The Second Greatest Baseball Game Ever Played

The Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the 1955 World Series in the greatest baseball game ever played. The second-greatest baseball game ever played took place Saturday, June 29, 1957. No Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Cardinals, or Red Sox were there. The game played out in author Drew Bridgess hometown of Hildebran in western North Carolina. Two teams of boys, ten to fifteen years old, faced off on the high school baseball diamond, no uniforms and no organized league. Bridges played second base, his brother played third, and their dad coached the team. In this memoir, Bridges tells the story of that afternoon of baseball and how it came to be through his recollections and his fathers wartime letters to his mother who was pregnant with their first child. It shares the words of an ordinary American serviceman who is dreaming about a life beyond war. Field of Dreams meets A League of Their Own meets The Sandlot in this story of a soldiers return home from World War II and his work with others in the community to build a youth league baseball program. The Second-Greatest Baseball Game Ever Played shares the game of baseball through the eyes of a ten-year-old and shows how this game captured the heart and soul of a community and became so vital to all.

This book is a historical fiction that I have written about the 1960 baseball World Series, specifically about game 7 of that series, that many baseball experts feel was the greatest game ever played in the history of Major League Baseball. The seventh game of that World Series was played on a sunny fall day on October 13, 1960, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On that date, around 3:00 p.m., Bill Mazeroski, the second baseman for the Pirates, hit a walk-off home run in the top of the ninth inning to win the game. On the second pitch thrown by Yankee pitcher Ralph Terry, Mazeroski hit a ball over the 402 sign in left field, which gave the Pirates an improbable and almost miraculous win over the heavily favored New York Yankees. This home run was the highlight of the many strange and dramatic plays that took place during game 7, which makes that game one for all ages and one that would make for an excellent script for any Hollywood movie. This book, however, is about more than the 1960 World Series. It is also about two nine-year-old boys who meet each other in the summer of 1960 and who become close friends, united by not only baseball but also by a crisis that plagues one of the main character's family. Daniel Pryzinski and Adam Brodziak are the two fictional characters in this book who meet each other by chance during the summer of 1960. Daniel lives in the Polish Hill section of Pittsburgh, while Adam lives in a small rural coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania, sixty miles from Pittsburgh. The two meet each other by chance when Adam's family is invited to stay with Daniel's family while they are attending a Polish Festival in Pittsburgh. While staying with the Pryzinski family, the Brodziaks discover a dark secret. Daniel's father, Peter, is an alcoholic whose drinking problems are so bad that it threatens to destroy the Pryzinski family. Daniel's mother, Pauline, is desperately trying to hold the family together but is on the verge of leaving her husband. She is a devout Catholic, so that decision was one that she did not want to make. Besides, she loved her husband so much that she was willing to do anything to help him recover from his drinking problem. Through the intervention of the Brodziaks and their family doctor, Tom Slevic, they are able to convince Peter to admit himself to an Alcohol Rehab Center in Somerset, Pennsylvania. Although the focus of this book is the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, it is the relationship of the fictional characters that will show the reader how reliance upon family and friends and hope in God and faith can serve to change the lives of so many whose loved ones are affected by alcohol or other types of addiction or substance abuse.

Clara's adventure begins on Christmas Eve with an amazing present - a magic doll. Soon she is flying in a sleigh to the Land of Sweets where she meets the Sugarplum Fairy... An enchanting retelling of the classic story, written for children beginning to read alone. "Irresistible for children learning to read." - Child Education Plus

Twenty-seven essays, profiles, and stories about America's pastime.

This incredible gathering of first-hand remembrances brings a fascinating and enlightening new perspective to the period of baseball's greatest peak and ultimate turning point--when bigotry and exploitation still ran rampant among the clubs and the sport was irrevocably being changed into a business. 100 photos.

In “a worthy companion to . . . Boys of Summer,” a Pulitzer prize winning journalist “exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace” (New York Times). From award-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry comes the beautifully recounted story of the longest game in baseball history—a tale celebrating not only the robust intensity of baseball, but the aspirational ideal epitomized by the hard-fighting players of the minor leagues. On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. For eight hours, the night seemed to suspend a town and two teams between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys—the shivering fans; their wives at home; the umpires; the batboys approaching manhood; the ejected manager, peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters and broadcasters; and the players themselves—two destined for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), the few to play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal forever to the game. With Bottom of the 33rd, Barry delivers a lyrical meditation on small-town lives, minor-league dreams, and the elements of time and community that conspired one fateful night to produce a baseball game seemingly without end. An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, Bottom of the 33rd is the rare sports book that changes the way we perceive America’s pastime—and America’s past. “Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Bottom of the 33rd is chaw-chewing, sunflower-spitting, pine tar proof that too much baseball is never enough.” —Jane Leavy, author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax

Contains play-by-play details of nine of the best baseball games ever played.

Intertwines the personal histories of baseball Hall of Famers Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn with the events of their sixteen-inning pitching duel at San Francisco's Candlestick Park in the summer of 1963.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.