Kirjahaku

As America's pasttime was still reeling from the Black Sox scandal of 1919, Red Sox player Babe Ruth was traded to the New York Yankees for $125,000. Who could have known that this business transaction would turn the 1920 season into a magical one and send Ruth's celebrity into the stratosphere? Babe Ruth captures that era, before Ruth joined the pantheon of sports gods.

October 13, 1960: the hardscrabble Pirates were a colourful bunch of overachievers led by Roberto Clemente and Bill Mazeroski, making the franchise's first World Series appearance in thirty-five years against a heavily favoured Yankee squad featuring such legends as Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Roger Maris. The Pirates were outscored 46-16 through the first six games,only to win, 10-9, when Mazeroski became the only player ever to decide aWorld Series Game 7 with a walk-off home run. With this captivating book" ( New York Times ), Reisler revisits this fall classic pitch by pitch, capturing the lively atmosphere within the ballpark and throughout the country. The result is the feeling of being there,from the seemingly predictable start, to the truly unbelievable finish,of the best game ever.

Presents interviews with 15 extraordinary oral deaf role models from diverse backgrounds and professions. Wall Street banker Ralph Marra, paralegal Kristin Buehl, 1984 Olympic gold medallist Jeff Float, and engineer George Oberlander are just some of those who share their experience and stories.

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.

This revised edition is an anthology of 10 African American sportswriters who covered baseball's Negro Leagues in the first part of the 20th century. The writers include Sam Lacy, Wendell Smith, Frank A. Young, Joe Bostic, Chester L. Washington, W. Rollo Wilson, Dan Burley, Ed Harris, A.S. "Doc" Young and Romeo Dougherty. The men represented here were pioneers in their own right. Writing for black weekly newspapers, they faced the same conditions as the leagues' players, from discrimination to endless travel. Yet it was through their writings that the public, both black and white were given an up-close, inside look at the day-to-day happenings of Negro League baseball.

C.C."Cash and Carry" Pyle made several fortunes representing professional football and tennis players--before losing everything and disappearing into history's dustbin. This work reevaluates Pyle's fast life and times while analyzing his extraordinary and enduring legacy. In 1925, Pyle rocked the sports world by inducing Red Grange to abandon the leafy confines of the University of Illinois for pro football, in essence thumbing his nose at protesting academics who insisted the move would irreparably harm both the college game and Grange's career. The book continues through all of Pyle's successes, and more than a few of his failures, including his signing of controversial French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen and his near-bankruptcy following losses incurred staging the short-lived annual Bunion Derby, as newspaper columnists dubbed the notorious 3,470-mile transcontinental footrace first held in 1928.

On his seventieth birthday in 1909, a slim man with a shock of white hair, a walrus mustache, and a spring in his step faced west from Park Row in Manhattan and started walking. By the time Edward Payson Weston was finished, he was in San Francisco, having trekked 3,895 miles in 104 days. Weston's first epic walk across America transcended sport. He was "everyman" in a stirring battle against the elements and exhaustion, tramping along at the pace of someone decades younger. Having long been America's greatest pedestrian, he was attempting the most ambitious and physically taxing walk of his career. He walked most of the way alone when the car that he hired to follow him kept breaking down, and he often had to rest without adequate food or shelter. That Weston made it is one of the truly great but forgotten sports feats of all time. Thanks in large part to his daily dispatches of his travails—from blizzards to intense heat, rutted roads, bad shoes, and illness—Weston's trek became a wonder of the ages and attracted international headlines to the sport called "pedestrianism." Aided by long-buried archival information, colorful biographical details, and Weston's diary entries, Walk of Ages is more than a book about a man going for a walk. It is an epic tale of beating the odds and a penetrating look at a vanished time in America.

Billy Hoy and Luther Taylor endure as two of the most fascinating--and unknown--players in 150-plus years of major-league baseball. At the turn of the twentieth century, both men were marque stars, with their names often in headlines and their exploits admired by fans and teammates alike. And yet about the most anyone knew of Hoy or Taylor was they were deaf; in fact, both men were nicknamed "Dummy," a shortened version of the term "deaf and dumb," which hearing people in the era used when referring to the deaf. Beyond that, their stories and everything they had to do to succeed--all the extra work, the improvisation, and the innovation--were blank slates.This book finally tells their full and colorful stories. It tells the improbable tale of how each carved out a significant career at the top of the big leagues. As deaf men, both faced low expectations and prejudice by those who considered them stupid. Sportswriters in the era, with a couple of exceptions, considered American Sign Language little more than gibberish and largely chose to ignore them. Still, Hoy and Taylor got their teams to incorporate elements of American Sign Language and finger-spelling for in-game signals that took opponents years to decipher.Despite the incomplete canvass about the lives of Hoy and Taylor, interest about these two remarkable players has exploded in the last several decades. Gallaudet University named its baseball field for Hoy, and he is the subject of two recent films, a documentary, at least three children's books, and a movement to induct him into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. With Hoy next due to be considered in 2027, The Talented Misters Hoy and Taylor will be a timely addition to his candidacy--and an entertaining read for anyone interested in baseball and history about what it takes to triumph against the odds.