Addie Joss (1880-1911) mowed down batters for the Cleveland Broncos/Naps from 1902 to 1910 before his career was cut short by his tragic death from tubercular meningitis in 1911. With a career ERA of 1.89 and two no-hitters, Joss earned Hall of Fame election despite a career that lasted less than ten years, the only player to do so. In the off-season, Joss also excelled as a sportswriter for the Toledo News-Bee and the Cleveland Press, filling the empty winter months penning stories about the game he knew firsthand. This collection of Joss's newspaper columns and World Series reports is a treasury of the deadball era with intimate first-person observations of the game and its players from the first decade of the American League. Informative annotations, archival photographs, and a brief biography complete the work.

Addie Joss (1880-1911) mowed down batters for the Cleveland Broncos/Naps from 1902 to 1910 before his career was cut short by his tragic death from tubercular meningitis in 1911. With a career ERA of 1.89 and two no-hitters, Joss earned Hall of Fame election despite a career that lasted less than ten years, the only player to do so. In the off-season, Joss also excelled as a sportswriter for the Toledo News-Bee and the Cleveland Press, filling the empty winter months penning stories about the game he knew firsthand. This collection of Joss's newspaper columns and World Series reports is a treasury of the deadball era with intimate first-person observations of the game and its players from the first decade of the American League. Informative annotations, archival photographs, and a brief biography complete the work.

As a seven-year-old growing up in the small town of Juneau, Wisconsin, Adrian "Addie" Joss had one ambition: To be a ballplayer. He excelled at the high school level, town ball, semi-pro and one year of college. Through hard work and a tremendous fast ball, he earned a tryout with the minor league Toledo Mud Hens. He made the best of the opportunity, and in 1902 became a member of the American League's Cleveland Blues. In his first Major League start against the St. Louis Browns he allowed only one hit, a disputed pop fly single. Weeks later he nearly had a no-hitter against Detroit. In the ninth inning, angry Tiger fans stormed the field, taunting the twenty-two-year-old pitcher. The Tigers got a hit, yet notice was served that Addie Joss had the goods. From 1905 through 1908, Joss won twenty games each season, with a high of twenty-seven in 1907. He had established himself as an elite pitcher, going head-to-head with Rube Waddell, Eddie Plank, Ed Walsh and Walter Johnson. Fans in their suits and straw hats were spellbound watching Addie mow down batter after batter. Even with tiny wooden ballparks and fans standing in the outfield, Joss continued to rack up the wins, including a legendary perfect game in the midst of a fantastic 1908 pennant race between Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Addie Joss was not just a Hall of Fame pitcher. He was an accomplished sportswriter, editing the Sunday sports page for the Toledo News Bee. He wrote features for newspapers all around the United States. Addie had a magnetic personality with friends in every Major League city. Tragically, he only lived to be thirty-one-years-old, dying of tubercular meningitis before the start of the 1911 season. King of the Pitchers takes the reader back to a golden time before radio, television and the earliest computers. A time when fans left their jobs early and boarded a streetcar to get to the ballpark. Scott Longert's book is a must read for baseball fans of any generation.

Among baseball achievements, the perfect game--one in which no runners reach base--remains the greatest. Though many have come close, only 20 pitchers have achieved such perfection in more than a century of baseball. This exhaustive compendium examines the fascinating story behind every perfect game and uncovers details both great and small, illuminating the majesty of these titanic achievements. The faithfully narrated record of all 20 games--punctuated by statistics, trivia, little-known anecdotes, and personal memories from both witnesses and the pitchers themselves--gets inside the minds of the players who made baseball history. In addition to profiling some of the game's greatest pitchers, such as Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, and Randy Johnson, or others including Charley Robertson who had otherwise unremarkable careers, this updated edition features new chapters devoted to Dallas Braden, Mark Buehrle, and Roy Halladay, the three latest pitchers to throw a perfect game, and a comprehensive appendix profiles several pitchers who almost achieved perfection.

"Baseball is a sport with its own lingo and jargon, a colorful patois that developed over decades and millions of games. Jesse Goldberg-Strassler, storyteller, commentator, voice - delves into the language of the national pastime: from Vin Scully's philosophy on no-hitters to Red Barber's classic turns of phrase to a definitive listing of broadcasters' trademark home run call." -- Back cover.

