Adult

With exclusive access to surprising new evidence, Sporting News reporter Sean Deveney details a scandal at the core of baseball’s greatest folklore --- in a golden era as exciting and controversial as our sports world today. This inside look at the pivotal year of 1918 proves that baseball has always been a game overrun with colorful characters, intense human drama, and explosive controversy.

On October 8, 1956, New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen took the mound for game five of the World Series against the rival Brooklyn Dodgers. In an improbable performance that the New York Times called "the greatest moment in the history of the Fall Classic," Larsen, an otherwise mediocre journeyman pitcher, retired twenty-seven straight Dodger batters to clinch a perfect game and, to date, the only postseason no-hitter ever witnessed in major league baseball. Here, Lew Paper delivers a masterful pitch-by-pitch account of that fateful day and the extraordinary lives of the players on the field- seven of whom would later be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Boston, Tuesday, October 21, 1975. The Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds have endured an excruciating three-day rain delay. Tonight, at last, they will play Game Six of the World Series. Leading three games to two, Cincinnati hopes to win it all; Boston is desperate to stay alive. But for all the anticipation, nobody could have predicted what a classic it would turn out to be: an extra-innings thriller, created by one of the Big Red Machine's patented comebacks and the Red Sox's improbable late-inning rally; clutch hitting, heart-stopping defensive plays and more twists and turns than a Grand Prix circuit, climaxed by one of the most famous home runs in baseball history that ended it in the twelfth.

In THE MACHINE, award-winning sports writer Joe Posnanski captures all of the passion and tension, drama and glory of a baseball team considered to be one of the best ever to take the field. Featuring a who's who of stars --- including Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, George Foster, Cesar Geronimo, Dave Concepcion and Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson ---THE MACHINE brings to vivid life all the hopes and excitement, fireworks and controversy of a remarkable team's extraordinary year in a rollicking thrill-ride of a real-sports story.

CARDBOARD GODS is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child. It also captures the experience of growing up obsessed with baseball cards and explores what it means to be a fan of the game.

Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector’s items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players association into one of the country’s most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the 80s and 90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors.

IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE THE LINES THAT COUNTSbrings together ballplayers, managers, an umpire and the first head of the players’ union to describe the momentous changes to the game that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent draws from his ongoing oral history of the game to celebrate the era that spans the Miracle Mets through free agency to Cal Ripken’s historic consecutive-games streak.

These often obscure contests helped hasten the end of Jim Crow baseball, paving the way for the game’s integration. Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller never set out to make social history --- but that’s precisely what happened. Tim Gay has brought this era to vivid and colorful life in a book that every baseball fan will embrace.

At its heart, HIGH HEAT is a reflection on our infatuation with the fastball --- the expectation it carries, the raw ability it puts on display and, most of all, the feats and trials of those who have attempted to master it. As Wendel puts it, “The tale of high heat can lead in several different directions at once, and the real story has more to do with triumph and tragedy that with the simple act of throwing a baseball.”

Based on meticulous research and interviews with former teammates, family, two former presidents, and Aaron himself, THE LAST HERO chronicles Aaron’s childhood in segregated Alabama, his brief stardom in the Negro Leagues, his complicated relationship with celebrity and his historic rivalry with Willie Mays --- all culminating in the defining event of his life: his shattering of Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record.