Cy Young

Cy Young was one of the hardest-throwing pitchers of all time. He recorded three no-hitters—including a perfect game—and accumulated more than 2,800 strikeouts on his way to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Scott H. Longert uses Young’s life story to introduce middle-grade readers to the game, explaining balls, strikes, and outs in an easy-to-understand way. Longert narrates each season and each milestone game with an enthusiastic play-by-play that is sure to draw readers into the excitement on the field and in the crowd, fostering a better understanding of and a passion for baseball. Baseball fans today know Cy Young’s name chiefly through the award given in his honor each year to the best pitcher in the National and the American Leagues. Denton True “Cyclone” Young won more than five hundred games over a career that spanned four decades, a record that no other major league pitcher has come close to matching. In addition to being the winningest pitcher in baseball history, he was also a kind, self-effacing, and generous man. Born into a farm family in rural Ohio, he never lost touch with the small-town values he grew up with.

An early celebrity pitcher, Denton "Cy" Young (1867-1955) established supreme standards on the mound. A small-town Ohio farmer made good, he set Major League pitching records in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that will likely last forever. The winner of 511 games--nearly one hundred more than the second-ranked hurler--Young pitched the first perfect game of the modern era, as well as three no-hitters. His talents helped establish the American League in 1901. Among the Hall of Fame's first inductees, he remained a sought-after interviewee decades after retirement. A year after his death, the Cy Young Award was dedicated as baseball's most prestigious honor for pitchers.

Browning recreates the life of Denton True "Cylone" Young and places his story in the context of a rapidly changing turn-of-the-century America. This in-depth study tells of a career that spanned a long period in baseball history, one in which the game was transformed several times. 24 illustrations.

During fifteen seasons in the major leagues, Charlie O’Brien was battery-mate to thirteen pitchers who won the Cy Young Award, presented each year by the Baseball Writers Association of America. To put that accomplishment in perspective, Hall of Fame catchers Johnny Bench and Yogi Berra each worked with only one Cy Young winner during their careers. Legendary hurlers caught by O’Brien include such greats as Roger Clemens, Dwight Gooden, Bret Saberhagen, and Steve Bedrosian. O’Brien’s The Cy Young Catcher, written with Doug Wedge, includes up-close views of the thirteen Cy Young Award–winning pitchers at their best . . . and occasionally at their worst. O’Brien shares an inside perspective on how catchers talk to umpires, what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a 90-mph fastball, and how it feels to be in a clutch situation when the World Series is on the line. This authentic, down-to-earth memoir will not only delight baseball fans of all stripes, it will also provide keen insights into what separates the game’s greatest competitors from the also-rans.

America From Apple Pie to Ziegfeld Follies is a four book series of reproducible low level ESL/EFL/Literacy reading and discussion texts. Each unit examines an element of the American experience that will genuinely interest and inform not only immigrants to the United States but also learners abroad who want to know more about the people, history, geography and culture of this great nation. Although the passages are limited to an elementary level of language difficulty, their style remains vivid and authentic. Readers will be inspired by the courage of Harriet Tubman, awed by the beauty of the Grand Canyon, fascinated by the work of the F.B.I., and shocked by the events surrounding Watergate.

The first National League franchise to be featured in the new, exciting, and completely original Sports by the Numbers series! THE TEAM: The Giants franchise is the winningest in professional baseball history, having won more regular season games than the Cubs, Yankees, Dodgers, or Red Sox. The Giants have been to the World Series 18 times and claimed six championships during baseball's modern era-and the success of this franchise has been built on legends, as the club also boasts more Hall of Fame players than any other in the sport. THE FORMAT: The presentation created by the authors distinguishes Sports by the Numbers from everything else available today. San Francisco Giants is composed of ten chapters, each offering one hundred numbered "mini-stories"-facts, anomalies, records, coincidences, and enthralling lore and trivia from Hall of Fame legends such as Willie Mays, Mel Ott, and Bill Terry, to contemporary stars such as Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, and Buster Posey. Each chapter begins with an introduction that highlights the many exciting stories found in these pages such as the "Shot Heard 'Round the World," Mays' catch in the 1954 World Series, Barry Bonds' pursuit of Hank Aaron, and rivalry games against the hated Dodgers. Sports by the Numbers books are not just for diehard sports fans, but for every fan and sports history reader who loves sports and wants to know more about their heroes and favorite teams.

Gross Productivity Average, or GPA, is a new baseball statistic that measures performance. Accounting for the effect that each plate appearance or baserunning play has on scoring opportunities, it is reported on a scale similar to that for batting average, making it easy for the average fan to understand. Beginning with a detailed explanation of the statistic and its derivation, the book identifies, in Part II, historical patterns in league-average GPA (even the steroids effect is quantified). Practical applications are then explored, as GPA is used in Part III to settle long-running arguments about strategy and in Part IV to reassess players and awards voting from 1952 to 2012.

When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.