The Thing Lenny Loves Most About Baseball

Andrew Larsen’s latest story celebrates the eternal hope and joy of baseball. Lenny loves playing baseball. He also loves reading about it. He wants to be in the big leagues, and, he figures, the more he knows, the better his chances. The only thing is, when he’s in the outfield, the ball somehow always ends up by his feet and not in his glove. But he and his dad practice. And practice. Lenny doesn’t give up. And it pays off. He makes a game-changing catch! Now he’s proven he can be great some of the time. Which makes him just like the greatest Hall of Famers, right? All you need is glove — as long as you believe!

“You can write about ANYTHING, as long as you write about YOU.” A young boy listens as Mr. Lopez explains the class’s assignment: write about yourself. Marcus is going to write about his hat collection. Alia is going to write about the vampires she talks about all the time. The boy, however, doesn’t have any ideas beyond a title: “The Story of Me by Me.” His sister suggests making lists as a way to start — Thinks I Like, Things I Know. But the things all seem disconnected. Is there a way to tie them all together? Finally, a kid’s-eye guide to writing! Perfect inspiration for every child to start their very own “Story of Me”!

A child and beloved grandma bond over birds during the grandma’s final days. When Grandma gets sick and comes to stay at her grandchild’s house, she brings her bird feeder. Grandma loves birds. And the child loves the time they spend together, drawing bird pictures and “talking about interesting things.” Grandma’s health declines, however. She moves to the hospice, where the child hangs the bird feeder outside her window. There, though the grandma’s ability to interact diminishes over time, their love for each other never wavers. Simple and deep, this quiet book speaks with empathy about the loss of a treasured grandparent, and with hope about the tomorrows — and the birds — that always come.

Bob Fontaine Jr. spent 48 plus years as a baseball scout, traveling the world to find the next superstars of the sport. From drafting a one-handed pitcher to building the foundation of a World Series roster, Fontaine's success of looking for projection on amateur players in near unmatched within the baseball scouting business. Scouting is not an exact science, and with the success also comes failure. Beginning his career with a team that showed no prosperity, Bob helped build an organization from the ground up. This became a common theme, as he would leave one team for another, and restart on the groundwork of building a championship roster, bringing new challenges each time around.

Perhaps the finest memoir ever was never written at all. It was performed. I’m referring to an improvised scene in a now obscure Harrison Ford movie entitled Blade Runner. In it, the gifted German actor and poet, Rutger Hauer, plays, Roy Batty, a replicant. A replicant is basically a machine, but one capable of human emotion. And in this final scene, Roy, is dying exactly as you’d expect a machine to die. Just like a common flashlight, Roy’s batteries are getting low. But Roy is dying a machine death but at the same time feeling and expressing human emotions, a thing no flashlight I’m aware of can do, not even the long black ones the police carry and sometimes use as a weapon. It’s one hell of a scene and it’s played out for the movie cameras on a rainy rooftop full of nightmarish steam pipes and white doves. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. The movie itself, even though it stars a young Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah, is kind of a stinker. But if you go to You-Tube and prompt in “Tear In the Rain,” you’ll get just the dying-breath monologue that Rutger Hauer, the German actor and poet, improvises for Roy Batty, the replicant who’s fast running out of battery life. It goes like this. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.”

Nine Innings: Life Lessons Learned, written for young student athletes and their parents, contains nine chapters, each referenced to coincide with nine innings of a baseball game. This guide provides practical advice from a father, and baseball coach, to help you and your child become mentally tougher, relying on confidence, courage, competitiveness, and continued improvement in order to achieve success in school, sports, and life. Learn how to find the inner strength to improve your life with a positive attitude and proper goal-setting techniques, while stepping out of your comfort zone. In order to achieve all that you want, it’s important to understand that the behavioral changes that you make today will improve who you are tomorrow. This is best accomplished by focusing your energy on the present. Nine Innings: Life Lessons Learned offers practical advice to help young student athletes—and their parents—become more confident, street-smart, mentally strong, positive, focused, and successful.

Includes sections devoted to financial applications of forecasting, as well as demand forecasting. This publication also includes a section on general business applications of forecasting, as well as one on forecasting methodologies.