Baseball in blue and gray

During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformatio...

Baseball on the border

From 1985 to 1994 there existed a significant but unheralded experiment in professional baseball. For ten seasons, the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos) were the only team in professional sports to represent two nations. Playing in the storied Mexican League (an AAA affil...

City of dreams

A vivid history of the controversial building of Dodger Stadium and how it helped transform Los AngelesWhen Walter O’Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 with plans to construct a new ballpark, he ignited a bitter half-decade dispute over the future of a rapidly changing city....

Color blind

A 2013 CASEY Award Finalist for Best Baseball Book of the Year and a Booklist Top Ten Sports Book of the YearWhen baseball swept America in the years after the Civil War, independent, semipro, and municipal leagues sprouted up everywhere. With civic pride on the line, rivalries were fierce and t...

Dodgers to damascus

An adventure-driven story that helps us understand the Middle East and Syria

Fail better

A smart, accessible look into the philosophy of baseball, with a focus on its lessons for a life best lived.

I don't care if we never get back

Ben, a sports analytics wizard, loves baseball. Eric, his best friend, hates it. But when Ben writes an algorithm for the optimal baseball road trip—an impossible dream of seeing every pitch of 30 games in 30 stadiums in 30 days—who will he call on to take shifts behind the wheel, especially when...

Nobody's perfect

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 o...

Scouting and scoring

An in-depth look at the intersection of judgment and statistics in baseballScouting and scoring are considered fundamentally different ways of ascertaining value in baseball. Scouting seems to rely on experience and intuition, scoring on performance metrics and statistics. In Scouting and Scoring...

Sporting justice

A history of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win an Ontario amateur baseball title in 1934. Sporting Justice situates the team in a broader history of Black baseball in Chatham and southwestern Ontario, exploring themes including racism in sport, gender, class, and social ...

The old ball game

To every thing a season

Shibe Park was demolished in 1976, and today its site is surrounded by the devastation of North Philadelphia. Kuklick, however, vividly evokes the feelings people had about the home of the Philadelphia Athletics and later the Phillies.

Tokyo junkie

60 years of observation: an American journalist’s memoir about Tokyo’s modern urban transformation, its criminal underworld and, oh yes, baseball.