A complete guide for student-athletes, parents and advisors on college baseball programs.

A complete review of the 2004 baseball season, as seen through the eyes of an online baseball magazine called The Hardball Times (www.hardballtimes.com). The Hardball Times 2004 Baseball Annual contains a number of articles reviewing the 2004 baseball season, as well as over 150 pages of baseball stats and our own special graphs. In all, 300 pages of pure baseball.

Education is your foundation. If you want to sing, you must educate yourself on how to sing well. If you want to rap, it takes more than a pen and a pad, and a few rounds of freestyle in back of the school. If you want to really be a successful athlete, you must learn the science of the sport, know it as though you breathe it. Whatever it is you want to do, you must educate yourself on how to do it. You must learn, and you must plan. If you do not plan, you will fail.

The increasing complexity of work systems and changes in the nature of workplace technology over the past century have resulted in an exponential shift in the nature of work activities, from physical labor to cognitive work. Modern work systems have many characteristics that make them cognitively complex: They can be highly interactive; comprised of multiple agents and artifacts; information may be limited and distributed across space and time; task goals are frequently ill-defined, conflicting, dynamic and emergent; planning may only be possible at general levels of abstraction or require adaptive solutions; some degree of proficiency or expertise is required; the stakes are often high; and uncertainty, time-constraints and stress are seldom absent. To complicate matters further, cognition in complex work settings is typically constrained by broader professional, organizational, and institutional practice and policy. These features of cognitive work present significant challenges to scientific methodology and theory, and subsequent design of reliable interventions. Historically, philosophers and scientists have attempted to understand the mental activities experienced during cognitive work at multiple levels of analysis using divergent methods. Some have examined cognition at an associative, contextual, functional or holistic level, relying on naturalistic methods to understand the higher mental processes as they work in harmony during goal-directed behavior. Others have embraced experimental methods and favored internal over external validity, often reducing cognition to a psychology of fundamental acts, such as short-term memory access with millisecond shifts in attention. More recently, Macrocognition has evolved as a complementary paradigm. Macrocognitive researchers have studied the cognitive functions and processes associated with skilled, adaptive, collaborative, and resilient cognitive work in the context of the aforementioned complexities of psychotechnical and sociotechnical work systems. Typically, this research has been carried out using cognitive task analytic techniques that draw on both naturalistic and (quasi-)experimental methods. The primary goals of research in Macrocognition are to better understand cognitive adaptations to complexity, to increase our theoretical understanding of the organism-environment relations by studying the mapping between cognitive work and real-world demands, and to promote use-inspired research capable of improving system performance.

If unpredictability is so much of what makes sports compelling, the baseball draft might be the best place to look. This book explores the intricate uncertainties of the draft and the people who face it. Since the modern draft began in 1965, major league teams have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to identify and develop stars of the future. Whether because of injury, poor performance or mental and physical struggles, a large percentage of the most ballyhooed prospects never reach the game's highest level. Though teams have improved in recent years at turning top picks into major leaguers, the baseball draft is still centered on educated guesswork. This book explains why.

"Former minor-league baseball player Byron Bennett has a deep and spiritual connection to the game of baseball and its history. He sees things in a way others cannot and believes in things others would not. He thinks the old men working the menial jobs in the dienrs, dives, and graveyards he frequents are not what they seem. They try to fit in, go unnoticed, but Byron suspects thay are not your typical second-career workign stiffs"--Page 4 of cover.