Baseball Books

if you baseball.like i do buy i

All the old ballparks, color "postcards" from the cities, all the players, umpires, managers, uniforms, writers, broadcasters and even the nameplates from the local newspapers in each major league city. If you grew up with a transistor radio under the bedcovers listening to Bob Prince or Red Barber, Okkonen's books are better (and cheaper!) than a Jackie Robinson baseball card. A unique combination of nostalgia and factual information that is guaranteed to awaken memories dormant for years. His volumes on the thirties and "oughts" are similarly unique and wonderful.

I just picked this book up and it's really cool. Not only does it list tons of cool and interesting baseball sites, it's really fun to read as well. I'd recommend this book to ALL baseball fans with access to the Internet.

With so much (good and bad) on the net, a guide beyond the normal search engines is often essential. Rob Edelman's Baseball on the Net does an exemplary job of being that guide. It's tough to imagine it being outdone by anyone else.

THIS BOOK WAS THE BEST!!! It captured my imagination and will stay in my hear forever. Thanks Fred Arrigg!!!

This is an excellent book that captures the imagination of my students. As a Reading Specialist, I can say this book motivates all my students to read. I can highly recommed it to parents, teachers, and children.

I really enjoyed reading the questions and stories that Dave Brown used in this book. I aleays knew Mitch Williams was a fun and exciting baseball pitcher, but I had no idea how entertaining and funny his stories could be. I am so glad he decided to share some of the stories about his baseball days in this book. Using the format of Q&A, was ingenious and very, very entertaining! Thanks Mr Brown for the idea, and THANK YOU Mitchell, for another wild time ! Love ya forever !!!!!!

Trivia at its best is challenging, informative and fun. This book is all three. The Baseball Triva Book is challenging enough for the most hardcore baseball trivialists yet has plenty of questions that "Joe Fan"(like myself) can answer and find challenging. 200 hundred questions - multiple choice, matching and my favorite "Who am I?". Here the authors describe a player through career highlights and lowlights and asks the reader to identify him. I was truely disappointed when I reached the end this trivia book. A must have for all fans and for under six bucks it's a no brainer!

Baseball fans love statistics. They are part and parcel of the lore and the talk of the game. This book is built around an interesting idea, giving a page a short essay to ' firsts'. The first player to hit four- hundred, or the first player to win thirty- games in a season etc. There is a lot of baseball lore in this book much of which will be new even to the most dedicated of baseball funs.
This is a book for baseball fans only but I am sure they will enjoy it.

Think you know everthing there is to know about baseball? You'll be surprised by the factoids uncovered. A must have reference guide for all baseball enthusists.

The writers do an excellent job of reminding the reader of why we like sports. In this Post-Mitchell Report Era, it's nice to see examples of heros who aren't so driven by personal glory at the expense of others. Overall, a nice read.

I think Jack Walsh, and Marshall Cook have captured the heart and soul of Baseball's greatest players. Baseball Good Guys is a book that will inspire the reader to learn more of the Character and Integrity of these players. The statistics are there, but their ability to overcome adversity, personal problems, prejudice and more, will inform the readers of the real skills of these players.

Be forewarned, some of the pages come to life, in such a way that splinters (possibly from the bats) seem to leap into your eyes.

Good book, should be a must read for school athletes and those of us who lived during some of those years.

This book is obscure, hard to find, rare. I stumbled across my copy at a bookstore that has since closed down. It quickly became one of the invaluable prizes in my baseball library.

A few qualifiers: This is only for baseball nuts. Casual fans shouldn't bother. Also, the book is only current through 1980.

Now, what the book is. It's every pennant race in baseball history, displayed in graphic form. On the left side of each graph, the teams all start at zero. Time passes from left to right. As teams win, their lines move up. When they lose, their lines move down. Each team is shown at each point on the graph with respect to their number of games above or below .500. Come the far right of each graph, you'll see how they finished.

Well, that really loses a lot in translation, but please take my word for it: the excitement of a pennant race really comes through on these graphs, often more than is the case with just a written description. You can feel the flavor of each pennant race -- the closely fought battles with teams moving back and forth throughout, the amazing comebacks, the sudden collapses, the teams that stumbled along until mid-June or so and then suddenly got hot, the blowouts -- all the different flavors of pennant races are here in full detail.

Many a book has been written that covers many of these pennant races, but try as they might, they can't convey all the information, all the drama, that these graphs do. In many of these books, every so often, the narration will stop to show you the standings at a certain point -- the author's attempt to show you a glimpse of the story that these graphs tell more thoroughly.

For the best pennant races, the author has presented "close ups" -- magnified portions of the closing dates on the graph, the sections involving the key teams, with the scores of key games printed over the points where they occurred.

These graphs really bring a lot of dramas back to life, and are a wonderful supplement to the great tales you might have read elsewhere: the 1908 donnybrook, the 1914 Miracle Braves, the incredible 1920 season, the 1934 Gas House Gang comeback to surpass the Giants, the 1951 Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, anong others.

An unexpected bonus is that the author's capsule prose rundowns of each pennant race are usually quite well written.

Again, this isn't for everyone; this is for the sort of fan who gets something out of graphs. If you're not a numbers person, this probably isn't for you. It's for the type of obsessed baseball fan who has the time and inclination to sit around looking at these pictures and discovering new stories in them.

John Warner Davenport's 1981 book "Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" presents a series of graphs showing every American and National League pennant race from 1901-1980. When you think of the nature of pennant races, from wild season-long battles between two or more teams to runaways by one dominant team, chances are the way these graphs look is the way you'd see those races in your mind.

For all of the marquee races during this span -- the 1908 chases in both leagues; the 1920 American League battle between the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants tussle; the Philadelphia Phillies' 1964 collapse that created a heated four-team struggle; and others, Davenport gives us "close-up" graphs, that chronicle each day's scores over a period of one or more months. These closeups really give an insight into what was actually happening to these teams day by day, and in some cases, what effect teams outside the race were having on the final result.

In the regular, more broad-based graphs, we get a glimpse at interesting also-rans who were either on the rise -- like the Philadelphia Athletics of 1926-28, right before their domination of the American League over the following three seasons -- or on the way down. These are indicated by bolder lines in Davenport's graphs (as are the teams who won the race).

Perhaps the ideal combination would be this book's graphs and the pure numbers available in Neft and Cohen's "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball." Having both books separately is good enough, however.

While on one level it's unfortunate that this book hasn't been updated, either by Davenport or someone else, for some people an update would only be valuable through 1993, in any case. After '93, the Wild Card was introduced, devaluing the pennant race for many observers. Of course, the real purists might point to 1968 as the last year of true pennant races (though neither was particularly close), coming on the eve of divisional play in 1969.

"Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" is a fine addition to any baseball fan's collection, its lack of updating notwithstanding.

The poems in this book are wonderful. Reading them makes me remember my own childhood.

Donald Graves' poetry book, "Baseball, Snakes, and Summer Squash" recants the follies and joys about growing up. While simple in thier construction, the poems express adequately all the dimensions of being a kid; from school to hating squash. Graves claims he wrote some of the poems specifically for boys to identify with, but don't be fooled, this gem is applicable to all. VERY usuable in the classroom and with children - a must read.

As a long time student and coach of this great game, I could not at this time more highly recommend any how-to guide than this one. Although nearly every baseball "expert" could debate some of the fine points of the game brought out by Coach Kindall, no one could argue the value of this book for any age group.

I have read about 5 or 6 Baseball instructional books and I felt this was the most understandable, complete book out there. It covers every aspect of the game and includes great pictures, so that they not only tell you how to do something but show you as well. It covers Hitting, Pitching, Baserunning, Fielding, throwing, Individual positions, and strategies. It is the book that I mention first to my fellow coach's.

Baseball: The People's Game is the third volume in the series of this famous work and the best of the three books. It's about the way people played amateur and semipro ball all over the country, in schools and colleges, on sandlots, even in prisons and on reservations. It includes five chapters on early women's baseball and of course material on the black clubs and leagues. I'm the wife and assistant of the late author, Dr. Harold Seymour, the historian of baseball. To read more about his baseball books, visit my web site, http://www.DorothyJaneMills.com. Soon I will be opening a new web site about his work: www.HaroldSeymour.com

Harold Seymour made the right move as a kid when he waited on Bedford Avenue outside the right field fence at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to catch home runs hit off the bats of Dolph Camilli and Pete Reiser. Thus began a love affair with the game that has blossomed into three great books including "The People's Game," maybe the best. Seymour goes into great detail about aspects of the game as they relate not to the big leagues or even to the bushes but to stories and anecdotes that anybody who has ever played the game can relate to, especially us old timers. If you're my age, you probably remember continually taping up the .35 ball after the cover came off, generally about the second inning. If it was a really big game, you probably used white medical tape that you had purloined from the medicine chest. But in all likelihood, you used the much more utilitarian black friction tape from the garage.The ball had to last the whole game as no one had another thirty five cents for a second one. And do you remember when there just weren't enough gloves to go around and you had to share a mitt with your opposing player? A myriad of rememberances await readers of this love letter to our National Pastime. But they are six hundred of the liveliest, most interesting pages any player or fan of the game will ever read. Go read this home run of a book! It's a gem.