Focusing on the unusual friendship between John McGraw and Christy Mathewson, "The Old Ball Game" is a masterful chronicle of the early days of baseball from America's most beloved sportswriter. Illustrations throughout.

A grandmother takes her two granddaughters to a ballgame. Includes music and text to the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" (words by Jack Norworth; music by Albert von Tilzer).

A school, sports, and friendship story perfect for fans of Mike Lupica's Comeback Kids.

Before multimillion-dollar salaries, luxury boxes, and player strikes became synonymous with professional sports, there existed the belief in playing simply "for the love of the game." Nothing captures that spirit better than these twenty classic pieces about America's favorite pastime. Collected here are the writings of Ring Lardner, Zane Grey, the Giants' immortal Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Finley Peter Dunne (who for a time was America's most popular humorist after Mark Twain), Burt Standish (creator of that all-American hero, Frank Merriwell), and many more. Baseball's golden era may have long since passed, but in the pages of CLASSIC BASEBALL STORIES, you can still sit in the bleachers for a nickel. Relive the golden era of baseball with timeless classics from: Albert G. Spalding Henry Chadwick Ernest Lawrence Thayer Grantland Rice Sol White Brig. Gen. Fredrick Funston Zane Grey Candy Cummings Alfred H. Spink Burt L. Standish Lester Chadwick Finley Peter Dunne Christy Mathewson Damon Runyon Grover Cleveland Alexander Gerald Beaumont Ring Lardner Hugh Fullerton Ralph D. Blanpied Charles E. Van Loan P.G. Wodehouse

The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.

On deck and ready for your reading lineup, New York Times bestselling author-illustrator Brian Lies’s ode to “batty” baseball fans. You think humans are the only ones who enjoy America’s national pastime? Grab your bat—the other kind—and your mitt, because it’s a whole new ballgame when evening falls and bats come fluttering from the rafters to watch their all-stars compete. Get set to be transported to the right-side-up and upside-down world of bats at play, as imagined and illustrated by bestselling author-illustrator Brian Lies. Hurry up! Come one—come all! We’re off to watch the bats play ball!

The legendary NPR sports commentator and Sports Illustrated journalist retells the story of an unusual friendship between two towering figures in baseball history. At the turn of the twentieth century, Christy Mathewson was one of baseball’s first superstars. Over six feet tall, clean cut, and college educated, he didn’t pitch on the Sabbath and rarely spoke an ill word about anyone. He also had one of the most devastating arms in all of baseball. New York Giants manager John McGraw, by contrast, was ferocious. The pugnacious tough guy was already a star infielder who, with the Baltimore Orioles, helped develop a new, scrappy style of baseball, with plays like the hit-and-run, the Baltimore chop, and the squeeze play. When McGraw joined the Giants in 1902, the Giants were coming off their worst season ever. Yet within three years, Mathewson clinched New York City’s first World Series for McGraw’s team by throwing three straight shutouts in only six days, an incredible feat that is invariably called the greatest World Series performance ever. Because of their wonderful odd-couple association, baseball had its first superstar, the Giants ascended into legend, and baseball as a national pastime bloomed. “A fine baseball book but just as fine a study of American popular culture.” —Booklist, starred review