Get fit for baseball season! A specialized strength and conditioning program for young athletes. Developed by best-selling fitness author and strength and conditioning expert Mike Volkmar, The High School Athlete: Baseball is the essential strength and conditioning program for any student athlete who wants to achieve and excel on the varsity baseball team. Third in The High School Athlete series, this unique program features training fundamentals for different levels of player development from pre-freshman all the way to varsity level getting ready to play in college. With over 100 workouts, The High School Athlete: Baseball also contains information geared towards a young athlete's goals and includes information on player development, motivation, and nutrition.
The author chronicles his son's senior year of high school baseball, the boy's obsession with and talent for sports, and his efforts to keep his grades up while deciding what college to attend and avoiding problems until graduation.
In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.
Coach Ron Wolforth reveals truths about pitching that are rarely shared with the public. In Survival Guide for the Parent of the Elite Pitcher, you'll find straight talk from America's "Go-To-Guy" on Pitching. "Relying on first-hand experience, in this type of arena, can be quite costly. Imagine if you could avoid injury for your son's arm, or body? Would you want him to "learn the hard way"? Baseball is a game that requires a ton of perspective from a parent's viewpoint. All that matters when your son is 12, or 16, or 18 is that along the development curve he has a chance to reach his potential. Regardless of what that potential ceiling is, relying on first-hand knowledge with the possibility of injury and ineffectiveness is not secure. As a kid, I was a great reader, and from A-Z it seemed like I'd read every available book on pitching, even skimming biographies for inspiration. I never got my hands on Ron's method until I was already in the major leagues, which by that time I'd already had enough injuries to essential body parts. Perhaps if my family and myself could rewind the clock, then I might have been able to avoid some of the injuries and their lasting effects. A saying you learn in the minor leagues: nobody gets sent to the big leagues from the training room. Find a way to make yourself stronger, more stable mechanically, and mentally by working on the right program and having a bit of perspective. It's more important to improve, and if you are going for the top, you better do what you can to keep yourself in onepiece." -C.J. Wilson Major League Picher, Los Angeles Angels 2011 American League All-Star
Strength Training for Baseball will help you create a baseball-specific resistance training program to help athletes at each position--pitchers, catchers, middle infielders, corner infielders, center fielders, and corner outfielders--develop strength and power that will serve them on the field.
"One Shot at Forever is powerful, inspirational. . . This isn't merely a book about baseball. It's a book about heart." -- Jeff Pearlman, New York Times bestselling author of Boys Will Be Boys and The Bad Guys Won In 1971, a small-town high school baseball team from rural Illinois, playing with hand-me-down uniforms and peace signs on their hats, defied convention and the odds. Led by an English teacher with no coaching experience, the Macon Ironmen emerged from a field of 370 teams to represent the smallest school in Illinois history to make the state final, a distinction that still stands. There the Ironmen would play against a Chicago powerhouse in a dramatic game that would change their lives forever. In this gripping, cinematic narrative, Chris Ballard tells the story of the team and its coach, Lynn Sweet: a hippie, dreamer, and intellectual who arrived in Macon in 1966, bringing progressive ideas to a town stuck in the Eisenhower era. Beloved by students but not administration, Sweet reluctantly took over the ragtag team, intent on teaching the boys as much about life as baseball. Together they embarked on an improbable postseason run that buoyed a small town in desperate need of something to celebrate. Engaging and poignant, One Shot at Forever is a testament to the power of high school sports to shape the lives of those who play them, and it reminds us that there are few bonds more sacred than that among a coach, a team, and a town. "Macon's run at the title reminds us why sports matter and why sportswriting has such great power to inspire. . . [It's] one hell of a good story, and Ballard has written one hell of a good book." -- Jonathan Eig, Chicago Tribune
PARENTING NEVER ENDS. From the founders of the #1 site for parents of teens and young adults comes an essential guide for building strong relationships with your teens and preparing them to successfully launch into adulthood The high school and college years: an extended roller coaster of academics, friends, first loves, first break-ups, driver’s ed, jobs, and everything in between. Kids are constantly changing and how we parent them must change, too. But how do we stay close as a family as our lives move apart? Enter the co-founders of Grown and Flown, Lisa Heffernan and Mary Dell Harrington. In the midst of guiding their own kids through this transition, they launched what has become the largest website and online community for parents of fifteen to twenty-five year olds. Now they’ve compiled new takeaways and fresh insights from all that they’ve learned into this handy, must-have guide. Grown and Flown is a one-stop resource for parenting teenagers, leading up to—and through—high school and those first years of independence. It covers everything from the monumental (how to let your kids go) to the mundane (how to shop for a dorm room). Organized by topic—such as academics, anxiety and mental health, college life—it features a combination of stories, advice from professionals, and practical sidebars. Consider this your parenting lifeline: an easy-to-use manual that offers support and perspective. Grown and Flown is required reading for anyone looking to raise an adult with whom you have an enduring, profound connection.
