Books about Leaguers from Amazon.com

There are baseball books and there are baseball books.

But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers.

Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'"

And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year..
Price: $12.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Of all the players in the little league, Harold was the littlest

No matter how hard he tries, Harold is no good at baseball The ground balls always bounce over his head, and his little legs never get him to the pop flies fast enough. So the only place Coach Lombardi puts him is on the bench. Until one day, during a very important game, Harold gets his big chance to show that being little isn't so bad after all.

.
Price: $1.20 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $13.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For the record, Moses "Fleetwood" Walker was born in Ohio four years before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, attended Oberlin College, studied law at the University of Michigan, was acquitted of first-degree murder in Syracuse, was granted a patent for an artillery shell, was convicted of mail robbery in Ohio, ran a hotel, edited a newspaper, wrote a well-regarded treatise advocating the emigration of blacks back to Africa, and spent the years before his death in 1924 running a theater that offered opera, live drama, and motion pictures. All of which are footnotes to the one overriding fact of his multidimensional life: Walker was black, and in 1884, he played 42 games for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, then recognized as a Major League.

A good ballplayer, though not a great one, Walker predated Jackie Robinson to the bigs by more than 60 years, faced the same hatreds, and suffered the same indignities. The White Sox's Cap Anson, generally regarded as the 19th century's greatest star, decided baseball should be racially pure; he personally hounded Walker out of the game. Out of the game, Walker made a life for himself--an interesting, full, and often angry one that balanced precariously on the edge of racial tensions and civil rights.

He was such a socially and historically rich character that it's too bad his life found such a prosaic chronicler. Still, Zang's biography is essential because it's there. The story it tells is a necessary one. He's done fine work in unearthing the facts of Walker's life, but he never seems able to reach out and touch the man. --Jeff Silverman.
Price: $74.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Pádraig Ó Fathaigh ( 1879-1976) was a lifelong Gaelic Leaguer and teacher of Irish. Already a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers before 1916, O Fathaigh was arrested on Easter Tuesday before he could join forces with Liam Mellows. He spent the next year undergoing penal servitude, the first of four terms of imprisonment between 1916 and 1920. When at liberty he acted as an intelligence officer in South Galway and Mid-Clare, taking part in some minor ambushes. His detailed and thoughtful handwritten recollections of life " on the run" and in prison portray the widening chasm between Irish nationalists and agents of authority such as the police. For men like Ó Fathaig, the Irish language was essential to nationality, providing access to a secret world which the oppressor could never enter. These personal recollections will interest all students of the Irish revolution and the Gaelic revival.
Price: $5.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The playing and post-playing careers of all 1,560 players who appeared in a major league box score between 1950 and 1959—the "golden age," many say—are profiled in this exhaustive work. From Aaron to Zuverink: this treasure-trove of anecdotes, many gathered from personal interviews, are full of historical facts, controversy, and trivia.

For example, readers will learn, or be reminded, that Humberto Robinson, a Milwaukee Braves pitcher, was approached by a gambler and asked to fix a game against the Phillies, that Joe Adcock chased Giants pitcher Ruben Gomez with a bat around the field, Bob Turley reached the top of the corporate ladder after his playing days, Casey Wise became an orthodontist, Bobby Brown became a heart surgeon and president of the AL, and that Chuck Conners became an actor. All of this and much more can be found here..
Price: $42.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]