Each played baseball as kids. They all played together on a college baseball juggernaut at Seton Hall. All of them wanted to make baseball their life. The Hit Men and the Kid Who Batted Ninth traces the baseball lives of Craig Biggio, Mo Vaughn, John Valentin, and Marteese Robinson—from the playgrounds through college ball to the big leagues—revealing a fascinating and personal account of four routes to the same destination and dream.
An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseball Scouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring, Christopher Phillips rejects these simplistic divisions. He shows how both scouts and scorers rely on numbers, bureaucracy, trust, and human labor to make sound judgments about the value of baseball players. Tracing baseball’s story from the nineteenth century to today, Phillips explains that the sport was one of the earliest fields to introduce numerical analysis, and new methods of data collection were supposed to enable teams to replace scouting with scoring. But that’s not how things turned out. From the invention of official scorers and Statcast to the creation of the Major League Scouting Bureau, Scouting and Scoring reveals the inextricable connections between human expertise and data science, and offers an entirely fresh understanding of baseball.
Few ballparks still in use today can boast of hosting both Babe Ruth and Vince Lombardi during their playing days. Muzzy Field in Bristol, Connecticut, is one of them. In Muzzy Field, author Douglas S. Malan retells the stories of the events and people who shaped this municipal ballpark that is so rich in history. Tucked away in the woodsy corner of a public park located within the once-gilded boundaries of a manufacturing city, Muzzy Field's illustrious history began as a charitable land donation in 1912. With the financial backing of the sports-minded management at New Departure Manufacturing, the field became home to one of the area's strongest semiprofessional baseball teams; it also welcomed some of the greatest athletes who played the game from Ruth to Martín Dihigo and dozens of Hall of Fame athletes. From its earliest days, the colorful stories of the great barnstorming era of professional sports defined what has become a grand old dame of New England ballparks. With photos included, Muzzy Field relates the long legacy and the fascinating stories of a field that many never knew existed. They are tales from a forgotten ballpark.
First published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1949, Franklin "Whitey" Lewis's The Cleveland Indians begins with the organization's early years as the Cleveland Forest Citys, covers the 1920 World Series victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers, and concludes with the excitement of the 1948 pennant race. This early team history covers such Cleveland legends as Cy Young, from his days in Tuscarawas County and Canton and his time with the Cleveland Spiders; Bob Feller, his discovery and development; and Larry Doby, the second African American to play in the major leagues and the first to play in the American League. It also delivers such forgotten and lesser-known stories as professional baseball's first-ever perfect game, thrown by John Lee Richmond of Worcester against the Cleveland Forest Citys on June 12, 1880; the acquisition of Napoleon Lajoie and the city's vote to change the team's name to the Napoleons (Naps) in his honor; and Charles W. Somers and John F. Kilfoyl and the birth of the American League.
