Chasing The Big Leagues

Three years after earning a full-ride baseball scholarship to Ohio State, "Golden" Jake Standen has burned out. Working as a furniture mover and bouncing between meaningless relationships, he's convinced that his baseball dreams are over. But after the 1994 Major League Baseball strike prematurely ends the season, the playoffs, and even the World Series, Jake is about to get his lucky break. Strike be damned, the owners will have a team for the '95 season, even if they have to open tryouts and spring training to anyone who can hit or throw the ball. After scoring contracts for the Toronto Blue Jays, Jake, his best friend Brian Sloan, and an unlikely cast of new teammates have just six weeks to learn how to play like never before, amid a slowly building crescendo of public curiosity, media scrutiny, and a labor dispute that could put them on the field come Opening Day—or dash their dreams at any minute. Based on the true stories of the 1994–95 replacement players, Chasing the Big Leagues is an exciting novel about shared dreams and competing interests, best friends and second chances, growing up and finding love.

The typical baseball fan yearns for one of two things: a strikeout or a home run. But most of the game takes place in between these electrifying moments, and this book discusses the importance of "small ball" to baseball. It examines the multitude of times small ball activities have secured victories through aggressive base running, sacrifice hits, squeeze bunts, stolen bases, productive outs and hit-and-run plays, as well as games in which aggressive small ball activity led to defeat. The book covers the most important small ball players, managers and teams.

Discusses the evolution of baseball, football, and basketball and offers new perspectives on established legends

For more than five decades, pioneering researcher Dorothy Seymour Mills has studied and written about baseball's past. With this groundbreaking book, she turns her attention to the historians, stat hounds, and many thousands of not-so-casual fans whose fascination with the game and its history, like her own, defies easy explanation. As Mills demonstrates, baseball elicits a passion--and inspires a slightly off-kilter, obsessive behavior--that is only slightly less interesting than the people who indulge it.

Darrel Chaney made it to the Big Leagues. He played for 7 years on one of the best teams ever to take the field, the Cincinnati Reds—the Big Red Machine. He played in 4 National League Championship Series and 3 World Series. He was in the game that the Major League Baseball Network considered the best game of the last 50 years—game 6 of the 1975 World Series. But Darrel had a nagging frustration that eroded his belief in his significance. Disappointments, setbacks and opposition attacked his dream. He was a utility player among superstars. Most men are utility players. They face the same battles that Darrel faced. They get frustrated and lose enthusiasm for work and life itself. But, when a man discovers his God given significance, he enjoys life more and does better in it. Then, whatever his game, he is in the Big Leagues.

Chase and Leah, a young and ambitious couple, form a union and take a journey down the path of marital bliss with hopes of making it last forever. Conflicts arise when secrets from the past invade the couples intimate relationship. The drama unfolds and marriage suddenly seems anything but blissful. With the support of family and friends, Chase and Leah struggle with many challenges to maintain balance in a deteriorating relationship. As time evolves, the couple hits a wall. They realize that their chase for forever is quickly disintegrating and their marriage has come to the point of being another statistical disaster.

Published in 1914, Busting 'Em was the first of three books credited to Ty Cobb the author. Though in fact it was ghostwritten by John N. Wheeler, who also penned Mathewson's Pitching in a Pinch, the book fascinates with its insights into Cobb as a public figure. The reader is presented Cobb's explanation of the beating incident at Hilltop Park, the Baker spiking, and his contentious relationship with teammates. His thoughts--or those he sanctioned--of umpires, his contemporaries, crowds, and strategy are also shared. This book, long out of print and increasingly hard to find, is essential reading for those who would understand Cobb's awareness of and investment in the shape of his public image.

Many histories of the New York Yankees only skim the early years in their rush to pick up with the 1919 season when Babe Ruth joined the team and go on to celebrate the careers of Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Whitey Ford, and the team's World Series titles. But what about the Yankees before these big names? The early Yankees, who spent their first 12 years known as the Highlanders and were occasionally known as the Americans and the Invaders, get the attention they deserve in this work. It tells the story up until the sale of the Yankees in December 1914, beginning with 1903 when the team was formed from the remnants of the Baltimore Orioles. Led by future Hall of Famers "Wee" Willie Keeler, Jack Chesbro, and Clark Griffith, they were the most expensive major league team ever assembled--but they are remembered primarily for their terrible failures, which included losing a club-low 103 games in 1908 and finishing 55 games out of first place in 1912. Yes, the Yankees.