Offering a fresh approach to the familiar concept of all-time baseball teams, this exhaustive work ranks more than 2,500 players by state of birth and includes both major league and Negro League athletes. Each chapter covers one state and opens with the all-time team, naming a top selection for each position followed by honorable mentions. Also included are all-time stat leaders in nine categories--games, hits, average, RBI, home runs, stolen bases, pitching wins, strikeouts and saves--a brief overview of the state's baseball history, notable player achievements, historic baseball places to see, potential future stars, a comprehensive list of player nicknames, and the state's all-time best player.

Advanced statistics and new terminology have taken hold of baseball today, but do they accurately reflect the reality of the game? A baseball lifer states his case. America’s favorite pastime is enduring an assault of new thoughts and ideas. In recent years, the sabermetrics and analytics craze has infiltrated Major League Baseball—from its front offices to dugouts to clubhouses to media covering both, inciting a baseball culture war. New phrases like “launch angle,” “spin rate,” and “pitch framing” have entered the vocabulary, often with little real meaning when it comes to how the game is actually played on the field. No more. In State of Play, twelve-year Major League veteran, Emmy Award–winning MLB Network analyst, and bestselling author Bill Ripken breaks down these modern statistical methods to explain which ones make sense in the game’s historical context, bringing them together with proven old-school strategies. He simplifies those sabermetric terms hastily added to the baseball lexicon without being fully realized, taking new-school confusion out of old-school baseball’s tried-and-true common sense. In the end, he unites the teachings of each school to show fans of both how to listen to and understand the game as it’s played today and how it should be played moving forward. From a true baseball lifer and member of baseball’s first family, State of Play offers a fascinating insider’s look at how to reconcile years of historical tradition with the rules and trends of the new millennium. As Ripken sees it: the game inside the game cannot be measured by a spreadsheet—but it can be measured by a qualified, crusty baseball man. Play ball.

COMPETE MENTALLY TOUGH! WINNING STATE Women's Soccer focuses on competing. It shows players how to take their mental game to a winning level. WINNING STATE instantly improves tournament performance. It gives players the mental toughness skills to eliminate distractions and crush apprehension, so they can execute in competition as well or better than they do in practice. WINNING STATE is for all ages and abilities. It's for players who consistently want to bring their "A-Game" to the competitive arena. WINNING STATE inspires players to face the pressure head on, believe 100%, and execute with conviction. Players get the skills to conquer the nerves, fiercely compete, and win! Your mind is your most powerful weapon. Train it! WINNING STATE Women's Soccer: The Athlete's Guide to Competing Mentally Tough

In the postseasons of 2005, 2006 and 2007, the Oregon State Beavers baseball team achieved a seemingly impossible dream and forever changed the culture of Northwest sports. After nearly a century of dismissal as a wet-weather team, unable to compete with the southern baseball belt on the national stage, a run of three College World Series appearances and back-to-back titles earned the Beavers national respect. Inspired by his own coverage of the dramatic seasons, "Corvallis Gazette-Times" sportswriter Cliff Kirkpatrick recounts the program's rise to prominence and lasting legacy. Filled with firsthand insights from players and coaches and photos of pivotal moments and stands filled with orange and black, this retrospective captures the magic of Oregon State's three-season run.

Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the "opening" of Japan by Commodore Perry, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often surprising history, Transpacific Field of Dreams shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.

Top college baseball coaches offer drills for players at all levels. Focuses on hitting, baserunning, fielding, pitching, and catching.

Funny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.