The Baseball Timeline

"Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd!" Baseball is an integral part of American popular culture. In fact, baseball offers a form of social currency by which many people relate. Its stars--King Kelly, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio--have often transcended the game. Discover the amazing development of baseball in The Timeline History of Baseball.- Lavishly illustrated and colorfully designed throughout, The Timeline History of Baseball presents hundreds of fascinating details about the development of baseball in a fun, easy-to-use format.- This unique book brings together a comprehensive history of the sport along with a separate pull-out timeline that offers an at-a-glance view of baseball from 1601 to 2009.- Get some peanuts and Cracker Jacks! You're about to meet some of the greatest players and teams ever to play the game, and venture to some of baseball's hallowed grounds and legendary stadiums.- Did you know that the spit ball was outlawed in 1920, but pitchers who already threw it were permitted to continue using it until they retired? Filled with fun and fascinating facts about the game and all of its organized leagues throughout history, including the major and minor leagues, negro leagues, women's leagues, little league and leagues around the world.- This engaging compendium also includes a giant, colorfully-illustrated gate-fold timeline that offers a unique way of looking at the history of baseball. The timeline integrates world events with major moments in baseball for a unique overview of social history.

One of the great bards of America's Grand Old Game gives a rousing account ofbaseball, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day.

From baseball's humble beginnings to its modern-day pyrotechnics, this comprehensive, one-of-a-kind, and endlessly entertaining volume contains stats and records, amazing anecdotes, and recreations of great games and heroic events--from pre-season to post-season and all the glory days in between.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From The New York Times baseball columnist, an enchanting, enthralling history of the national pastime as told through the craft of pitching, based on years of archival research and interviews with more than three hundred people from Hall of Famers to the stars of today. The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach, pitchers have never stopped innovating. In K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, Tyler Kepner traces the colorful stories and fascinating folklore behind the ten major pitches. Each chapter highlights a different pitch, from the blazing fastball to the fluttering knuckleball to the slippery spitball. Infusing every page with infectious passion for the game, Kepner brings readers inside the minds of combatants sixty feet, six inches apart. Filled with priceless insights from many of the best pitchers in baseball history--from Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, and Nolan Ryan to Greg Maddux, Mariano Rivera, and Clayton Kershaw--K will be the definitive book on pitching and join such works as The Glory of Their Times and Moneyball as a classic of the genre.

"The Baseball Timeline" brings together the players and the history of the game in a unique, day-by-day format that makes each season come alive and contains every record and statistic for the die-hard fan. Illustrations.

Baseball's greatest asset is the richness of its lore, and Leonard Koppett has made the entire treasure of the game's history accessible in one enjoyable volume. In his lively narratives on the shape and significance of each season from baseball's nineteenth-century beginnings to the updated and expanded sections on the last decade, Koppett explains the changes in baseball-the-game and baseball-the-business that forged the major leagues we know today. Each chapter recounts trends, players, and events during different eras; offers succinct seasonal recaps, and summarizes how the consequences of that particular baseball era set the stage for the next. On the origins and evolution of on-the-field play—from the 1880s origin of pitching high and tight then low and away, to modern-day use of body armor at bat—plus statistics and record-breaking achievements, Koppett's got it covered. On business and organizational controversies, such as the introduction of night baseball, radio and TV broadcasting, free agency, strike actions, divisional play-offs, and the policies of owners and commissioners, Koppett's got it covered. One-stop reading for the most essential stories, statistics, and opinions on the major leagues, Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball is the most original baseball reference available.

With more than 500 photographs -- Introduction by Roger Angell -- Essays by Thomas Boswell, Robert W. Creamer, Gerald Early, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bill James, David Lamb, Daniel Okrent, John Thorn, George E Will -- And featuring an interview with Buck O'Neil

Discusses baseball's history and the game's relationship to American society from the 1850s until the present day.

In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Goldstein's classic includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s and an account of his experience as a scholarly consultant during the production of Ken Burns's Baseball.

This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime. Charles C. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game's surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game's expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding teams and personalities but also demonstrates the many connections between baseball--as game, sport, and business--and the evolution of tastes, values, and institutions in the United States.