Sabermetrics is taking baseball by storm. Whether you like it or not, it's difficult to watch a game without being inundated by stats. Are the numbers really as important as the Sabermetricians claim? How did we get to this point? Do we need to learn baseball al over again? Broken Baseball Numbers will answer these questions and many more. In the end, you'll have a totally new perspective on America's pastime.

Unlike other baseball statistics books that reveal only information about the numbers players put on the board, this unique take on America's favorite pastime reveals the little-known facts and nuances behind the numbers players wear on their backs. In Now Batting, Number...baseball historian Jack Looney delves into every aspect of baseball uniform numbers. Here are topics including "Boyhood Idols" (players who chose numbers to honor heroes, fathers, grandfathers, and friends), "Birthday Babes" (players who have worn the same number as their day, month, or year of birth), "Caretakers" (inside stories on how numbers are distributed and the bartering of numbers among players), and "Early Innings" (the history of numbering in Major League baseball). At the center of Now Batting, Number...is a substantial section listing the complete rosters of all thirty Major League teams including each player's number and position. Other lists include every retired number listed by league and team, every retired number listed by position, and famous players' numbers and every other player who ever honored them by wearing that number (listed by number). In a controversial chapter called "Dream Teams," player from various eras, who wore the same number durin their careers, are selected to play together on the same Dream Team. Statistics for fifty teams are included. Also included are dozens of some of the toughest, number-related trivia questions that will have even the most knowledgeable fan scratching his or her head.

The retiring of a number to honor a player likely began with the New York Yankees. The Yankees were not the first team to experiment with numbers on uniforms to identify players, but they were the first to wear numbers permanently and retired Lou Gehrig's number 4 in 1939. This book covers retired numbers in baseball's major and minor leagues. In the major league section of the book, a player's name is followed by his retired number, the name of the team that retired it, the year that it was retired, the player's primary position, and the teams he was affiliated with during his playing career. The author then presents a brief summary of the player's career and lists any major awards or honors he won. Retiring numbers in the minor leagues is a bit different; a player who excels in the minors isn't usually with a team for long because he is promoted to the majors. In the minor league section, a player's name is followed by a brief summary of his significance. After both the major and minor league sections, readers will find team-by-team and numerical lists of honored players.

Baseball is much more than a game. As the American national pastime, it has reflected the political and cultural concerns of US society for over 200 years, and generates passions and loyalties unique in American society. This Companion examines baseball in culture, baseball as culture, and the game's global identity. Contributors contrast baseball's massive, big-business present with its romanticized origins and its evolution against the backdrop of American and world history. The chapters cover topics such as baseball in the movies, baseball and mass media, and baseball in Japan and Latin America. Between the chapters are vivid profiles of iconic characters including Babe Ruth, Ichiro and Walter O'Malley. Crucial moments in baseball history are revisited, ranging from the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal to recent controversies over steroid use. A unique book for fans and scholars alike, this Companion explains the enduring importance of baseball in America and beyond.

The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books. When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.” Today Ball Four has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.” Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman “An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” —The Washington Post

Henry Aaron's pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record captivated the baseball world. So did Cal Ripken's effort to outlast Lou Gehrig's ironman streak and Rickey Henderson's attempt to swipe Lou Brock's stolen-base throne. Here are pro baseball's greatest records and the stories of the players who have held, chased, and broken them.

The Numbers Game is the first-ever history of baseball statistics - the keeping of them, the study of them, the people who devised them, the cultural phenomenon of them, from 1845 until today. Most baseball fans, players and even team executives assume that the National Pastime's infatuation with statistics is simply a byproduct of the information age, a phenomenon that blossomed only after the arrival of Bill James and computers in the 1980s. They couldn't be more wrong. In this unprecedented new book, Alan Schwarz - whom bestselling Moneyball author Michael Lewis calls "one of today's best baseball journalists" - provides the first-ever history of baseball statistics, showing how baseball and its numbers have been inseparable ever since the pastime's birth in 1845. He tells the history of this obsession through the lives of the people who felt it most: Henry Chadwick, the 19th-century writer who invented the first box score and harped endlessly about which statistics mattered and which did not; Allan Roth, Branch Rickey's right-hand numbers man with the late-1940s Brooklyn Dodgers; Earnshaw Cook, a scientist and Manhattan Project veteran who retired to pursue inventing the perfect baseball statistic; John Dewan, a former Strat-O-Matic maven who built STATS Inc. into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse for statistics over the Internet; and dozens more. Almost every baseball fan for 150 years has been drawn to the game by its statistics, whether through newspaper box scores, the backs of Topps baseball cards, The Baseball Encyclopedia, or fantasy leagues. Today's most ardent stat scientists, known as "sabermetricians," spend hundreds of hours coming up with new ways to capture the game in numbers, and engage in holy wars over which statistics are best. Some of these men--and women --are even being hired by major league teams to bring an understanding of statistics to a sport that for so long shunned it. Taken together, Schwarz paints a history not just of baseball statistics, but of the soul of the sport itself. The Numbers Game will be an invaluable part of any fan's library and go down as one of the sport's classic books.