This book will fill readers with the confidence they need to add prayer to life.

In the most complete and compelling account of the origins of professional football, The Sunday Game tells the stories of all the teams that played independent football in the small towns and industrial cities of the Midwest, from early in the twentieth century to the beginning of the National Football League shortly after the end of World War I. The foundations of what is now the most popular professional sport in America were laid by such teams as the Canton Bulldogs and the Hammond Clab...

Sometimes life just seems to get the best of us. The wounds can cut very deep on occasion: addiction, divorce, grief, feeling unloved and unwanted, and so many others. And the scars may never entirely heal. However, our Christian faith urges us to recall that Jesus rose from the tomb with visible but transformed wounds, demonstrating that nothing in life is wasted in the economy of God's mercy. Getting Through the Hurt offers timely reflections on how God's grace gently permeates...

The Black Sox Scandal is a cold case, not a closed case.When Eliot Asinof wrote his classic history about the fixing of the 1919 World Series, Eight Men Out, he told a dramatic story of undereducated and underpaid Chicago White Sox ballplayers, disgruntled by their low pay and poor treatment by team management, who fell prey to the wiles of double-crossing big-city gamblers offering them bribes to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Wea...

Southern Methodist University in Dallas is one of numerous prestigious universities in Texas. The school’s football team was the pride of the university and the city. Before the late 1970s, however, the relatively small school had trouble recruiting and struggled to keep up with the big-time football universities that were often more than double its size. Under pressure to compete, the SMU football program engaged in ethics, rules, and recruiting violations for years. When the corruption c...

As befits a game traditionally passed from one generation to the next, baseball has always had a special reverence for origins. Claims of being first with any element of the game are disputed with fervor and passion. When the octogenarian Fred Goldsmith died in 1939, a headline proclaimed, 'Goldsmith Dies Insisting He Invented Curve Ball'; Fred Goldsmith understood the secret of immortality. Yet while countless thousands of words have been spilled on the subject of baseball “firsts,” there...

From an AP sports writer and author, a history of Pennsylvania State University's Nittany Lions, with personal stories from coaches and players.In Tales from Penn State Football, Ken Rappoport puts you on the fifty-yard line and sometimes gets you a seat on the bench or a stall in the locker room. From the first team in the 1880s to the celebrated Joe Paterno teams of the 20th century, Penn State's most entertaining—and legendary—football stories are chroni...

WE ARE . . . SPORTS BY THE NUMBERS. The new, exciting, and completely original book series continues with an in-depth look at the proud history of Penn State football.THE TEAM: Rooted in success achieved through dignity and situated amongst the rolling farmland of Pennsylvania’s “T” region, the Penn State football program has won two national championships and posted seven undefeated, untied seasons as far back as 1887. The Sports by the Numbers franchise combs through the program’...

With almost 150 years of baseball history, the stories of many players from before 1900 were long obscured. The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) first attempted to remedy this in 1989 by publishing a collection of 136 fascinating biographies of talented late-1800s players. Twenty-three years later, Nineteenth Century Stars has been updated with revised stats and re-released in both a new paperback and in e-book form.Baseball didn't begin as the strictly profes...

The unknown story of the Black pioneers who collectively changed the face of the NFL in 1946.THE FORGOTTEN FIRST chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come.More than a year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier i...

Win one for The Gipper. Has there ever been a better-known and widely-used exhortative phrase in sports? Not likely. But who was the “Gipper,” this mythical-like sports figure whose nickname has aroused, in turn, awe, wonderment, curiosity, and amusement since the second decade of the twentieth century, and why is his story important? Answering those questions is the formidable task taken on here by veteran sportswriter Jack Cavanaugh, whose Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography of b...

One of the greatest centerfielders ever, Tris Speaker's career was full of colorful moments on and off the field. This biography chronicles his career spent with the Boston Red Sox, the Cleveland Indians, the Washington Senators, and the Philadelphia Athletics. It also follows his years as a minor league manager and part owner, civic activist, Indians coach, and general promoter of baseball. Every significant major league game is described in detail, along with the careers of Speaker's tea...