There are baseball heroes-and then there are legends. Dizzy Dean stands among the legendary players who have truly left their mark on America's game. History remembers Dizzy not only for his prowess on the pitcher's mound, but also for his character off of it. Dizzy and the Gashouse Gang takes readers back in time to a simpler era in Major League Baseball, when the St. Louis Cardinals ruled the roost. Follow Dizzy and his teammates on their journey as they grow from a ragtag bunch of misfits to true world champions.

The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals were one of the most colorful crews ever to play the National Pastime. Sportswriters delighted in assigning nicknames to the players, based on their real or imagined qualities. What a cast of characters it was! None was more picturesque than Pepper Martin, the “Wild Horse of the Osage,” who ran the bases with reckless abandon, led his team­mates in off­ the­field hi­jinks, and organized a hillbilly band called the Mississippi Mudcats. He was quite a baseball player, the star of the 1931 World Series and a significant contributor to the 1934 championship. The harmonica player for the Mudcats was the irrepressible Dizzy Dean. Full of braggadocio, Dean delivered on his boasts by winning 30 games in 1934, the last National League hurler to achieve that feat. Dizzy and his brother Paul accounted for all of the Cardinal victories in the 1934 World Series. Some writers tried to pin the moniker Daffy on Paul, but that name didn’t fit the younger and much quieter brother. The club’s hitters were led by the New Jersey strong boy, Joe “Ducky” Medwick, who hated the nickname, preferring to be called “Muscles.” Presiding over this aggregation was the “Fordham Flash,” Frankie Frisch. Rounding out the club were worthies bearing such nicknames as Ripper, “Leo the Lip,” Spud, Kiddo, Pop, Dazzy, Ol’ Stubblebeard, Wild Bill, Buster, Chick, Red, and Tex. Some of these were aging stars, past their prime, and others were youngsters, on their way up. Together they comprised a championship ball club. “The Gas House Gang was the greatest baseball club I ever saw. They thought they could beat any ballclub and they just about could too. When they got on that ballfield, they played baseball, and they played it to the hilt too. When they slid, they slid hard. There was no good fellowship between them and the opposition. They were just good, tough ballplayers.” — Cardinals infielder Burgess Whitehead on "When It Was A Game," HBO Sports, 1991

Explore over a century of Cardinals baseball in this illustrated tour of the players, teams, ballparks, and historic moments! With a legacy that goes back to the Brown Stockings of the old American Association, the St. Louis Cardinals have one of the longest and greatest traditions in the history of baseball. Winners of ten World Series titles (second only to the New York Yankees) and twenty-one pennants dating back to 1885, the Redbirds have established a dynasty across the decades—from Charlie Comiskey’s four-time AA champs, through the “Gashouse Gang” of the 1930s and the “Runnin’ Redbirds” in the 1980s, up to the 2006 World Champions. Front-office pioneers like Chris von der Ahe and Branch Rickey have put the Cardinals franchise at the forefront of innovation, while bringing in some of baseball’s greatest talent—pitchers Dizzy Dean to Bob Gibson, sluggers Johnny Mize to Mark McGwire, and all-around superstars like Rogers “Rajah” Hornsby, Stan “the Man” Musial, and Albert Pujols. Pairing historic black-and-white photos and contemporary images of the modern game, St. Louis Cardinals: Past & Present explores the ballparks and the fans, the players and the teams that have defined Cardinals baseball.

“I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?” The history of baseball is rife with colorful characters. But for sheer cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win, very few have come close to Leo “the Lip” Durocher. Following a five-decade career as a player and manager for baseball’s most storied franchises, Durocher teamed up with veteran sportswriter Ed Linn to tell the story of his life in the game. The resulting book, Nice Guys Finish Last, is baseball at its best, brimming with personality and full of all the fights and feuds, triumphs and tricks that made Durocher such a success—and an outsized celebrity. Durocher began his career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees and hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him “the All-American Out.” But soon Durocher hit his stride: traded to St. Louis, he found his headlong play and never-say-die attitude a perfect fit with the rambunctious “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals. In 1939, he was named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers—and almost instantly transformed the underachieving Bums into perennial contenders. He went on to manage the New York Giants, sharing the glory of one of the most famous moments in baseball history, Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world,” which won the Giants the 1951 pennant. Durocher would later learn how it felt to be on the other side of such an unforgettable moment, as his 1969 Cubs, after holding first place for 105 days, blew a seemingly insurmountable 8-1/2-game lead to the Miracle Mets. All the while, Durocher made as much noise off the field as on it. His perpetual feuds with players, owners, and league officials—not to mention his public associations with gamblers, riffraff, and Hollywood stars like George Raft and Larraine Day—kept his name in the headlines and spread his fame far beyond the confines of the diamond. A no-holds-barred account of a singular figure, Nice Guys Finish Last brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball’s greatest era to vivid life, earning a place on every baseball fan’s bookshelf.

