“One of the best and truest books about baseball, and about coming to maturity in America.” —Time In the late 1950s, acclaimed sportswriter Pat Jordan was a young pitching phenom, blowing away opposing batters for his Fairfield, Connecticut, high school baseball team. Fifteen major league clubs offered him a contract, but it was the Milwaukee Braves who won out, signing Jordan to a $45,000 bonus—one of the largest paid to any new player by the organization—and shipping him off to McCook, Nebraska, to play for their Class D ball club. It did not take long, however, for Jordan to realize he was out of his depth in professional baseball’s backwoods. He battled with inconsistency and a lack of control for three dismal seasons in such far-flung locales as Keokuk, Iowa, and Palatka, Florida, before the Braves released him and he gave up his dreams of big league greatness. Declared “unforgettable” by the Los Angeles Times and “a major triumph” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, A False Spring is a powerful and deeply affecting memoir about the gift of athletic talent and the heartbreak of unfulfilled promise.

"An biography of perhaps the most significant and controversial player in baseball history, Ty Cobb, drawing in part on newly discovered letters and documents"--

The Longest Walk takes the reader into every baseball fan's ultimate fantasy: seeing the greatest players who ever lived play together when it really counts. What if a Babe Ruth homerun could save a kid's life? This question and others are answered when Don Ogilvie, a fifty-something boozy minor league hitting coach, makes a deal with Death. He bargains to trade his life for that of his best friend, Roberto, a terminally ill seven-year-old. But first, the alcoholic coach must win the really big one. Ogilvie's challenge is to manage a team of dead Hall of Famers against a powerful squad fielded by Death Personified and captained by the bitter and bigoted Ty Cobb. This other World(ly) Series takes place at a venue called Limbotown. Baseball becomes a metaphor for the road of life, with all its twists, turns and unexpected pitfalls. There's no game in the world that lends itself more to drama, humor, and magic than baseball. The Longest Walk is Damn Yankees, Field of Dreams, and Rocky combined. You will love it About the Author: Kirk Marty is the pen name of Kirk Grossman, an attorney and dedicated Dodger fan in Ventura, California.The way I see it, I've been a professional writer for over 33 years. As a practicing attorney, I've cranked out literally hundreds of thousands of pages of mumbo jumbo. Legal writing provides great instruction on the wrong way to create fiction, although some attorneys often confuse the two. Still, it is the type of writing that requires great precision and focus, qualities needed for good fiction as well. He has already started his next novel. Publisher's website: http: //www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLongestWalk.htm

The grandson of the legendary baseball player reveals another side of “a fascinating, severely flawed sports icon” (Booklist). Ty Cobb’s grandson Herschel saw a side of him that very few others did. While baseball fans were familiar with Cobb’s infamously cold, competitive nature—and his relationship with his own children was deeply difficult—Cobb, in his later years, embraced the opportunity to form a loving bond with his grandchildren during their summertime visits. In this moving memoir, Herschel Cobb reveals how his grandfather, after the devastating loss of two sons, shared his gentler side with Herschel and his siblings. Herschel’s own parents, a cruel, abusive father and an adulterous, alcoholic mother, filled his childhood with turmoil. But “Granddaddy” offered the stability, love, and guidance that Herschel desperately needed. “Elegantly written and genuinely moving,” this story of their relationship presents a unique perspective on this larger-than-life man (Publishers Weekly). “An unforgettable story . . . that will alter how you feel about baseball’s most demonized star.” —Tom Stanton, author of Ty and the Babe

A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.