In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

Baseball, Chicago Style explores the exciting, enticing, enduring and frequently frustrating panorama of our national pastime. For the first time the colorful saga of Major League Baseball in Chicago is wrapped between the covers of a single book sure to appeal to both Cubs and White Sox fans. No writers are better suited to survey it than Holtzman, a Hall of Fame member and the first official historian of Major League Baseball, and partner Vass, both of whom covered the teams for many seasons. When it comes to baseball tradition, Chicago is second to none, the sole city to embrace two major league teams without interruption from their founding to the present. The Cubs haven't missed a beat since 1876 as the oldest uninterrupted franchise in all pro sports, while the White Sox have challenged them without letup since 1901 for the backing of Chicago's vast fandom. The Cubs' best known exploit of the last 55 seasons may have been to not win the pennant in 1969, the year of the Great Collapse. Not even division titles in 1984 and 1989, or a "wild card" post-season excursion in 1998, all of which ended in tears, have displaced the sorrow of 1969 in the collective memory of Cubs fans. But those who scoff at Cubs' tradition willfully ignore several glorious periods of their history. It's true they've won only two World Series (1907-08), but they've played in 10, far more than most teams. And their 1906 record of 116-36, for a percentage of .847, is unmatched in major league history. What's best-known nationally about the White Sox is that they "threw" the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The dastardly act, commemorated in history, literature, film and television, transformedtheir previously innocuous nickname of Black Sox, based on the hue of their uniforms in previous seasons, into an invidious epithet which clings to them like a burr to corduroy. The tale of stinginess, greed and the betrayal of "the faith of 50 million people" forms the book's first chapter. It has never been told so fully and objectively without glib sentiment obscuring its uglier aspects. Even if Chicago's teams have waged war by frequently marching to the rear since the White Sox last brought the World Series to the city in 1959, more than four decades ago, they've played the game with a gusto that belongs solely to Baseball, Chicago Style.

A potpourri of major league happenings between 1900 and 1978. Includes records, anecdotes, photographs, and biographical information.

A sports journalist reminisces about the days of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays, when writers hung out with ball players, before the days of agents and publicists. by the author of The Boys of Summer.

Gathers essays, stories, and poems about baseball, baseball players, and the myths and history of baseball

A compilation of tips on batting, including gripping the bat, learning the strike zone, bunting, concentrating, and hitting for power.