The story of Dean's (1911-1974) magical seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs and his 25-year broadcasting career, first in radio and then as the nation's first regular play-by-play announcer on television. With 16 pages of bandw photographs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

With The Gashouse Gang, John Heidenry delivers the definitive account of one the greatest and most colorful baseball teams of all times, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, filled with larger-than-life baseball personalities like Branch Rickey, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Casey Stengel, Satchel Paige, Frankie Frisch, and -- especially -- the eccentric good ol' boy and great pitcher Dizzy Dean and his brother Paul. The year 1934 marked the lowest point of the Great Depression, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, banks collapsed by the score, and millions of Americans were out of work. Epic baseball feats offered welcome relief from the hardships of daily life. The Gashouse Gang, the brilliant culmination of a dream by its general manager, Branch Rickey, the first to envision a farm system that would acquire and "educate" young players in the art of baseball, was adored by the nation, who saw itself -- scruffy, proud, and unbeatable -- in the Gang. Based on original research and told in entertaining narrative style, The Gashouse Gang brings a bygone era and a cast full of vivid personalities to life and unearths a treasure trove of baseball lore that will delight any fan of the great American pastime.

He was not much of a player and not much more of a manager, but by the time Branch Rickey (1881-1965) finished with baseball, he had revolutionized the sport--not just once but three times. In this definitive biography of Rickey--the man sportswriters dubbed "The Brain," "The Mahatma," and, on occasion, "El Cheapo"--Lee Lowenfish tells the full and colorful story of a life that forever changed the face of America's game. As the mastermind behind the Saint Louis Cardinals from 1917 to 1942, Rickey created the farm system, which allowed small-market clubs to compete with the rich and powerful. Under his direction in the 1940s, the Brooklyn Dodgers became truly the first "America's team." By signing Jackie Robinson and other black players, he single-handedly thrust baseball into the forefront of the civil rights movement. Lowenfish evokes the peculiarly American complex of God, family, and baseball that informed Rickey's actions and his accomplishments. His book offers an intriguing, richly detailed portrait of a man whose life is itself a crucial chapter in the history of American business, sport, and society.

Prove It: A Climate Revelation for People Just like You! presents a readable, nontechnical explanation of what does and does not cause "climate change." The conclusions are new to the climate debate, they are demonstrably proven, and they convey the feeling of comfort that follows naturally from plain spoken truth. The book's theme, "Climate cycles, not climate change," is supported by proven science in many disciplines. Because highly relevant proven facts are being widely ignored, there is a need for understanding by the "people" of all the facts before prudent policy can be set. The book directly challenges the prevailing "settled science" of climate theories in the United States, which is demonstrably incorrect. If left unchallenged, these theories will cause economic and psychological damage to many people for many years to come. Short chapters in the book are devoted to what is in fact very complex science (e.g., photosynthesis, changes in the earth's orbit about the sun, and the critical importance of CO2 in the oceans and atmosphere to sustain life on earth). The perhaps surprising definition of fossil fuels as "stored solar energy" is directly related to the documented decline of atmospheric CO2 content over the last 500 million years. We present a hypothesis as to why this decline in CO2 is happening. There is a playful tone; for example, CO2 is introduced with the metaphor of Beauty and the Beast, with CO2, the source of life, widely feared as the Beast embodiment of the evils of industrialization! The story is child-friendly, definitely not nightmare material. In summary, the ultimate aim of this book is to inform and teach, and the ultimate audience is the students of present and future generations.

A sophisticated study of how bodies and language move and are moved by each other Kenneth Burke may be best known for his theories of dramatism and of language as symbolic action, but few know him as one of the twentieth century's foremost theorists of the relationship between language and bodies. In Moving Bodies, Debra Hawhee focuses on Burke's studies from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s while illustrating that his interest in reading the body as a central force of communication began early in his career. By exploring Burke's extensive writings on the subject alongside revealing considerations of his life and his scholarship, Hawhee maps his recurring invocation of a variety of disciplinary perspectives in order to theorize bodies and communication, working across and even beyond the arts, humanities, and sciences. Burke's sustained analysis of the body drew on approaches representing a range of specialties and interests, including music, mysticism, endocrinology, evolution, speech-gesture theory, and speech-act theory, as well as his personal experiences with pain and illness. Hawhee shows that Burke's goal was to advance understanding of the body's relationship to identity, to the creation of meaning, and to the circulation of language. Her study brings to the fore one of Burke's most important and understudied contributions to language theory, and she establishes Burke as a pioneer in a field where investigations into affect, movement, and sense perception broaden understanding of physical ways of knowing.