The SABR Bookshelf: Spring/Summer 2011 Additions
These are additional listings in The SABR Bookshelf for Spring/Summer 2011. To see the first page of listings, click here.
To get your NEW book listed on The SABR Bookshelf, make sure a review copy is sent to: The SABR Bookshelf, Society for American Baseball Research, 4455 E. Camelback Rd., Ste. D-140, Phoenix, AZ 85018.
To ensure a listing in The Baseball Index — SABR’s online catalog of baseball research materials at www.baseballindex.org — make sure a review copy is sent to The Baseball Index, 4025 Beechwood Pl., Riverside, CA 92506.
These books can be purchased at the SABR Bookstore, powered by Amazon.com.
Bolded names indicates that the author(s) is a SABR member. Publishers’ contact information can be found by clicking here.
Vintage Base Ball: Recapturing the National Pastime
By James R. Tootle
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $39.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-3599-9 |
- Summary: If you have ever watched a game of vintage baseball and wondered what it would be like to play, this is the book for you. It provides 19th Century rules as well as advice on how to put together a league and find competition.
Bucky Harris: A Biography of Baseball’s Boy Wonder
By Jack Smiles
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-4160-0 |
- Summary: Harris was the Boy Wonder as a second baseman, and then manager, of the successful Washington Senators teams of the 1920s. From his youth through retirement, Smiles explains what made him wonderful.
Hutch: Baseball’s Fred Hutchinson and a Legacy of Courage
By Mike Shannon (author) and Scott Hannig (illustrator)
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $24.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-4625-4 |
- Summary: This is a graphic biography of Fred Hutchinson, one of baseball’s most beloved men. Hutch enjoyed a successful big league career, first as an All-Star pitcher for the Tigers and later as a pennant-winning manager with the Reds. And he is remembered for his final major league summer and a season he didn’t finish.
Dixie Walker: A Life in Baseball
By Lyle Spatz
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-4633-9 |
- Summary: He was the “Peepul’s Cherce” in Brooklyn, but Dixie Walker had an erratic decade before he made it to the Dodgers. He then was tainted by the native Alabaman’s reaction to the appearance of Jackie Robinson. Spatz tells the story from before and after the events that everyone remembers.
Broadcasting Baseball: A History of the National Pastime on Radio and Television
By Eldon L. Ham
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $39.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-4644-5 |
- Summary: This work covers the development of the baseball broadcasting industry from the first telegraph reports of games in progress, the influence of early pioneers at Pittsburgh’s KDKA and Chicago’s WGN, including the first World Series broadcast, the launch of the Telstar Satellite, the Carlton Fisk home run in the 1975 World Series, which changed how baseball is broadcast, through the latest computer graphics, HD television and the Internet.
Silver Bats and Automobiles: The Hotly Competitive, Sometimes Ignoble Pursuit of the Major League Batting Championship
By David L. Fleitz
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-5879-0 |
- Summary: For more than a century, the annual contest to create the leagues’ best batting averages has sparked fan interest. It’s also sparked cheating, intrigue and a range of prizes.
Life Behind the Mask: Memoir of a Youth Baseball Umpire
By Michael Schafer
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-5945-2 |
- Summary: Calling upon his 35 years of experience, the author provides the reader with a humorous retelling of what it is like to work as an umpire in youth baseball leagues. It is a perspective rarely afforded to the spectator, but one that is a surprisingly powerful evocation of both the nitty-gritty bits and the grandeur of the baseball experience.
Bucketfoot Al: The Baseball Life of Al Simmons
By Clifton Blue Parker
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6143-1 |
- Summary: Al Simmons, at top form in the Roaring Twenties, sparked one of baseball’s greatest dynasties, the Philadelphia Athletics, to multiple championships, before becoming just another ballplayer. While his achievements demonstrated greatness, he was not an easy man to like—for those competing against him or with him—and he seemed to play to the level of team expectation.
Farewell to the Last Golden Era: The Yankees, the Pirates and the 1960 Baseball Season
By Bill Morales
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6327-5 |
- Summary: In the 1950s, the Pirates moved from bottom dweller to their first pennant and World Series in nearly four decades. It began with Branch Rickey and Joe Brown putting together the team and wound up with Mazeroski’s home run.
