The Cleveland Barons should never have existed. Born when the National Hockey League's California Golden Seals--another team that should never have existed--were transplanted to Cleveland in 1976 and greeted with apathy by the dwindling number of hockey fans in northeastern Ohio, the Barons were an embarrassment to the city and to the NHL. The only thing the team had going for them was the state-of-the-art arena they played in, which was all but empty for nearly every game they played. Thi...

This book is the day by day story of the 1954 Indians, whose .721 winning percentage is still the highest in American League history. It tells how down the city of Cleveland was on the team following three straight second-place finishes, how little was expected of it by its fans, and even some of its players, and how it exceeded all expectations by winning a league-record 111 games and a pennant, before flopping in the World Series.

The All-American Football Conference was the only challenger to the NFL (except for the American Football League of the 1960s) to survive more than two seasons in competition with the established league. It ultimately failed to achieve its goal of a peaceful coexistence with the NFL and folded in 1949. Its Cleveland Browns and San Francisco 49ers, which were absorbed by the NFL in 1950, are still in business.This book takes a brief look at all of the NFL's challengers (and would-be...

According to the National Football League, the 1972 Miami Dolphins are the only undefeated, untied Super Bowl champions. But pro football's first undefeated championship team was crowned in 1948, when the Cleveland Browns won their third straight All-America Football Conference title with a record of 15 victories, no losses and no ties. They were led by Hall of Fame head coach Paul Brown, whose methods revolutionized the game and influenced every coach who followed. On the field, the '48 B...

The book chronicles almost 300 in-season changes of managers in the major leagues since 1900. It elaborates on the circumstances that led to the change, whether it was a firing or a resignation and includes, in many cases, remarks of the dismissed manager, the manager who replaced him, and the executive (owner or general manager) who orchestrated the change. It then examines how the team fared under the new manager. The central purpose of the book is to study the effects of the changes: ho...

What if your brain wasn’t the enemy... but the tool you’ve never learned how to use properly?You wake up with that familiar tension in your chest. Your thoughts race before your feet even touch the floor. You overthink, avoid, procrastinate, repeat. You’ve tried to “calm down,” but your brain seems wired for panic.Here’s the truth:Anxiety doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your brain’s trying to protect you — just in the wrong way. And once you ...

The life of baseball’s grandest figure, told in extraordinary detailNearly a century has passed since George Herman Ruth made his major league debut, and in that time millions of words have been used to describe baseball’s greatest hero. But for a man like the Babe, for whom the phrase “larger than life” seems to have been coined, those millions of words have created a mythologized legacy. Who was the real Babe Ruth?Relying on exhaustive research and interv...

A "vividly, excitingly written" classic of baseball history: "The most thorough investigation of the Black Sox scandal on record" ( Chicago Tribune).It was "the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America"—the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up. Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the...

A fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps the most controversial player in baseball history, Ty Cobb—“The best work ever written on this American sports legend: It’s a major reconsideration of a reputation unfairly maligned for decades” (The Boston Globe).Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player ever. His lifetime batting average is still the highest in history, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detr...

**With a new Afterword covering the 2015 season.The bestselling, inside-the-clubhouse story of two tumultuous years when the Los Angeles Dodgers were re-made from top to bottom, becoming the most talked-about and most colorful team in baseball. “It’s as if Molly Knight ushers you behind the closed clubhouse doors.” (Buster Olney, ESPN)**In 2012 the Los Angeles Dodgers were bought out of bankruptcy in the most expensive sale in sports history. Los Angeles icon Magic Johnson ...

BLOOPER: BALL SQUIRTS THROUGH BILLY BUCKNER'S LEGS.BLUNDER: BILLY BUCKNER'S MANAGER LEFT HIM IN THE GAME.Baseball bloopers are fun; they're funny, even. A pitcher slips on the mound and his pitch sails over the backstop. An infielder camps under a pop-up...and the ball lands ten feet away. An outfielder tosses a souvenir to a fan...but that was just the second out, and runners are circling the bases (and laughing). Without these moments, the highlight reels wouldn't...

50th anniversary edition of the story of the team that caused the last, great FA Cup upset...'Times have changed but this book is an engrossing reminder for all fans' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY'An essential piece of British football history for fans of any club. Brilliantly researched and written with an undisguised passion' Guy Mowbray, BBC's Match of the DayToday, it seems inconceivable that a team from the lower reaches of the Champio...