Billy Ball

In the early 1970s, the Oakland Athletics became only the second team in major-league baseball history to win three consecutive World Series championships. But as the decade came to a close, the A's were in free fall, having lost 108 games in 1979 while drawing just 307,000 fans. Free agency had decimated the A’s, and the team’s colorful owner, Charlie Finley, was looking for a buyer. First, though, he had to bring fans back to the Oakland Coliseum. Enter Billy Martin, the hometown boy from West Berkeley. In Billy Ball, sportswriter Dale Tafoya describes what, at the time, seemed like a match made in baseball heaven. The A’s needed a fiery leader to re-ignite interest in the team. Martin needed a job after his second stint as manager of the New York Yankees came to an abrupt end. Based largely on interviews with former players, team executives, and journalists, Billy Ball captures Martin’s homecoming to the Bay area in 1980, his immediate embrace by Oakland fans, and the A’s return to playoff baseball. Tafoya describes the reputation that had preceded Martin—one that he fully lived up to—as the brawling, hard-drinking baseball savant with a knack for turning bad teams around. In Oakland, his aggressive style of play came to be known as Billy Ball. A’s fans and the media loved it. But, in life and in baseball, all good things must come to an end. Tafoya chronicles Martin’s clash with the new A’s management and the siren song of the Yankees that lured the manager back to New York in 1983. Still, as the book makes clear, the magical turnaround of the A’s has never been forgotten in Oakland. Neither have Billy Martin and Billy Ball. During a time of economic uncertainty and waning baseball interest in Oakland, Billy Ball filled the stands, rejuvenated fans, and saved professional baseball in the city.

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Battle in the Bullpen For as long as Billy Baggs can remember, rich townie and ace pitcher Archer "King" Kenwood has been his nemesis--both on the field and off. And the summer before they enter high school, their long-standing rivalry explodes into violence. Desperate to keep the peace between his two star players, Coach Anderson comes up with a plan: If they want to play, they have to pay--by spending a week together, twenty-four hours a day. But will Coach's plan make things better? Or just a whole lot worse? After a family tragedy on the farm, Billy Baggs’s life is finally back on track. He’s starting high school. He’s caught the eye of the baseball coach and even a few college scouts. He has prospects for a girlfriend—Suzy Langen, the catch of the ninth grade. But blocking Billy’s path is King Kenwood, town rich kid and ace pitcher. As the two boys’ rivalry turns violent, it is left to Coach Anderson to find a solution. In the process, both Billy and King come to find their real problems might lie closer to home—with their own fathers.

Not since Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show has a novelist captured the poignant contradictions of young manhood in the American West the way Bud Shrake does in Billy Boy. And no novel has ever combined history, spirituality and golf into so potent a triumph of the human spirit. There are tough times ahead for sixteen-year-old Billy. He's just come to Fort Worth with his father, Troy, after the death of his mother back in Albuquerque. Troy's drinking and gambling will leave them all but penniless, and he'll soon move on and abandon Billy in this strange town to fend for himself. With only a vague idea of how he's going to live, Billy heads over to Colonial Country Club, where he hopes he can get work as a caddie and where he just might see his hero, Ben Hogan. What he finds there, under the watchful eye of his guardian spirit, teaches him unforgettable lessons about golf, life, love and honor. In Billy Boy, longtime novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake takes us back to the early 1950s, in a story thick with the Texas dust. Hardscrabble Billy, tough as he thinks he is and smarter than he knows, makes a place for himself behind the walls of privilege at Colonial. He first draws the approval, then the ire, of the club's most eccentric millionaire member, while his looks and manner draw the attention of the millionaire's beautiful granddaughter -- to the displeasure of her boyfriend, the club champion. Billy survives a fierce initiation and a dreadful scene with his drunken father -- but most important, he comes in contact with two of the greatest figures in the history of golf in Texas, Ben Hogan and John Bredemus, each of whom takes Billy under his wing for different reasons and with different results. Shrake skillfully weaves these historical figures and his richly drawn characters into the fabric of the town and the tenor of the time. Billy must face down his fears and doubts, and he does so in a climactic confrontation that combines the yearnings of youth with the redemption of the spirit. Billy Boy is an unforgettable novel of coming of age in a time and a place filled with mythic echoes and frontier dreams.

A fascinating tour of Oakland sports history and a look toward the future of professional sports in the East Bay. Oakland is a sports city like no other. It is the only city in America to be abandoned by the same team twice, with the Raiders most recently leaving for Las Vegas. The Golden State Warriors, who crossed the bay in 1971 in search of better digs, have now returned to San Francisco with trophies in tow. The long-fought battle to keep the Oakland Athletics in the East Bay may narrowly save the city from a hat trick of departures. And yet, Oakland has produced more than its share of success in the form of 10 league championships across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The city is gritty, gutsy, and self-preserving, with a blue-collar mentality and a gold standard under that collar. Bolstered by the Silicon Valley tech boom, Oakland has become one of the most desirable places to live in the entire country, all while its sports fans are increasingly made to feel that, in the famous words of Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there." What is it about Oakland that inspires such wanderlust in its professional teams? Featuring numerous conversations with luminaries across sports, politics, and economics, this new book explores Oakland's fascinating and paradoxical identity as a sports town while illuminating a cast of characters as diverse as the city itself: rogues, superstars, movers and shakers operating on and off the field, and the ill-treated fans. Through the insight of venerated Oakland Tribune scribe Dave Newhouse and sports business leader Andy Dolich, readers will come to appreciate the many quirks and challenges that define "The Town."

The sometime manager of the New York Yankees holds forth on America's favorite pastime with provocative and informed opinions on players, owners, coaches, strategies, managing, and the nitty-gritty of play on the field

Billy's in the team, and he's not about to let the side down! He runs, he heads, he shoots, he scores! Billy is our hero. Have Billy's dreams come true? A wonderful picture book with bright and fun illustrations and an engaging story that young children will love. Ideal for sharing!

A fictional re-creation of a day in the life of a Rainbow character named Sunflower begins the book, illustrating events that might typically occur at an annual North American Rainbow Gathering. Using interviews with Rainbows, content analysis of media reports, participant observation, and scrutiny of government documents relating to the group, Niman presents a complex picture of the Family and its relationship to mainstream culture - called "Babylon" by the Rainbows. Niman also looks at internal contradictions within the Family and examines members' problematic relationship with Native Americans, whose culture and spiritual beliefs they have appropriated.