Can T Anybody Here Play This Game

A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times–bestselling author (Newark Star-Ledger). Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball. Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Our language is full of hundreds of quotations that are often cited but seldom confirmed. Ralph Keyes's The Quote Verifier considers not only classic misquotes such as "Nice guys finish last," and "Play it again, Sam," but more surprising ones such as "Ain't I a woman?" and "Golf is a good walk spoiled," as well as the origins of popular sayings such as "The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings," "No one washes a rented car," and "Make my day." Keyes's in-depth research routinely confounds widespread assumptions about who said what, where, and when. Organized in easy-to-access dictionary form, The Quote Verifier also contains special sections highlighting commonly misquoted people and genres, such as Yogi Berra and Oscar Wilde, famous last words, and misremembered movie lines. An invaluable resource for not just those with a professional need to quote accurately, but anyone at all who is interested in the roots of words and phrases, The Quote Verifier is not only a fascinating piece of literary sleuthing, but also a great read.

New York Times bestseller: A novel of a messy mob war in Brooklyn that “makes you laugh out loud” (Chicago Sun-Times). Kid Sally Palumbo has been a loyal servant to the Brooklyn Mafia for years. His specialty is murder, and he is so skilled at it that he has gotten the attention of Mafia boss Papa Baccala. But unfortunately for Kid Sally, murder pays poorly. He wants to make real dough, to get respect, and to be able to tell his colleagues where to sit when they eat dinner. In short, he wants to be boss. The job would be his for the taking—if only Kid Sally weren’t a Grade A moron. To keep Sally from stirring up trouble, Baccala tosses him an easy assignment: Organize a bicycle race through Brooklyn, and keep the profits. Kid Sally bungles it, setting off a turf war that quickly engulfs the borough. The dimwitted mobsters are masters in the art of murder, and they are about to put on a show. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year Winner of the 2017 Casey Award for the Best Baseball Book of the Year “The ultimate biography.” —The New York Times As a player, Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel's contemporaries included Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson. As a legendary manager, he formed indelible, complicated relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin. For more than five glorious decades, Stengel was the undisputed, quirky, hilarious, and beloved face of baseball—and along the way he revolutionized the role of manager. But for a man who spent so much of his life in the limelight Stengel remains an enigma. Acclaimed New York Yankees' historian and bestselling author Marty Appel digs into Casey Stengel's quirks and foibles, unearthing a tremendous trove of baseball stories, perspective, and history. Weaving in never-before-published family documents, Appel creates a matchless and intimate portrait of a private man. Casey Stengel is a biography that will be treasured by fans of our national pastime for years to come.

Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants battle it out.

In time for the 50th anniversary of the Mets' miraculous 1969 World Series win, right fielder Ron Swoboda tells the story of that amazing season, the people he played with and against (sometimes at the same time), and what life was like as an Every Man ballplayer. Ron Swoboda wasn’t the greatest player the Mets ever had, but he made the greatest catch in Met history, saving a game in the 1969 World Series, and his RBI clinched the final game. By Met standards that makes him legend. The Mets even use a steel silhouette of the catch as a backing for the right field entrance sign at Citi Field. In this smart, funny, insightful memoir, which is as self-deprecating as a lifetime .249 hitter has to be, he tells the story of that magical year nearly game by game, revealing his struggles, his triumphs and what life was like for an every day, Every Man player, even when he was being platooned. He shows what it took to make one of the worst teams in baseball and what it was like to leave one of the best. And when he talks about the guys he played with and against, it’s like you’re sitting next to him on the team bus, drinking Rheingold. Here's the Catch is a book anyone who loves the game will love as much.

New York Times Bestseller: A “superb” blow-by-blow account of how Tip O’Neill and his colleagues impeached Richard Nixon after Watergate (Chicago Tribune). Not long after burglars were caught raiding the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, Congressman Tip O’Neill noticed that Democratic fundraising efforts for the 1972 election had stalled. Major contributors were under IRS investigation, and Republican lackeys were threatening further trouble if those donors didn’t close their checkbooks. O’Neill sensed a conspiracy coming from the Nixon administration, but it wasn’t until the scandal broke that he connected the threatened donors with the Watergate burglary. In the boldest move of his career, he did something that would shock the nation: O’Neill decided to impeach the President. To his fellow members of the House of Representatives, this was an ugly idea. But as evidence mounted against Nixon and his cronies, O’Neill led the charge against the President. This blow-by-blow, conviction-by-conviction account is a gripping reminder of how O’Neill and his colleagues brought justice to those who abused their power, and revived America after the greatest political scandal in its history. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

In the popular 1977 movie “Oh, God!” George Burns, playing the deity, is asked in a courtroom to prove His divinity by performing a miracle. Burns tells the attorney, "The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea." Man has engaged in athletic competition at least since the ancient Greeks. Baseball has been played, according to legend, since Abner Doubleday invented it at Cooperstown, New York in 1839. Through the travail of ages, in the entire history of sports, the 1969 "Amazin' Mets" remains the single most impossible, unbelievable, improbable and wonderful sports story of all times. This book tells the tale of that incredible spring, summer and fall, but it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to the very heights of greatness in a few short months. The Last Miracle is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Mets remained the last, best hope of a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through the lens of time we now can view them as a metaphor for a changing America, and in light of the Big Apple's phoenix-like comeback over the years, the catapult for this battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis. Somehow, while the Mets became the mods of baseball, the "new breed" athlete, Tom Seaver and his teammates are viewed herein as the final symbols of an innocent age; an age when the greatest icons in American culture – New York sports heroes – mounted the stage in awesome splendor; before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over. Here they are: Seaver and Harrelson; Hodges and Stengel; Grote and Swoboda; Jones and Agee; all the characters of the greatest comedy act ever performed, all the while upstaging a tempestuous Mayoral race, President Nixon's "secret plan," a Moonshot, and Woodstock.