SABR 50 at 50 celebrates and highlights the Society for American Baseball Research’s wide-ranging contributions to baseball history. Established in 1971 in Cooperstown, New York, SABR has sought to foster and disseminate the research of baseball—with groundbreaking work from statisticians, historians, and independent researchers—and has published dozens of articles with far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the game. Among its current membership are many Major and Minor League Baseball officials, broadcasters, and writers as well as numerous former players. The diversity of SABR members’ interests is reflected in this fiftieth-anniversary volume—from baseball and the arts to statistical analysis to the Deadball Era to women in baseball. SABR 50 at 50 includes the most important and influential research published by members across a multitude of topics, including the sabermetric work of Dick Cramer, Pete Palmer, and Bill James, along with Jerry Malloy on the Negro Leagues, Keith Olbermann on why the shortstop position is number 6, John Thorn and Jules Tygiel on the untold story behind Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers, and Gai Berlage on the Colorado Silver Bullets women’s team in the 1990s. To provide history and context, each notable research article is accompanied by a short introduction. As SABR celebrates fifty years this collection gathers the organization’s most notable research and baseball history for the serious baseball reader.

By 1964 the storied St. Louis Cardinals had gone seventeen years without so much as a pennant. Things began to turn around in 1953, when August A. Busch Jr. bought the team and famously asked where all the black players were. Under the leadership of men like Bing Devine and Johnny Keane, the Cardinals began signing talented players regardless of color, and slowly their star started to rise again. Drama and Pride in the Gateway City commemorates the team that Bing Devine built, the 1964 team that prevailed in one of the tightest three-way pennant races of all time and then went on to win the World Series, beating the New York Yankees in the full seven games. All the men come alive in these pages--pitchers Ray Sadecki and Bob Gibson, players Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bobby Shantz, manager Johnny Keane, his coaches, the Cardinals' broadcasters, and Bill White, who would one day run the entire National League--along with the dramatic events that made the 1964 Cardinals such a memorable club in a memorable year.

A lively illustrated introduction to the Negro League equivalent of the All-Star Game discusses the history of the games, as well as the colorful cast of promoters, gamblers, and hucksters who made it happen. Original.

From Rube to Robinson aims to bring together the best Negro League baseball scholarship that the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) has ever produced, culled from its journals, Biography Project, and award-winning essays. The book includes a star-studded list of scholars and historians, from the late Jerry Malloy and Jules Tygiel, to award winners Larry Lester, Geri Strecker, and Jeremy Beer, and a host of other talented writers. Beginning in the 19th century, Todd Peterson's "May the Best Man Win: The Black Ball Championships 1866-1923" opens the volume and inventories claims to baseball supremacy that preceded the Colored World Series competition that began in 1924. The late Jerry Malloy, whose name graces SABR's annual Negro League Conference, covers an early attempt at forming a Black baseball circuit in "The Pittsburgh Keystones and the 1887 Colored League."There are also profiles of some of the Negro Leagues' now-mythic figures: Sol White (by Jay Hurd), Rube Foster (by Larry Lester), and Oscar Charleston. Seymour Award winning author Jeremy Beer contributes his article "Hothead: How the Oscar Charleston Myth Began," which rebuts the oft-repeated notion that Charleston was in need of anger management.Ballparks and venues also get a look. James Overmyer's "Black Baseball at Yankee Stadium" describes the tenant/landlord relationship of Negro Leagues teams with the New York Yankees during the 1930s and 40s, while Geri Driscoll Strecker's "The Rise and Fall of Greenlee Field" is a cradle-to-grave biography of the Pittsburgh Crawfords' stadium.The final section of the book covers integration and the socio-economics of Black baseball. Leading off is Larry Lester's masterful "Can You Read, Judge Landis?" which refutes the contention that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was blameless for the persistence of baseball's segregation. MLB's official historian John Thorn and the late Jules Tygiel weigh in with "Jackie Robinson's Signing: The Real, Untold Story," and Duke Goldman presents an in-depth and meticulously referenced recap of the winter meetings and in-season owners meetings from the formation of a second Negro National League in 1933 through the last gasp of the Negro American League in 1962.

This official commemorative book tells the stories behind all the iconic moments, the legendary players and coaches, and so much more. Featuring hundreds of stunning photographs and insightful writing from team reporter Adam McCalvy, this is a deluxe, essential celebration of Brewers baseball, from the field to the clubhouse and beyond.

The career of supremely talented but ill-fated Brooklyn Dodger star Pete Reiser comes to life in this new biography from baseball author Dan Joseph (Last Ride of the Iron Horse). Only a tendency to smash into outfield walls stopped Reiser from earning a spot in baseball'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