Explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money.

Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith was the most widely read sportswriter of the last century and the first to win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. From the 1940s to the 1980s, his nationally syndicated columns for the New York Herald Tribune and later for The New York Times traversed the world of sports with literary panache and wry humor. Now, writer and editor Daniel Okrent presents the best of Smith's inimitable columns ---miniature masterpieces that...

As America's pastime since the mid-1800s, baseball offers the sights, sounds, and even smells that are deeply entrenched in our culture. But for some, the experience can be less sensory. Some, such as Ryan Spaeder and Kevin Reavy, live for baseball statistics. Stats give the game historical context and measurables for past, present, and predictive analysis.

The author chronicles his 1999 baseball adventure: attending all eighty-one home games at Tiger Stadium in its last season. In the process, he examines his relationships with his father and his young son.

A New York Times reporter describes the perspectives he gained into the game of baseball while attending umpire training school and umpiring games firsthand, in an insider fan's account that also draws on the experiences of dozens of professional umpires.

In 1989 David Halberstam published Summer of '49, which became a number one New York Times bestseller. It was a compelling portrait of baseball in an America as yet unchanged by affluence, technology, and social progress. The players, almost all white, had been raised in harsh circumstances, the games were played in the afternoon on grass and were broadcast on radio, the teams traveled by train, and the owners had dictatorial power over the players....

A collection of quotes, anecdotes, and malaprops from one of baseball's wisest and wittiest personalities. New York Times–bestselling author Phil Pepe takes readers along on Yogi Berra's journey from St. Louis to New York's Yankee Stadium, including all the stops along the way-from his days as a tack-puller in a women's shoe factory, to a pre-game tribute in St. Louis, when he coined the phrase, "I want to thank all those that made this night necessary,"...