Mr Ball

Mr. Ball is back in this Jump-Into-Chapters sequel to the hilarious Mr. Ball Makes a To-Do List.

Mr. Ball loves to make to-do lists! But he NEVER finishes them. Will the easiest to-do list ever help him break his unfortunate history of didn't-do failures? Angry bees, a funky skunk, and a bathtub full of tomato sauce provide challenging obstacles as Mr. Ball tries to finally check EVERYTHING off his list!

Bounce along with this rhyming read-aloud about all kinds of balls From footballs to eyeballs, beach balls to meatballs, if you can roll it, this book has it! With his signature whimsy and wordplay, author Joshua David Stein compares and contrasts different kinds of balls in this part-reference, part-comedy act. The book invites readers to identify various sports balls, while simultaneously weaving in a whole selection of unexpected rollable objects. A winning formula for every young reader who loves to kick, throw, catch, or giggle.

Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was a city of immigrants, mobsters, and flappers with one shared passion: the Chicago Cubs. It all began when the chewing-gum tycoon William Wrigley decided to build the world’s greatest ball club in the nation’s Second City. In this Jazz Age center, the maverick Wrigley exploited the revolutionary technology of broadcasting to attract eager throngs of women to his renovated ballpark. Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club transports us to this heady era of baseball history and introduces the team at its crazy heart—an amalgam of rakes, pranksters, schemers, and choirboys who take center stage in memorable successes, equally memorable disasters, and shadowy intrigue. Readers take front-row seats to meet Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Joe McCarthy, Lewis “Hack” Wilson, Gabby Hartnett. The cast of characters also includes their colorful if less-extolled teammates and the Cubs’ nemesis, Babe Ruth, who terminates the ambitions of Mr. Wrigley’s ball club with one emphatic swing.

Mr. Putter and his cat go out to the ballgame in this book by the Newbery Medal-winning author: “A home run.”—Kirkus Reviews Mr. Putter and his fine cat, Tabby, love to take naps — too many naps. What they need is a sport! Luckily Mrs. Teaberry and her good dog, Zeke, know of a baseball team they can join. It's not long before Mr. Putter is ready to play ball, but will his creaky knees cooperate? And can Zeke avoid wreaking havoc on the field? Win or lose, this baseball team will never be the same! “Another winner…The artwork, done in pencil, watercolor, and gouache, is expressive and quite hilarious.”—School Library Journal “Rylant’s sympathetic characters work their usual magic, entertaining all ages with a text well suited to beginning readers.”—Booklist

A fun and adorable story about resiliency, that I wrote for my son when I was in prison. It's all about the bounce back! Resilient Mr Ball is a story about bouncing back. When I created him, I was an inmate at the Women's Adult Correctional Institution in Rhode Island. Even though I was in a very low and dark place, separated from my son, holding on to the notion of bouncing back helped me endure through adversity. Now that my son, Dasan, and I are reunited, we want to bring this book to other children who are affected by the prison system. We survived - so can you! Although I wrote this book for my son, the message is universal to people of all ages. We all get knocked down, but its all about the bounce back.

Fifteen years after its hardcover debut, the FSG Classics reissue of the celebrated work of narrative nonfiction that won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, with a new preface by the author The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"

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?

Mirabelle, a Boston terrier, and Mr. Muller spend the day playing catch with her bright red ball.