Books about Scouting from Amazon.com

"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).

I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?

With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.

What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.

In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David?.
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In college football circles, the first Wednesday in February is New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas all rolled into one. It’s payoff time for a year spent screening miles of videotape and probing mountains of data, balancing the promise of a dazzling 40-yard-dash time against the perils of a putrid GPA, and text-messaging high schoolers 50 times a day. It’s the day when coaches across the country camp out in front of their fax machines waiting for their football futures to be decided by a bunch of 18-year-olds.

It’s National Signing Day.

In this surprising and unprecedented dissection of college football’s secret season, author Bruce Feldman takes you deep inside the war room of Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron, the combustible Cajun who built national championship teams at the University of Miami and USC before setting up shop in the Deep South. In a blow-by-blow account of the year leading up to National Signing Day 2007, Feldman reveals the inner secrets of Orgeron’s success, recounting every step along the way as Orgeron and his Ole Miss staff pick 25 winners from a list of 1,000 names.

Meat Market makes the actual football season—the one that runs from September through January—read like a postscript..
Price: $12.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

First published in 1882, this is a wealth of projects and games, with practical directions on how to make them, by one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America The ultimate pre-TV, anti-couch potato activity book, it answers the question, "What's there to do?".
Price: $8.22 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Considered the bible of scouting techniques" according to the Los Angeles Times, Football Scouting Methods explains the basic scouting strategies and insights of author Steve Belichick. He was widely viewed as the ablest football scout of his time and coached at the U.S. Naval Academy for 33 years; his son is New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a three-time Super Bowl winner.

When Steve Belichick died in November 2005, the New York Times headline cited him as "Coach Who Wrote the Book on Scouting," and quoted Houston Texans General Manager Charley Casserly calling Football Scouting Methods "the best book on scouting he had ever read." Joe Bellino, Navy's Heisman Trophy winner in 1960, told the Times that Steve Belichick "was a genius. On Monday nights, he would give us his scouting reports, and even though we were playing powerhouses, I always felt we were prepared because he found a way for us to win."

In recent years Football Scouting Methods has been one of the top ten most sought out-of-print books; used copies have been quite scarce. This reissue edition makes the original 1962 text available once again in exact facsimile.

The book covers how to scout opponents, recognize defenses, analyze offenses, discover "tip-offs" that reveal the opponent's plays, compose a useful report, self-scout, and conduct postgame analysis.

"Steve Belichick taught many younger men how to scout and how to watch film and how to prepare their teams for the next week's game," David Halberstam noted in the Washington Post, and his best student was his own son Bill Belichick, "one of whose greatest skills as a coach to this day remains his ability to analyze other teams, figuring out both their strengths and their vulnerabilities, and shrewdly deciding how to take away from them that which they most want to do."

When CBS asked Bill Belichick to name his favorite book, he replied "Well, I've got to go with my dad's. Football Scouting Methods. I'd have to go with that.".
Price: $14.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

If Tom Sawyer had been a girl, Aunt Polly would certainly have seen to it that she had a copy of this book and with a heartfelt blessing. Its a magical cornucopia of projects, devices, toys, gifts, dolls, recipes, decorations, perfumes, wax and clay modelling, oil and water-color painting and games, all with clear and practical directions for how to make and play them. Vintage Americana by the Beard sisters, two of the founders of Girl Scouting in the United States.

"In the Beard sisters' version, 'the American girl' ranges in age from eight to eighteen. Healthy and spirited, she thinks nothing of taking a ten-mile 'romp' through woods and fields with a group of friends, and collects flowers and leaves for preservation or presentation to friends and relations. Above all, however, the Beards' girl is handy. She can make a hat rack, a screen, or a bookshelf; fashion a macrame hammock or a cornhusk doll; and draw, paint, sculpt, or decorate a room.
The American Girls Handy Book, in short, by emphasizing what girls can do, presents a portrait of girlhood that is vigorous, active, and full of possibilities."
- From the foreword by Anne M. Boylan.
Price: $4.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $5.64 [Notify me when price goes down.]

WHEN YOU'RE IN THE DEATH BUSINESS,
EACH DAWN COULD BE YOUR LAST.

Raw, straightforward, and powerful, Ed Kugler's account of his two years as a Marine scout-sniper in Vietnam vividly captures his experiences there--the good, the bad, and the ugly. After enlisting in the Marines at seventeen, then being wounded in Santo Domingo during the Dominican crisis, Kugler arrived in Vietnam in early 1966.

As a new sniper with the 4th Marines, Kugler picked up bush skills while attached to 3d Force Recon Company, and then joined the grunts. To take advantage of that experience, he formed the Rogues, a five-sniper team that hunted in the Co Bi-Than Tan Valley for VC and NVA. His descriptions of long, tense waits, sudden deadly action, and NVA countersniper ambushes are fascinating.

In DEAD CENTER, Kugler demonstrates the importance to a sniper of patience, marksmanship, bush skills, and guts--while underscoring exactly what a country demands of its youth when it sends them to war. .
Price: $3.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This manual is packed with practical lessons, on-the-ground tricks, training drills and equipment suggestions for the solo tracker on up to a multiagency tracking operation. Learn from a 30-year veteran how to find and follow tracks through any terrain; assess the age of tracks; relocate the trail after it's gone missing; foil every effort to throw off your pursuit; coordinate a four-man team while tracking armed fugitives; set up and run large tracking operations, use the latest high-tech gear to find fugitives and more..
Price: $21.93 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Hunters strapped by today's demanding schedules will find practical solutions for getting in the woods more often and tips for an improved hunt in this rare resource. This latest release from our popular line of whitetail handbooks is aimed at intermediate and advanced hunters, but includes valuable information for hunting enthusiasts of all skill levels!

For every deer hunter whose biggest problem is finding the time to get in the woods, this book offers easy and effective tips to make the time, and the best use of it. With chapters like "Scout Less, Hunt More," "Think Like a Deer," "Win the Small Woods Chess Game," and "Get Private Out in Public," and a collection of 110+ detailed photos and illustrations, this book is the time-saving guide hunters will covet.

-110+ photos and illustrations demonstrate time saving techniques

-Portable-size guide is perfect for use outdoors

-Tips on making time to hunt and using it wisely are easy to apply.
Price: $11.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]