The Detroit Tigers, an umpire, a pitcher, and a mistake—one of the “classic, human, baseball stories” (Ken Burns, creator of the PBS mini-series Baseball). The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in over 130 years, it has happened only twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first. Except that’s not how it entered the record books. That’s because Jim Joyce, voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 and 2011, missed the call on the final out. But rather than throwing a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound, and finished the game. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said later in the locker room. “You might think everything that could have been said, replayed, and revealed about that night has already been uttered, logged, and exposed. You would, however, be as wrong as the unfortunate Mr. Joyce” (The Detroit News). In Nobody’s Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports. The result is “a masterpiece”, an absorbing insider’s look at two careers in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of pure grace and sportsmanship (The Huffington Post).

"This book provides practical strategies for developing the mental skills which help speed you to your full potential."---Dave Winfield What does it mean to play heads-up baseball? A heads-up player has confidence in his ability, keeps control in pressure situations, and focuses on one pitch at a time. His mental skills enable him to play consistently at or near his best despite the adversity baseball presents each day. "My ability to fully focus on what I had to do on a daily basis was what made me the successful player I was. Sure I had some natural ability, but that only gets you so far. I think I learned how to focus; it wasn't something that I was necessarily born with." -- Hank Aaron "Developing and refining my mental game has played a critical role in my success in baseball. For years players have had to develop these skills on their own. This book provides practical strategies for developing the mental skills that will help speed you toward your full potential." -- Dave Winfield

A former major-league catcher provides a view of the lighter side of baseball as he relates his professional experience

Preacher Roe, a legendary, Brooklyn Dodger hall-of-famer, was a 5-time National League All-Star and a 3-time World Series pitcher during the golden era of baseball.When Baseball Was Still A Game uses over 150 photographs with short stories, facts, and captions which takes the reader through a journey of Preacher Roe?s life. Preacher started in his birthplace of Ash Flat, Arkansas and was raised in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The journey continues with his early days pitching in the minors with the St. Louis Cardinals, through his years with the Pittsburgh Pirates, to the height of his career with the Brooklyn Dodgers and subsequent retirement to West Plains, Missouri.

The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.

In 1918, Joseph Seaman Cotter, Jr., a promising young African-American poet who later died at the age of twenty-four, published a poem in which he prayed, "O God, give me words to make my dream-children live!" In this collection of some two thousand quotations, Deirdre Mullane has taken Cotter's prayer to heart and gathered the most memorable quotes from a wide range of sources--poetry, folk songs, political speeches, autobiographies, stories, novels, interviews, and essays--to illustrate the amazing richness of the African-American written and oral tradition. From the earliest tracts against slavery to the poetry of Maya Angelou, African-Americans have tumed to language to record their experience and to sustain their souls. Barred from education for centuries, they used the spoken word to hand down their daily wisdom, their faith in God, and dreams of freedom and justice, until the establishment and survival of their own press during the 1800s enabled them to document the horrors of slavery and discrimination, to name the political and social realities they faced, as well as to celebrate the everyday joys of their lives. An ideal companion to African-American history, this extensive and varied collection of quotes, from political figures to poets, from jazz greats to boxers, will be an important resource for writers, journalists, public speakers, and parents seeking an educational gift for their children. The entries are arranged alphabetically by speaker, along with a brief biography of each source. Also included is a subject index that allows a reader to research quotations on specific topics, such as "freedom" or "dreams." Encyclopedic and inspirational,Words To Make My Dream Children Liverepresents the living legacy of the word, both spoken and written, for African-Americans everywhere.

When we think of baseball, we think of sunny days and leisurely outings at the ballpark--rarely do thoughts of death come to mind. Yet during the game's history, hundreds of players, coaches and spectators have died while playing or watching the National Pastime. In its second edition, this ground-breaking study provides the known details for 150 years of game-related deaths, identifies contributing factors and discusses resulting changes to game rules, protective equipment, crowd control and stadium structures and grounds. Topics covered include pitched and batted-ball fatalities, weather and field condition accidents, structural failures, fatalities from violent or risky behavior and deaths from natural causes.