SABR

SABR Digital Library

Download new and classic books from the SABR Digital Library all year long. Here are the titles we've recently published:

CAN HE PLAY?
A Look At Baseball Scouts And Their Profession
edited by Jim Sandoval and Bill Nowlin
$9.99 e-book/$19.95 paperback
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-933599-25-0
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-933599-23-6
200 pages, 8.5”x11”, 100 photos

They dig through tons of coal to find a single diamond. They spend countless hours traveling miles and miles on lonely back roads and way too much time in hotels. Their front offices expect them to constantly provide player reports and updates. So much of their time is spent away from family and friends, missing birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. Their best friend is Rand McNally. Always asking the question, “CAN HE PLAY?” Such is the life of a professional scout.

CAN HE PLAY? collects the contributions of 26 members of the Society for American Baseball Research on the subject of scouts, including biographies and historical essays. The book touches on more than a century of scouts and scouting with a focus on the men (and the occasional woman) who have taken on the task of scouring the world for the best ballplayers available. In CAN HE PLAY? we meet the “King of Weeds,” a Ph.D. we call “Baseball’s Renaissance Man,” a husband-and-wife team, pioneering Latin scouts, and a Japanese-American interned during World War II who became a successful scout—and many, many more.

For those interested in learning more about scouts and scouting, and helping contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the profession, please consider joining SABR and the Scouts Committee.

Buy the book: CAN HE PLAY? A Look At Baseball Scouts And Their Profession

SABR members: This book is available as a FREE e-book download until February 29, 2012.

Non-members

This e-book is also available for purchase at Barnes & Noble.com, Omnilit and other online retailers.

RUN, RABBIT, RUN
The Hilarious and Mostly True Tales of Rabbit Maranville
By Walter "Rabbit" Maranville
Introduction by Harold Seymour, Ph.D.; afterword by Bob Carroll
$5.99 e-book/$9.95 paperback
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-933599-27-4
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-933599-26-7
96 pages, 8.5”x11”

RUN, RABBIT, RUN is the unfinished autobiography of Hall of Fame infielder Walter "Rabbit" Maranville — one of baseball's all-time funny characters. He was a star shortstop on the "Miracle" Boston Braves' world championship team of 1914 and, despite his 5-foot-5 stature and weak bat, served as the team's cleanup hitter in those Deadball Era days. He did compile 2,605 career hits, but it was his stellar defensive play that kept him in the major leagues for 23 colorful seasons with the Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs.

At the urging of his daughter and sports writer Max Kase, Maranville put down on paper his collection of amusing anecdotes a year before his death in 1954, just weeks before his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. For decades, the stories were virtually unread until Dallas and Ralph Graber discovered the manuscript and brought it to SABR for resurrection. SABR originally published RUN, RABBIT, RUN in 1991 as a benefit for members, with an introduction by famed baseball historian Dr. Harold Seymour and a biographical essay on Maranville by Bob Carroll. The text and photographs in this newly published edition of RUN, RABBIT, RUN remain unchanged.

Buy the book

SABR members: This book is available as a FREE e-book download until February 29, 2012.

Non-members

About the SABR Digital Library

For 40 years, SABR and its members have led the way in publishing the best baseball historical and statistical research. Our publications program is shifting to take advantage of new methods of publishing. Not only will we continue to publish new books like CAN HE PLAY?, which showcase the best efforts of SABR's members, chapters and committees, but now new technology makes it possible for us to bring out-of-print titles back again. Books will be available in digital formats as well as paperbacks produced by "print on demand" (POD).

Stay tuned throughout the year for new (and old!) titles that we'll be adding to the SABR Digital Library. SABR members will get discounted rates for all e-book publications. If you're not a member, click here to join SABR.

To learn more about SABR Publications, contact Cecilia Tan at ctan@sabr.org.

Individual Memberships start at just $45/year

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When you join SABR you are making a statement of support for baseball history. You are joining a worldwide community of people who love to read about, talk about and write about baseball.