From Zack Hample’s The Baseball, this is the definitive, always-entertaining, never-fail guide to successfully snagging baseballs at Major League games.Luck—or hard work and skill? Zack Hample has caught more than 7,600 baseballs from the stands of 51 major league stadiums. His snags include Mike Trout’s first career home run and Barry Bonds’s 724th; the last homer hit by a Met at Shea Stadium; and a regular old Cubs-Reds contest from which Hample walked a...

The Baseball is a salute to the ball, filled with insider trivia, anecdotes, and generations of ball-induced insanity—from Zack Hample, the bestselling author of Watching Baseball Smarter• Which Hall of Famer once caught a ball dropped from an airplane?• Why do balls get stamped with invisible ink?• What’s the best ticket to buy for catching a foul ball?• Whic...

Zack Hample's bestselling, smart, and funny fan’s guide to baseball explains the ins and outs of pitching, hitting, running, and fielding, while offering insider trivia and anecdotes that will appeal to anyone—whether you're a major league couch potato, life-long season ticket-holder, or a beginner.• What is the difference between a slider and a curveball?• At which stadium did “The Wave” first make an appearance?

An insider’s look at baseball’s unwritten rules, explained with examples from the game’s most fascinating characters and wildest historical moments.Everyone knows that baseball is a game of intricate regulations, but it turns out to be even more complicated than we realize. All aspects of baseball—hitting, pitching, and baserunning—are affected by the Code, a set of unwritten rules that governs the Major League game. Some of these rules are openly discussed (don’t steal a ...

From the humble heights of a Class-A pitcher's mound to the deflating lows of sleeping on his gun-toting grandmother's air mattress, veteran reliever Dirk Hayhurst steps out of the bullpen to deliver the best pitch of his career--a raw, unflinching and surprisingly moving account of his life in the minors.I enjoyed the visualizations, maybe a little too much, and would stop only when I felt I'd centered myself. . .or after one of my teammates hit me in the nuts with the rosin b...

In 1996, a brassy young team of fansproduced a guide to baseball statistics.Printed on a photocopier, its distribution,which was in the low hundreds, was limited tofriends, family, and die-hard stat heads. Sixteenyears later, the Baseball Prospectus annualregularly hits best-seller lists and has becomean indispensable guide for the serious fan.In Extra Innings, the team at Baseball Prospectusintegrates statistics, interviews, and analysis todeliver twenty arguments about t...

“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The NumberIn Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles a...

In Scorecasting, University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports, and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball, baseball, football, and hockey games are played, won and lost.Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-...

"Dirk Hayhurst has done it again. . .Turns out he's a starter and a closer." —Tim Kurkjian, ESPNAs a major and not-so-major league pitcher, Dirk Hayhurst has learned to master more than striking out batters. While waiting for his name to be called in the bullpen, he honed his gifts as a storyteller, one the New York Times calls the "best writer in a baseball uniform." In this often hilarious collection of adventures on and off the diamond, Dirk details the intricacies of pulling of...

**The New York Times bestseller from the author of The Bullpen Gospels. “**A humorous, candid and insightful memoir . . . Grade: Home Run.”—Cleveland Plain DealerAfter six years in the minors, pitcher Dirk Hayhurst hopes 2008 is the year he breaks into the big leagues. But every time Dirk looks up, the bases are loaded with challenges—a wedding balancing on a blind hope, a family in chaos, and paychecks that beg Dirk to ask, “How long can...

The Toronto Blue Jays pitcher recounts his fateful season of injury, rehab, and reinvention in a memoir by “the best writer in a baseball uniform” (Tyler Kepner, The New York Times).After nearly a decade in the minors, Dirk Hayhurst defied the odds to climb onto the pitcher's mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Newly married, with a big league paycheck and a brand new house, Hayhurst was ready for a great season in the Bigs.Then fate delivered a crush...

Since he first began publishing his Baseball Abstracts in the 1980s, Bill James has constantly challenged conventional wisdom by asking simple questions like, "Is that really true?" or "What if we looked at the question this way?" He has sparked a virtual revolution in the way the game of baseball is understood and played, from how players are evaluated or positioned to whether or not they should attempt to bunt or steal a base. In Solid Fool s Gold James continues his lifelong work with n...