Examining the connection between baseball and our society as a whole, How Baseball Explains America is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind journey through America's pastime. Longtime USA TODAY baseball editor and columnist Hal Bodley explores just how essential baseball is to understanding the American experience. He takes readers into the Oval Office with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as the former presidents share their thoughts on the game, he looks at the changes that America's Greatest G...

**Now with bonus material on the Chicago Cubs' World Series win, the New York Times-bestselling history of America's most beloved baseball stadium, Wrigley Field, and the Cubs’ century-long search for World Series gloryIn A Nice Little Place on the North Side, leading columnist George Will returns to baseball with a deeply personal look at his hapless Chicago Cubs and their often beatified home, Wrigley Field, as it enters its second century. Baseball, Wi...

In his provocative and compelling new book, America’s most widely read and most influential commentator casts his gimlet eye on our singular nation. Moving far beyond the strict confines of politics, George F. Will offers a fascinating look at the people, stories, and events–often unheralded–that make the American drama so endlessly entertaining and instructive.With Will’s signature erudition and wry wit always on display, One Man’s America chronicles a spectacular, eclect...

**The New York Times-bestselling history of America's most beloved baseball stadium, Wrigley Field, and the Cubs’ century-long search for World Series gloryIn A Nice Little Place on the North Side, leading columnist George Will returns to baseball with a deeply personal look at his hapless Chicago Cubs and their often beatified home, Wrigley Field, as it enters its second century. Baseball, Will argues, is full of metaphors for life, religion, and happine...

Award-winning sports writer Jane Leavy follows her New York Times runaway bestseller Sandy Koufax with the definitive biography of baseball icon Mickey Mantle. The legendary Hall-of-Fame outfielder was a national hero during his record-setting career with the New York Yankees, but public revelations of alcoholism, infidelity, and family strife badly tarnished the ballplayer's reputation in his latter years. In The Last Boy, Leavy plumbs the depths of the complex ...

Best-selling author George Vecsey is an esteemed and award-winning sports journalist for the New York Times. In Baseball, he recounts the history of America's national pastime. Baseball has been around in various forms for thousands of years, but within the last 200 years it has become an American institution. Growing from a sport played in open fields and in big city streets, baseball has seen its share of innovators and detractors, heroes and villains. Vecsey details them all from the sc...

The New York Times bestselling, authorized, “enormously entertaining and wide-ranging” (The Seattle Times) biography of the late, great Willie Mays.Willie Mays (1931–2024) was arguably the greatest player in baseball history, revered for the passion he brought to the game. He began as a teenager in the Negro Leagues, became a cult hero in New York, and was the headliner in Major League Baseball’s bold expansion to California. He was a blend of pow...

April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. World War II had just ended. Democracy had triumphed. Now Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front—and Robinson had a chance to lead the way.He was an unlikely hero. He had little experience in organized baseball. His ...

In the thirty-four years since his retirement, Henry Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude: he broke existing records (rbis, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least thirty home runs per season fifteen times, becoming the first player in history to hammer five hundred home runs and three thousand hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures.Based on ...

Everyone has an opinion about the Yankees. More than an opinion in most cases, but an opinion at the very least.—From the IntroductionLove them or hate them, the New York Yankees have been an American institution for nearly a century. With their rich history and colorful cast of characters, the Yankees never fail to inspire or provoke. In this exciting compendium, some of today's most acclaimed writers—including Pete Dexter, Colum McCann, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Barry, Jane Leav...

Journalist Robert Weintraub vividly recreates the pivotal year that transformed the New York Yankees into the legendary franchise of today. Overshadowed by the New York Giants, the hapless Yankees played their home games at the ballpark of their cross-town rivals. But when Yankee Stadium was completed in 1923, Babe Ruth bounced back from a disappointing season-launching the Yankees' storied history and immortalizing the stadium as the "House That Ruth Built."

Originally published in 1976, James A. Michener’s explosive, spectacular Sports in America is a prescient examination of the crisis in American sports that is still unfolding to this day. Pro basketball players are banned for narcotics use, while a Major League pitcher is arrested for smuggling drugs across the Mexican border. The NFL’s “injury report” grows longer every Sunday. Corruption and recruiting violations plague collegiate sports as the “winning is everything” mentality ...