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.
Ted Williams was a giant of a man, the likes of whom America may never see again. Enshrined in Cooperstown in 1966, in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Ted Williams was also the first living athlete to be honored with his own Museum - the Ted Williams Museum and Hitter's Hall of Fame.
Advance Praise for THE 50 GREATEST RED SOX GAMES "Here's the deal. It costs about $43 for a grandstand seat at Fenway Park these days, unless you buy the ticket from a scalper, which makes the cost $2 million. If you went to just 50 games of any dimension that means the cost would be either $2,150 or $100 million. Here, for considerably less, you get the 50 greatest games the Red Sox ever played plus tight prose, snappy anecdotes, and reasoned judgments. Bargains like this don't come often. Plus, you don't even have to pay for parking." --Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero "It's a daunting task, but Cecilia Tan and Bill Nowlin have come up with the Red Sox greatest hits album, the box set. Enjoy." --Dan Shaughnessy, author of Reversing the Curse "Old Towne Team fans will think they have died and gone to heaven with The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games in their grasp. Informative, exciting, entertaining . . . Cecilia Tan and Bill Nowlin have done a good deed for the Fenway faithful." --Harvey Frommer, coauthor of Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry
