Addie Joss

Addie Joss (1880-1911) mowed down batters for the Cleveland Broncos/Naps from 1902 to 1910 before his career was cut short by his tragic death from tubercular meningitis in 1911. With a career ERA of 1.89 and two no-hitters, Joss earned Hall of Fame election despite a career that lasted less than ten years, the only player to do so. In the off-season, Joss also excelled as a sportswriter for the Toledo News-Bee and the Cleveland Press, filling the empty winter months penning stories about the game he knew firsthand. This collection of Joss's newspaper columns and World Series reports is a treasury of the deadball era with intimate first-person observations of the game and its players from the first decade of the American League. Informative annotations, archival photographs, and a brief biography complete the work.

The first in-depth look at baseball's nirvana -- a lyrical history of pitching perfection. There have been only fourteen perfect games pitched in the modern era of baseball; the great Cy Young fittingly hurled the first, in 1904, and David Cone pitched the most recent, in 1999. In between, some great pitchers -- Sandy Koufax, Catfish Hunter, Jim Bunning, and Don Larsen in the World Series -- performed the feat, as did some mediocre ones, like Len Barker and the little-known Charlie Robertson. Fourteen in 150,000 games: The odds are staggering. When it does happen, however, the whole baseball world marvels at the combination of luck and skill, and the pitcher himself gains a kind of baseball immortality. Five years ago, Michael Coffey witnessed such an event at Yankee Stadium, and the experience prompted this expansive look at the history of these unsurpassable pitching performances. He brings his skills as a popular historian and poet to an appraisal of both the games themselves and of the wider sport of baseball and the lives of the players in it. The careers of each of the fourteen perfect-game pitchers are assessed, not only as to their on-the-field performances but with a regard for their struggles to persevere in an extremely competitive sport in which, more often than not, the men and women who run the game from the owners' boxes are their most formidable adversaries. Along the way, Michael Coffey brings us right into the ballparks with a play-by-play account of how these games unfolded, and relates a host of fascinating stories, such as Sandy Koufax's controversial holdout with Don Drysdale and its chilling effect on baseball's owners, Mike Witt's victimization by the baseball commissioner, and Dennis Martinez's long struggle up from an impoverished Nicaraguan childhood. Combining history, baseball, and a sweeping look at the changing face of labor relations, 27 Men Out is a new benchmark in sports history.

Offering the best in original research and analysis, Base Ball is an annually published book series that promotes the study of baseball's early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture. This volume, number 10, brings together 14 articles on a wide range of topics, including the role of physicians in spreading early baseball; the game's financial revolution of 1866, when teams began charging a 25-cent admission price; the prejudice that greeted Japan's Waseda University team during its American tour in 1905; the Addie Joss benefit game and its place in baseball lore; the 1867 western tour of the National Base Ball Club; and entrenched ideas about class and early baseball, with a focus on the supposedly blue-collar Pennsylvania Base Ball Club.

Meningitis: its varieties, symptoms, history, treatment, and prevention.

Legends of the Tribe relives the exciting Jacobs Field era of the 1990s along with the complete 100-year legacy of this storied franchise. This book revives the memorable moments of Indians history and includes a stunning collection of more than 200 vintage photos of the great games, players, and events.

Propelled into the World Series in 1995 for the first time since 1954, the Cleveland Indians proved to the world they are no run-of-the-mill team. This comprehensive volume covers all of the team lore and legend, the controversies, the triumphs, and the heartaches. It includes 200 player profiles, season-by-season descriptions of unforgettable moments and memories, 700+ illustrations, extensive statistics, the World Series championships, and an immense treasure of little-known facts. The second edition of The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia has been completely updated from its original release in 1996.

As a seven-year-old growing up in the small town of Juneau, Wisconsin, Adrian "Addie" Joss had one ambition: To be a ballplayer. He excelled at the high school level, town ball, semi-pro and one year of college. Through hard work and a tremendous fast ball, he earned a tryout with the minor league Toledo Mud Hens. He made the best of the opportunity, and in 1902 became a member of the American League's Cleveland Blues. In his first Major League start against the St. Louis Browns he allowed only one hit, a disputed pop fly single. Weeks later he nearly had a no-hitter against Detroit. In the ninth inning, angry Tiger fans stormed the field, taunting the twenty-two-year-old pitcher. The Tigers got a hit, yet notice was served that Addie Joss had the goods. From 1905 through 1908, Joss won twenty games each season, with a high of twenty-seven in 1907. He had established himself as an elite pitcher, going head-to-head with Rube Waddell, Eddie Plank, Ed Walsh and Walter Johnson. Fans in their suits and straw hats were spellbound watching Addie mow down batter after batter. Even with tiny wooden ballparks and fans standing in the outfield, Joss continued to rack up the wins, including a legendary perfect game in the midst of a fantastic 1908 pennant race between Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Addie Joss was not just a Hall of Fame pitcher. He was an accomplished sportswriter, editing the Sunday sports page for the Toledo News Bee. He wrote features for newspapers all around the United States. Addie had a magnetic personality with friends in every Major League city. Tragically, he only lived to be thirty-one-years-old, dying of tubercular meningitis before the start of the 1911 season. King of the Pitchers takes the reader back to a golden time before radio, television and the earliest computers. A time when fans left their jobs early and boarded a streetcar to get to the ballpark. Scott Longert's book is a must read for baseball fans of any generation.

The acclaimed classic on the statistical analysis of baseball records in order to evaluate players and win more games. Long before Moneyball became a sensation or Nate Silver turned the knowledge he’d honed on baseball into electoral gold, John Thorn and Pete Palmer were using statistics to shake the foundations of the game. First published in 1984, The Hidden Game of Baseball ushered in the sabermetric revolution by demonstrating that we were thinking about baseball stats—and thus the game itself—all wrong. Instead of praising sluggers for gaudy RBI totals or pitchers for wins, Thorn and Palmer argued in favor of more subtle measurements that correlated much more closely to the ultimate goal: winning baseball games. The new gospel promulgated by Thorn and Palmer opened the door for a flood of new questions, such as how a ballpark’s layout helps or hinders offense or whether a strikeout really is worse than another kind of out. Taking questions like these seriously—and backing up the answers with data—launched a new era, showing fans, journalists, scouts, executives, and even players themselves a new, better way to look at the game. This brand-new edition retains the body of the original, with its rich, accessible analysis rooted in a deep love of baseball, while adding a new introduction by the authors tracing the book’s influence over the years. A foreword by ESPN’s lead baseball analyst, Keith Law, details The Hidden Game’s central role in the transformation of baseball coverage and team management and shows how teams continue to reap the benefits of Thorn and Palmer’s insights today. Thirty years after its original publication, The Hidden Game is still bringing the high heat—a true classic of baseball literature. Praise for The Hidden Game “As grateful as I was for the publication of The Hidden Game of Baseball when it first showed up on my bookshelf, I’m even more grateful now. It’s as insightful today as it was then. And it’s a reminder that we haven’t applauded Thorn and Palmer nearly loudly enough for their incredible contributions to the use and understanding of the awesome numbers of baseball.” —Jayson Stark, senior baseball writer, ESPN.com “Just as one cannot know the great American novel without Twain and Hemingway, one cannot know modern baseball analysis without Thorn and Palmer.” —Rob Neyer, FOX Sports