Usa Today Baseball Weekly 1993 Almanac

A comprehensive annual baseball guide for the serious fan covers the major and minor leagues and offers statistics, player profiles, last year's highlights, and predictions for the forthcoming 1993 baseball season. Original.

Unrivaled coverage of the year in baseball offers full player statistics sorted by team and position, fantasy values for every major league player, and postseason wrap-ups from the staff of USA Today Baseball Weekly. 300 tables. Illustrations.

Based on America's most popular baseball publication, this new edition provides the baseball lover with all new statistics, profiles, and analyses in addition to editorial essays on high salaries and top draft prospects. Original.

The first owner of the Santurce Crabbers, Pedrín Zorrilla, was a visionary, with many Negro League and big league contacts (he signed up Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, Ray Dandridge and Leon Day in the first decade). Santurce was the most successful winter league team of the 1950s, with three Caribbean Series titles. Roberto Clemente, Rubén Gómez, Willie Mays, Willard Brown and Bob Thurman played for the Crabbers. Tom Lasorda used to pitch for them. Santurce set up working agreements with the Giants, Orioles, Dodgers and Astros, among other teams. Earl Weaver and Frank Robinson were team managers; several Hall of Famers were early-career Crabbers. Orlando Cepeda and Tony (Tany) Pérez played their entire winter league careers with Santurce.

With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history. At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement. Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan—the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later. During these years, the game was led by A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him."

Packed with all the statistics, analyses, profiles, and prognostications that national pastime lovers have come to expect, the 1994 edition of this instant home run success includes a historical section, essays on salaries and draft picks, sidebars, graphics, and more. Photos.

Packed with all the stats, analyses, profiles, and prognostications that national-pastime lovers have come to expect, the 1995 edition of this popular guide also features all-new stats, editorial essays, and more.