"September Swoon" is important because it not only chronicles how the Phillies disintegrated, but also looks at the racial tension surrounding the Phillies star rookie, Richie Allen."

Talking about race and sports almost always leads to trouble. Rush Limbaugh's stint as an NFL commentator came to an abrupt end when he made off-handed comments about black quarterback Donovan McNabb. Cincinnati Reds' owner Marge Schott and CBS commentator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder also landed in hot water for public remarks that most people construed as racist. Ask a simple question along these lines--"Why do African Americans dominate the NBA?"--and watch the sparks fly. It is precisely this flashpoint that Amy Bass seeks to explore. Sports wield a tremendous amount of cultural power in the United States and around the world, and often influence our ideas about race. In the Game is a collection of essays by top thinkers on race that survey this treacherous terrain. They engage topics like boxer Joe Louis's iconic status during the Jim Crow era, how blacks shaped the NFL in the 1970s, American Indian sports team mascots, and soccer in Argentina.

Anomalous evidence of seasonality in stock market returns presents a serious challenge to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Previous studies often explain anomalous monthly returns as being caused by various institutional considerations, like tax-loss selling or empirical problems tied to making inferences about market efficiency based solely on historical data--the “data snooping” problem. This paper analyzes an anomalous pattern of negative stock-market returns during the month of September. The “September Swoon” cannot be easily dismissed as a reflection of institutional consideration, time period considerations, nor differences in return measurement criteria. As such, it presents a challenge to the EMH.

Pennant races are arguably the most important aspect of baseball. Players, teams, and franchises are all after one goal: to win the pennant and get into the post-season. But what really determines who wins? Statistical analyses of baseball abound: different ways of breaking down everyone's individual performance, from hitters and pitchers to managers and even owners. But surprisingly, team success-what makes some teams winners over an entire season-has never been looked at with the same statistical rigor. In It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over, The Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts introduce the Davenport Method of deciding which races were the most dramatic-the closest, the most volatile-and determine the ten greatest races of modern baseball history. They use these key races (and a few others) to answer the main question: What determines who wins? How important are such things as mid-season trades, how much a manager overworks his pitchers, and why teams have winning and losing streaks? Can one player carry a team? Can one bad player ruin a team? Can one bad play ruin a team's chances? This fascinating and illuminating book will change your perception of the game.

Everything seemed to be going the Phillies’ way. Up by 6 1/2 games with just 12 left to play in the 1964 season, they appeared to have clinched their first pennant in more than a decade. Outfielder Johnny Callison narrowly missed being the National League MVP. Third baseman Richie Allen was Rookie of the Year. But the "Fightin’ Phils" didn’t make it to the postseason—they lost 10 straight and finished a game behind the St. Louis Cardinals. Besides engineering the greatest collapse of any team in major league baseball history, the ’64 Phillies had another, more important distinction: they were Philadelphia’s first truly integrated baseball team. In September Swoon William Kashatus tells the dramatic story—both on the field and off the field—of the Phillies’ bittersweet season of 1964. More than any other team in Philadelphia’s sports history, the ’64 Phillies saddled the city with a reputation for being a "loser." Even when victory seemed assured, Philadelphia found a way to lose. Unfortunately, the collapse, dubbed the "September swoon," was the beginning of a self-destructive skid in both team play and racial integration, for the very things that made the players unique threatened to tear the team apart. An antagonistic press and contentious fans blamed Richie Allen, the Phillies’ first black superstar, for the team’s losing ways, accusing him of dividing the team along racial lines. Allen manipulated the resulting controversy in the hopes that he would be traded, but in the process he managed to further fray already tenuous race relations. Based on personal interviews, player biographies, and newspaper accounts, September Swoon brings to life a season and a team that got so many Philadelphians, both black and white, to care deeply and passionately about the game at a turbulent period in the city’s—and our nation’s—history. The hometown fans reveled in their triumphs and cried in their defeat, because they saw in them a reflection of themselves. The ’64 Phillies not only won over the loyalties of a racially divided city, but gave Philadelphians a reason to dream—of a pennant, of a contender, and of a City of Brotherly Love.

Written in a personal, moving, and humorous style, The Last Days of Shea chronicles the New York Mets from October 2006, when the team lost the National League Championship Series, to October 2008, when the team began to dismantle its antiquated, inadequate, and dearly loved Shea Stadium. The book is about following a baseball team with one's heart, mind, and soul. It represents the experience of being in a crowd at a ballpark, following a pennant race, enduring an off season, experiencing streaks, slumps, triumph and heartbreak. All of this is represented against the imminent destruction of a stadium "that is not likely to be represented as well in the perfect and profitable little park that will replace it."

A new account of one of the most famous scandals in sports history shows how the 1919 fixing of the World Series forever changed the way America's pastime was both managed and perceived.