"This book provides practical strategies for developing the mental skills which help speed you to your full potential."---Dave Winfield What does it mean to play heads-up baseball? A heads-up player has confidence in his ability, keeps control in pressure situations, and focuses on one pitch at a time. His mental skills enable him to play consistently at or near his best despite the adversity baseball presents each day. "My ability to fully focus on what I had to do on a daily basis was what made me the successful player I was. Sure I had some natural ability, but that only gets you so far. I think I learned how to focus; it wasn't something that I was necessarily born with." -- Hank Aaron "Developing and refining my mental game has played a critical role in my success in baseball. For years players have had to develop these skills on their own. This book provides practical strategies for developing the mental skills that will help speed you toward your full potential." -- Dave Winfield

Branca is best known for throwing the pitch that resulted in the historic home run that capped an incredible comeback and won the pennant for the Giants in 1951. He was on the losing end of what many consider to be baseball's most thrilling moment, but that notoriety belies a profoundly successful life and career.

Since the first pitch was thrown, MLB has tracked the performance of every team and player, documented every hit and measured every home run. And while some plays are part of the everyday game, there are moments in baseball when a player's performance reaches a new level of greatness and new records are made. The Major League Baseball Ultimate Book of Records catalogs the game's most remarkable achievements, as well as some of the less traditional and quirky stats that all play a part in the game. MLB's team of in-house writers, researchers and historians have scoured the history of the game and written the most accurate, complete and definitive record of baseball stats and achievements. Major League Baseball Ultimate Book of Records documents the absolute best of the best and packs each achievement into this lavishly illustrated book where fans will be treated to never-before-seen photographs of their favourite players. Double-page spreads will show Henderson racing to second base to claim the stolen base record, while another full color spread celebrates Bond's crushing hit that set a new threshold for most home-runs. All the records are here, each with an account of events and spectacular photographs that make this truly the most spectacular baseball book ever published.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.

Discusses baseball's history and the game's relationship to American society from the 1850s until the present day.

Frommer's latest book takes us to the birthplace of America's most beloved sport. Starting from baseball's humble beginnings, Frommer vividly introduces the reader to the trailblazing personalities that shaped baseball's history. From the first games in Madison, New York to the rise of the National League, Frommer vividly recreates the energy of this early time. Frommer's expertise lends itself to tell the magical story of baseball's history and insight into an era that is not to be forgotten.

This historical baseball sourcebook features exclusive summaries of every major league season, including standings, league leaders, in-depth team profiles, and highlights.

Presents some of baseball's greatest players.

In this book, authors H.A. Dorfman and Karl Kuehl present their practical and proven strategy for developing the mental skills needed to achieve peack performance at every level of the game.

The story behind Major League Baseball’s two-way playing phenomenon and his rise from early days in Japan to his historic 2021 MVP season. Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels is playing baseball like no other major leaguer since Babe Ruth. His dominance as a two-way player—an electric pitcher and an elite slugger—made him the 2021 American League Most Valuable Player, the only player ever selected as an All Star as both a pitcher and hitter, and a member of Time 100’s most influential people of 2021. In Ohtani’s first two-way game of the 2021 season, he threw a pitch at 100 mph and hit a homer that left his bat at 115 mph, a confluence of feats unmatched by anyone else in the sport. He racked up eye-popping achievements all year. But awards and numbers tell only part of his amazing story. In Sho-Time, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Fletcher, who has covered Ohtani more than any other American journalist, charts Ohtani’s path through Japanese baseball to a championship with the Nippon-Ham Fighters, the recruiting war to bring him to the majors, his 2018 AL Rookie of the Year campaign, subsequent injury-riddled seasons, and then his historic 2021 season. Along the way, Fletcher weaves in the history of two-way players—including Babe Ruth and unsung Negro Leagues players like “Bullet” Joe Rogan, Martín Dihigo, and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe—and the Japanese athletes who preceded Ohtani in the majors. With insight from Japanese and American baseball front office personnel, managers, scouts, athletic trainers, ballplayers, and more, Sho-Time breaks down the physics of Ohtani’s game, his technologically advanced training, his international fame, and the role he and teammate Mike Trout are playing to lead baseball into the next generation. Praise for Sho-Time “Jeff Fletcher masterfully chronicles not only what Ohtani accomplished in ‘21, but also provides the full context to his achievements. . . . Fletcher’s book is the definitive look at Ohtani’s two-way majesty.” —Ken Rosenthal, Senior Writer at The Athletic “Historians will be talking about Shohei Ohtani’s 2021 season for decades, and thankfully the baseball gods arranged for Jeff Fletcher to be there to cover baseball’s best two-way player ever in the midst of a pandemic, to bear witness and mine details and write with grace about the sport’s most incredible individual performance.” —Buster Olney, ESPN “The essential portrait of baseball’s most captivating player. . . . Fletcher goes beyond the carefully scripted press conferences, revealing in vivid detail the challenges and triumphs of a baseball journey like no other.” —Tyler Kepner, The New York Times