If Wisden is cricket's bible, then Cricket With Balls is its Satanic Verses. This is not a cricket book for the tea and crumpet set. You need to be a perverted sort of cricket fan to enjoy this. You'll find yourself immersed in the players' boudoir activities, cry at the Bryce McGain saga and will be asked to join Sehwagology. There are heroes, villains and tales of South African redemption that will make you question the very core of your being. The book has more cricket opinion than an orgy with Peter Roebuck, Navjot Sidhu, Arjuna Ranatunga and Geoffrey Boycott. Abducted directly from the blog cricketwithballs.com, this is the ultimate disrespective of the 2008 cricket year.

What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association. What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association. The NBA may have won the financial battle, but the ABA won the artistic war. With its stress on wide-open individual play, the adoption of the 3-point shot and pressing defense, and the encouragement of flashy moves and flying dunks, today's NBA is still—decades later —just the ABA without the red, white and blue ball. Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports—told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

Everyone tries to guess what is round and warm and cold and strong and fragile, until they finally realize it is Earth.

In You?ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League Pam Postema reveals with frank language and uncompromising candor what it was like being an umpire in professional baseball. For thirteen seasons, from 1977 until her unconditional release in 1989, Postema umpired more than two thousand baseball games, making national news as she worked in various minor leagues as high as level AAA?one step below the majors. She also called many major league spring training games as well as the Hall of Fame game in 1988 between the Yankees and the Braves. ø Postema?s story is one of grit and determination to succeed in a profession dominated by men, but it is also an intimate look at umpiring. Postema discusses the mindset behind making a proper call, the weeks of intensive training, ejecting problem players and managers, and the chaos mixed with the monotony of being on the road most of the year. Throughout, Postema relates her encounters with major league stars when they were just up-and-comers in the minors.

Thirty years into baseball's sabermetric revolution, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact of a major league umpire's ball-and-strike judgment on game results. This welcome study corrects this omission by profiling more than ninety current umpires, summarizing their professional history, and charting their performance at home plate from 2007 through 2010. Annual and four-season rankings place the umpires according to four categories: runs per nine innings, walks per nine innings, strikeouts per nine innings, and strikeout-to-walk ratio. The statistical analysis reveals that the home plate umpire's influence on a game can be huge, both in terms of runs scored and the distribution of walks and strikeouts. By introducing umpires as individuals and encouraging a rational discussion of their work, this examination depicts umpires as dynamic actors whose impact on the game can be measured, analyzed, and enjoyed.

Projects included: Bat wings -- Thousand pyramids -- Snowballs -- Aunt Etta's diamond -- Soccer ball -- World without end -- Spring fling -- Job's trouble -- Block patchwork -- Tumbling blocks -- Desert rose -- Whirligig -- ZZZs.

One man's attempt to coach a peewee soccer team. When author Black was growing up in Glasgow, soccer was the be-all and end-all. His experience was not the little league, boys-of-summer stuff of modern America. For him, it was life and death. Now middle-a