Offering the best in original research and analysis, Base Ball is an annually published book series that promotes the study of baseball's early history, from its protoball roots to 1920, and its rise to prominence within American popular culture. This volume, number 10, brings together 14 articles on a wide range of topics, including the role of physicians in spreading early baseball; the game's financial revolution of 1866, when teams began charging a 25-cent admission price; the prejudice that greeted Japan's Waseda University team during its American tour in 1905; the Addie Joss benefit game and its place in baseball lore; the 1867 western tour of the National Base Ball Club; and entrenched ideas about class and early baseball, with a focus on the supposedly blue-collar Pennsylvania Base Ball Club.

The Cooperstown Casebook by Jay Jaffe provides a definitive guide to the greatest players in baseball history, and the Hall of Fame.

This book is a great read for anyone who loves baseball, not just the collector. Enjoy your look at this snapshot in time! --Book Jacket.

Since 1876, approximately 16,000 young men have enjoyed at least a taste of glory by appearing in big league games, many of them only a few times. By the end of the 2009 season, out of the millions who have aspired, fewer than three thousand individuals had had the good fortune to be a major league regular for five or more seasons. The median age at which they hung up their spikes was 35. However, 197 men played in their last big league contest at the age of 30 or younger. With a focus on the stories of 15 greats and near-greats, this book provides information on these 197 men. Why did their careers end so soon? The reasons are varied and include drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, illness, injury, banishment, and declining ability among others.

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 bag while my eyes were closed. Hilariously self-effacing and brutally honest, Hayhurst captures the absurdities, the grim realities, and the occasional nuggets of hard-won wisdom culled from four seasons in the minors. Whether training tarantulas to protect his room from thieving employees in a backwater hotel, watching the raging battles fought between his partially paralyzed father and his alcoholic brother, or absorbing the gentle mockery of some not-quite-starstruck schoolchildren, Dirk reveals a side of baseball, and life, rarely seen on ESPN. My career has crash-landed on the floor of my grandma's old sewing room. If this is a dream come true, then dreams smell a lot like mothballs and Bengay. Somewhere between Bull Durham and The Rookie, The Bullpen Gospels takes an unforgettable trot around the inglorious base paths of minor league baseball, where an inch separates a ball from a strike, and a razor-thin margin can be the difference between The Show or a long trip home. "It's not often that someone comes along who is a good pitcher and a good writer." --King Kaufman, Salon "After many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years spent in the bullpen, I can verify that this is a true picture of baseball." --Tim McCarver "There are great truths within, of the kind usually unspoken. And as he expresses them, Dirk Hayhurst describes himself as 'a real person who moonlights as a baseball player.' In much the same manner, while The Bullpen Gospels chronicles how all of us face the impact when we learn reality is both far meaner and far richer than our dreams--it also moonlights as one of the best baseball books ever written." --Keith Olbermann "A bit of Jim Bouton, a bit of Jim Brosnan, a bit of Pat Jordan, a bit of crash Davis, and a whole lot of Dirk Hayhurst. Often hilarious, sometimes poignant. This is a really enjoyable baseball read." --Bob Costas "Fascinating. . .a perspective that fans rarely see." --Trevor Hoffman, pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers "The Bullpen Gospels is a rollicking good bus ride of a book. Hayhurst illuminates a baseball life not only with wit and humor, but also with thought-provoking introspection." --Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated "Dirk Hayhurst has written a fascinating, funny and honest account on life in the minor leagues. I loved it. Writers can't play baseball, but in this case, a player sure can write." --Tim Kurkjian, Senior Writer, ESPN The Magazine, analyst/reporter ESPN television "Bull Durham meets Ball Four in Dirk Hayhurst's hilarious and moving account of life in baseball's glamour-free bush leagues." --Rob Neyer, ESPN.com "If Holden Caulfield could dial up his fastball to 90 mph, he might have written this funny, touching memoir about a ballplayer at a career--and life--crossroads. He might have called it 'Pitcher in the Rye.' Instead, he left it to Dirk Hayhurst, the only writer in the business who can make you laugh, make you cry and strike out Ryan Howard." --King Kaufman, Salon "The Bullpen Gospels is a funny bone-tickling, tear duct-stimulating, feel-good story that will leave die-hard baseball fans--and die-hard human beings, for that matter--well, feeling good." --Bob Mitchell, author of Once Upon a Fastball