallmarks of baseball history. Much has been written about the two men as teammates, but Ruth and Gehrig's relationship away from the field is rarely, if ever, explored. In Gehrig and the Babe, Tony Castro portrays Ruth and Gehrig for what they were: American icons who were remarkably different men. For the first time, readers will learn about a friendship driven apart, an enduring...

Baseball is a game of stars, but this is not their story. These are the stories of players who battled their way to a chance in the big leagues and hung on as long as they could - Deacon Jones, Brian Mazone, and Lorenzo Bundy. They are tales of a love of the game, passed from father to son. Without the Grinders, without their grit, determination, and persistence, there would be no stars. The Grinders fill every roster at every level, plugging away...

The 1950s marked a transformative period in postwar American history. In baseball, one dynasty was the story during the decade. The New York Yankees played in eight World Series from 1950 to 1959, winning six of them. David Fischer brings expertise and a knack for great story-telling to the most dominant decade in the annals of sport.

In the early 20th century, one of the most integral members of the criminal underworld was Arnold Rothstein, the archetype of the old school mobster. He was intelligent, charming, well-spoken, grotesquely wealthy, and a sharp dresser, often pictured with a patterned bowtie and a flat-top fedora snugly fit over his receding hairline. And yet, he was nothing like the stereotypical mobster; Arnold was not a drinker or smoker, and he was not one to be...

“It's our game…America's game: it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws, [and] is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”—Walt Whitman on baseball Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of...

Bissinger chronicles the process by which the manager leads his players to victory and distills the essence of the game from locker room and front office to dugout and field of play.