Jim Thorpe: A Biography
By William A. Cook
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6355-8 |
- Summary: Most biographies of Jim Thorpe (1888-1953) emphasize his Olympic glory and his remarkable abilities in track and football. Thorpe’s 1912 gold medals in the decathalon and pentathalon and his talent on the gridiron rank him high among outstanding athletes of the twentieth century. That Thorpe also played brilliantly on the baseball diamond is an often overlooked facet of his career.
Clark Griffith: The Old Fox of Washington Baseball
By Ted Leavengood
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6386-2 |
- Summary: Famed Washington sportswriter Shirley Povich once said that Clark Griffith’s life was a true Horatio Alger story. Born in a frontier log cabin in Missouri in 1869, Griffith enjoyed a successful 64-year career in baseball that ended with his death in 1955. He spent 20 seasons as a major league pitcher, another 20 seasons as a manager—including five as the first manager of the New York Yankees—and 35 years as owner of the Washington Senators, where he won three American League pennants and the 1924 World Series.
Brit at the Ballpark: An Englishman’s Baseball Tour of All 50 States
By Peter Taylor
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $25.00 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6460-9 |
- Summary: This work follows the journey Peter Taylor undertook during the summer of 2007 (and a bit of 2009), when he set out to achieve a long-held ambition and see a baseball game in every major league ballpark, a minor league game in those states without a major league franchise, plus the All-Star Game and the postseason.
Bargaining with Baseball: Labor Relations in an Age of Prosperous Turmoil
By William B. Gould IV
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $39.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-6515-6 |
- Summary: In 1995, William B. Gould IV, then chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, cast the deciding vote to obtain the injunction that ended the longest strike in baseball history. Sixteen years of peaceful relations between baseball labor and management have followed, as well as unprecedented prosperity in a relationship that had just endured 30 years of strikes and lockouts. This study, which clearly illustrates the practical impact of law on America’s pastime, considers the 140-year sweep of labor-management relationships and conflict, exploring player-owner disputes, the development of free agency, the collective bargaining process, and the racial integration of baseball, among other topics.
The Right Time: John Henry “Pop” Lloyd and Black Baseball
By Wes Singletary
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-8466-9 |
- Summary: This is the first full-length biography of Lloyd, a Hall of Famer, and one of the premier African-American players of the early decades of the twentieth century. Honus Wagner was the white Pop Lloyd.
When the Dodgers Were Bridegrooms: Gunner McGunnigle and Brooklyn’s Back-to-Back Pennants of 1889 and 1890
By Ronald G. Shafer
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $29.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-8596-3 |
- Summary: The American Association pennant winners of 1889 moved to the better-regarded National League for 1890 and, thanks in large part to the Players League, won a pennant in their first NL season. This is a biography of manager Bill McGunnigle and how the team was assembled.
Major League Umpires’ Performance, 2007-2010: A Comprehensive Statistical Review
By Andrew Goldblatt
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| McFarland & Co. | $39.95 (sftcvr) | 978-0-7864-8687-8 |
- Summary: Thirty years into baseball’s sabermetric revolution, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact of a major league umpire’s ball-and-strike judgment on game results. This welcome study corrects this omission by profiling more than ninety current umpires, summarizing their professional history and charting their performance at home plate from 2007 through 2010.
The Runmakers: A New Way to Rate Baseball Players
By Frederick E. Taylor
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| Johns Hopkins University Press | $24.95 (hdcvr) | 978-1-4214-0010-3 |
- Summary: Taylor dives into the territory pioneered by Bill James and Pete Palmer with a new formula for analyzing and predicting offensive performance.
The Pitch
By Hank Owens
| Publisher | Retail Price | ISBN |
|---|---|---|
| Pocol Press | $17.95 (sftcvr) | 978-1-929763-47-4 |
- Summary: Orval Sheckard is starting yet another season with the Keokuk Westerns, the bottom-dwelling team in the lowest single-A league around. He’s about to give up on baseball, but when Rube Tyler—an overweight, 40-something factory worker with a miraculous knuckleball—shows up in his parking lot the season starts to look brighter.
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