The Baseball Codes

Author: Jason Turbow
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030727862X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
An insider’s look at baseball’s unwritten rules, explained with examples from the game’s most fascinating characters and wildest historical moments. Everyone knows that baseball is a game of intricate regulations, but it turns out to be even more complicated than we realize. All aspects of baseball—hitting, pitching, and baserunning—are affected by the Code, a set of unwritten rules that governs the Major League game. Some of these rules are openly discussed (don’t steal a base with a big lead late in the game), while others are known only to a minority of players (don’t cross between the catcher and the pitcher on the way to the batter’s box). In The Baseball Codes, old-timers and all-time greats share their insights into the game’s most hallowed—and least known—traditions. For the learned and the casual baseball fan alike, the result is illuminating and thoroughly entertaining. At the heart of this book are incredible and often hilarious stories involving national heroes (like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays) and notorious headhunters (like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale) in a century-long series of confrontations over respect, honor, and the soul of the game. With The Baseball Codes, we see for the first time the game as it’s actually played, through the eyes of the players on the field. With rollicking stories from the past and new perspectives on baseball’s informal rulebook, The Baseball Codes is a must for every fan.

Baseball Hacks

Author: Joseph Adler
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1491949422
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Book Description
Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game. So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handedpitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for Baseball Hacks: "Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." -- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates thatthe latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." -- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals

Baseball Cheat Codes

Author: Michael Zgorzelski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 107

Book Description
Get a mental edge on the baseball field with Baseball Cheat Codes: A Player's Best Friend. If you want to take your game to the next level, this book can help you get there. The strategies contained within this easy-to-read work will pave the way to success. This book is a great tool for players and coaches of all ages.

The Doubleday Code

Author: Jim Pieczynski
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor (IN)
ISBN: 9781681926728
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Book Description
For fans of the sport, professional baseball is like a religious experience because it offers mystery -- the visible with the invisible. Blazing speeds, graceful fielding, and blistering hitting occur amidst ever-changing strategies, signs, substitutions, and situations. One pitch builds on another, one out on another, one inning on another, and one game on another. Watching players perform with wit, skill, and courage at the highest level satisfies the yearning of our hearts and minds to witness nobility in action. That's why we can "religiously" follow the sport. It speaks to our soul. In The Doubleday Code, author Jim Pieczynski draws parallels between the sport we love -- baseball -- and the faith we embrace -- Catholicism. Each chapter also provides prompts for prayer and personal reflection and can be used as a study guide for retreats. Fans who appreciate baseball are students of the game. They understand the deeper mysteries and are rewarded immensely. So, too, are committed Catholics who understand the teachings of the Faith and seek not an earthly Hall of Fame, but a heavenly one. About the Author Jim Pieczynski is a Catholic speaker who offers presentations on the Eucharist, Mary, and the Catholic mysteries hidden in Major League Baseball. Jim and his wife, Mary, live in Fairhope, Alabama. They have five children and eleven grandchildren.

The Ultimate Baseball Book

Author: Daniel Okrent
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618056682
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
THE ULTIMATE BASEBALL BOOK has more than lived up to its name. Spanning the complete history of the sport from the fledgling leagues in the late 1870s to the powerhouses of the 1990s and revealing in the process what a remarkable effect baseball has had on our collective experience, this is THE book for any and all baseball fans, certain to grace coffee and bedside tables alike. Designed with that wonderful nostalgia that the sport itself so often evokes, THE ULTIMATE BASEBALL BOOK combines timeless images with a sweeping narrative history as well as essays on various idols and icons by such heavy hitters as Red Smith, Wilfrid Sheed, Roy Blount, Jr., Tom Wicker, and Geoge Will. This new edition covers baseball through the nineties, the decade when home run records fell and the sport reclaimed its hold on America, and celebrates the national game in ultimate style.

They Bled Blue

Author: Jason Turbow
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 1328715531
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
The wildly entertaining narrative of the outrageous 1981 Dodgers from the award-winning author of Dynastic, Fantastic, Bombastic and The Baseball Codes In the Halberstam tradition of capturing a season through its unforgettable figures, They Bled Blue is a sprawling, mad tale of excess and exuberance, the likes of which could only have occurred in that place, at that time. That it culminated in an unlikely World Series win--during a campaign split by the longest player strike in baseball history--is not even the most interesting thing about this team. The Dodgers were led by the garrulous Tommy Lasorda--part manager, part cheerleader--who unyieldingly proclaimed devotion to the franchise through monologues about bleeding Dodger blue and worshiping the "Big Dodger in the Sky," and whose office hosted a regular stream of Hollywood celebrities. Steve Garvey, the All-American, All-Star first baseman, had anchored the most durable infield in major league history, and, along with Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey, was glaringly aware that 1981 would represent the end of their run together. The season's real story, however, was one that nobody expected at the outset: a chubby lefthander nearly straight out of Mexico, twenty years old with a wild delivery and a screwball as his flippin' out pitch. The Dodgers had been trying for decades to find a Hispanic star to activate the local Mexican population; Fernando Valenzuela was the first to succeed, and it didn't take long for Fernandomania to sweep far beyond the boundaries of Chavez Ravine. They Bled Blue is the rollicking yarn of the Los Angeles Dodgers' crazy 1981 season.

Nolan Ryan's Pitcher's Bible

Author: Nolan Ryan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671705814
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Offers advice on the mechanics of pitching, and recommends a program of weight training, aerobic exercise, and sound nutrition.

Baseball in the Barrios

Author: Henry Horenstein
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780152005047
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Book Description
Join nine-year-old Hubaldo Romero Paez in Venezuela as he introduces his friends, his family, and his favorite sport-baseball. Complemented by a map and an English-Spanish baseball glossary, Hubaldo's story is an inviting introduction to a foreign land viewed through the lens of a shared passion. "This dynamic sports photo-essay will be fun for sports fans and effective for social studies units."-Booklist

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Author: Jason Fagone
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062430505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
National Bestseller NPR Best Book of the Year “Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.” —The New York Times Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II. In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life. Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

The Cambridge Companion to Baseball

Author: Leonard Cassuto
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521761824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
From Babe Ruth to the Black Sox scandal, this Companion examines baseball's history, global identity, current challenges and memorable personalities.