Lena and Amanda are best friends and star soccer players—but what happens when the thing they love most threatens to tear them apart? Soccer has always been a part of Lena and Amanda’s friendship. For six years, they have been an unstoppable team on and off the field: best friends and great teammates. Amanda is sure they’ll both make the varsity team in ninth grade and go on to win the state championship. But when Lena makes the cut and Amanda doesn’t, everything seems uncertain, and Amanda worries that her best friend is leaving her behind. With Shutout, Brendan Halpin has created a powerful story of friendship, sportsmanship, and growing up.

Alex Paterson is the number-one goalie on his high-school hockey team. And he's thrilled that his team has made the playoffs. But when graffiti that apparently can be traced back to Alex is found on the walls of the school, and a photo of Alex at a party with a beer in his hand starts making the rounds, he is suspended from the team, and his reputation as a good kid is put in doubt. Alex knows he's innocent. The problem is, he cannot figure out who would want to frame him. Or why. Is it the other goalie who wants all the glory for himself? Or someone from a rival team looking for an advantage? With everyone assuming the worst about him, it's up to Alex to find out who is behind it all, not only to clear his name, but to save the season.

Shut Out is the compelling story of Boston's racial divide viewed through the lens of one of the city's greatest institutions - its baseball team, and told from the perspective of Boston native and noted sports writer Howard Bryant. This well written and poignant work contains striking interviews in which blacks who played for the Red Sox speak for the first time about their experiences in Boston, as well as groundbreaking chapter that details Jackie Robinson's ill-fated tryout with the Boston Red Sox and the humiliation that followed.

The battle of the sexes is on. Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part,Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention. Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: She and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. And Lissa never sees her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling, coming.

The shutout--a game in which a team prevents its opponent from scoring--remains relatively rare. Of the roughly 200,000 regular season games that have been played since the origins of the major leagues, only about 10 percent have been shutouts. Gold Glove defense, astonishing pitching talent, and the combined efforts of a team working toward baseball artistry must all come together. This work covers every shutout from the beginning of professional baseball through the 2010 World Series, including no-hitters and perfect games. With in-depth statistics and play-by-play descriptions to bring to life the action on the field, it is the definitive history of one of baseball's premier achievements.

Throughout baseball's long history, only twenty pitchers have thrown fifty or more complete game shutouts. In all probability, the author contends, this list of baseball elite has likely seen its last inductee, as the emergence of relief pitchers and the increasing brevity of playing careers have changed the game considerably. The twenty players are Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Eddie Plank, Warren Spahn, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Bert Blyleven, Don Sutton, Ed Walsh, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, Jim Palmer, Gaylord Perry, Juan Marichal, Rube Waddell, Vic Willis, and Pud Galvin. All but Blyleven are members of the Hall of Fame. The author presents anecdotal information about each of the pitchers, paying special attention to their shutout games, and also covers other significant games in their careers.

More than any other sport, baseball has developed its own niche in America's culture and psyche. Some researchers spend years on detailed statistical analyses of minute parts of the game, while others wax poetic about its players and plays. Many trace the beginnings of the civil rights movement in part to the Major Leagues' decision to integrate, and the words and phrases of the game (for example, pinch-hitter and out in left field) have become common in our everyday language. From AARON, HENRY onward, this book covers all of what might be called the cultural aspects of baseball (as opposed to the number-rich statistical information so widely available elsewhere). Biographical sketches of all Hall of Fame players, owners, executives and umpires, as well as many of the sportswriters and broadcasters who have won the Spink and Frick awards, join entries for teams, owners, commissioners and league presidents. Advertising, agents, drafts, illegal substances, minor leagues, oldest players, perfect games, retired uniform numbers, superstitions, tripleheaders, and youngest players are among the thousands of entries herein. Most entries open with a topical quote and conclude with a brief bibliography of sources for further research. The whole work is exhaustively indexed and includes 119 photographs.