Smart Baseball: How Professionals Play the Mental Game

Smart Baseball: How Professionals Play the Mental Game Review

See more picture

Smart Baseball: How Professionals Play the Mental Game Feature

What goes on in a baseball player's mind is critical to the outcome of the game. Since most major leaguers are in peak physical condition, the difference between success and failure on the field often depends on a player's mental approach.

Looking at everything from a player's confidence to his leadership skills, instincts, and hunches, Smart Baseball uses entertaining anecdotes to get inside the mind of baseball's greats and show fans what goes through a player's head when he steps onto the field.

Smart Baseball presents the knowledge and accumulated experience of one of the few three-generation baseball families---the Bells. In addition, this book is full of insights from more than one hundred of Major League Baseball's greatest players---from Willie Mays to Barry Bonds to Ferguson Jenkins.

A fascinating and informative look at what goes on in the psyche of professional baseball players as they play the game, Smart Baseball is a unique chance for baseball fans to see what it takes for ballplayers to succeed at the Major League level.

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball

Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball Review

See more picture

Growing the Game: The Globalization of Major League Baseball Feature

Baseball fans are well aware that the game has become increasingly international. Major league rosters include players from no fewer than fourteen countries, and more than one-fourth of all players are foreign born. Here, Alan Klein offers the first full-length study of a sport in the process of globalizing. Looking at the international activities of big-market and small-market baseball teams, as well as the Commissioner’s Office, he examines the ways in which Major League Baseball operates on a world stage that reaches from the Dominican Republic to South Africa to Japan.
The origins of baseball’s efforts to globalize are complex, stemming as much from decreasing opportunities at home as from promise abroad. The book chronicles attempts to develop the game outside the United States, the strategies that teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals have devised to recruit international talent, and the ways baseball has been growing in other countries. The author concludes with an assessment of the obstacles that may inhibit or promote baseball’s progress toward globalization, offering thoughtful proposals to ensure the health and growth of the game in the United States and abroad.

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game

The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game Review

See more picture

The Baseball Uncyclopedia: A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game Feature

Michael Kun — Pulitzer Prize-nominated author — and Howard Bloom — former newspaper reporter and columnist — explain that, contrary to popular belief, a walk is not always as good as a hit. They argue that it’s not always wrong to root against the home team. They contend that the Houston Astros’ jerseys were not the ugliest jerseys ever worn in the major leagues. They rail against the common misconception that Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance was a great double play combination. They insist that Shoeless Joe Jackson did not bat right-handed, he did not go barefoot, and he did not refuse to accept money to throw the World Series. They heap scorn upon those who believe Joe DiMaggio was ever “The Greatest Living Baseball Player.” And they offer a sound rebuke to anyone who thinks a baseball book can’t be smart, funny and informative all at the same time.

The Baseball Uncyclopedia is a witty and irreverent guide that debunks some of the mythology, opinions and widely held beliefs about baseball that fans have clung to for generations.

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

Baseball: A History of America's Game (Illinois History of Sports)

Baseball: A History of America's Game (Illinois History of Sports) Review

See more picture

Baseball: A History of America's Game (Illinois History of Sports) Feature

In this third edition of his lively history of America's game--widely recognized as the best of its kind--Benjamin G. Rader expands his scope to include commentary on Major League Baseball through the 2006 season: record crowds and record income, construction of new ballparks, a change in the strike zone, a surge in recruiting Japanese players, and an emerging cadre of explosive long-ball hitters.

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Review

See more picture

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Feature

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Review

See more picture

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Feature

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Review

See more picture

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Feature

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).

"I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?"

With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.

What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.

In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David?

"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes

Check price now

Rerate Products

Customer Review