Baseball Historical

When the kitchen ceiling caved in and the contents of his mother’s attic splayed across the floor, Ron, better known as “Punky”, knew he had to help clean up. With the assistance of his son and nephew, he would try to preserve as many of the dirty, mold-covered memories as he could, including a mysterious old metal box, possibly belonging to his Grandpa Hash. What’s inside it takes him back 32 years earlier, as he recalls the magical weekend in 1984 spent with his grandfather attending two baseball games.

From the author of the classic coming-of-age memoir Fresh off the Boat, tragicomic autofiction about how one very messed up and haunted manchild finds love in spite of himself. Hubie lives an exciting life. He hosts a traveling food show, produces it with his two best friends, and tastes the...

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

From Coney Island sideshows to the brand-new Yankee Stadium, Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties can bestow. But her fame comes with a price, and Ruby must escape a deadly web of conspiracy and threats from Prohibition rumrunners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the gangster underworld.

It takes two to tango. Allegra Hart has been working her whole life to achieve one goal: become a principal ballerina. When her director starts holding auditions for the lead role in the company’s latest production, Allegra sees this as her chance—maybe her last chance. The catch? The...

“This wonderful tale is for all lovers of golf, especially the weekend hackers with embarrassing handicaps (like me). Now we have hope. If we can just find the magic clubs.”—John Grisham A recently laid-off golf reporter. A down-on-his-luck caddie. And a magical set of clubs once owned by...

It seems that the FDR writer is back wanting more Fe-As-Ko stories from cowpoke Royal Leckner. This time it's 1897, Royal and E.M. have been married about four years. And so have Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault, owners of the Four Arrows ranch. Royal is still foreman of the ranch and caretaker of its owner. As he reminds us, Leviticus and Lou(ella) Perrault are "short a hat size," but "nice and honest, which is better than smart and fox-like any day." It's time to take the cattle to Portland for the annual sale, and Royal is bringing Leviticus along to teach him how "to sign on the dotted line."

Eddy Pareti is a street-smart kid who does things his own way. He ditches school and dodges duties at the family’s tavern, Ernie’s Bleachers (now Murphy’s Bleachers), which is just across from Wrigley Field. World War II is ending, the Cubs are heading to the World Series, and Eddy sneaks into games and brushes up against baseball legends, including stars of the Negro League. From behind his family’s bar, Eddy pours beer for soldiers, ball players, and rodeo clowns, runs bets for a bookie who wants him to shoot a deadbeat gambler and—hold your horses—crashes a stagecoach on State Street.

In 1963, volunteer Jack Harjo sits in the jungles of Costa Rica pondering three questions: Is there a greater good; does it apply here; and can you really trademark Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, and Maui Wowie? A story of sex, drugs, revolution, and the dawn of the Peace Corps....

Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.

Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, is having a record-breaking season in his first year as a New York Yankee. Larger than life on the field and off, Ruth is about to discover what the Chicago White Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series are learning - baseball heroes are not invulnerable to scandal. With suspicion in the air, Ruth's 1918 World Series win for the Boston Red Sox is now being questioned. Under scrutiny by the new baseball commissioner and enmeshed with gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, Ruth turns for help to Speed Cook, now a promoter of Negro baseball.

It’s 1984, and David is off the couch once more and providing support to the team-building efforts of a publishing start-up at the LA Dodgers Adult Fantasy Camp in Florida. As David seeks the elusive home run that will elevate his love life from the minors, team rivalries simmer, and he is drawn into a web of lies, suspicion, and drug smuggling. Teambuilding becomes less of a goal and more of a necessity as members start to show up dead.

What’s a 16-year-old boy to do when he learns that his stepmother and a local judge have murdered his father and now plan to kill him, too? Well, when it’s 1906, and you can play pretty good second base, you join a barn-storming baseball team making its way across Kansas. It also helps that the team is the Kansas City National Bloomer Girls. After all, who’d look for a runaway boy disguised as a girl on a women’s team that competes against town-ball teams of male players? Of course, it’ll take more than long hair, a Spalding glove, and a quick bat to stay alive.

When local baseball player Junior Jones receives death threats over the color of his skin, the team's wealthy owner hires Sam Rockwell to solve the case and stop a murder before it happens. Sam goes undercover as a minor league pitcher to strike out the culprit. Follow the clues along with Sam's curmudgeonly ghost of a father Frank Rockwell, and Sam's wife Amelia, who holds a secret that will forever change the lives of the entire Rockwell family. It's another laugh-filled, madcap mystery in the warm, witty 1950's Hollywood-style of author Jason Anspach.

It is 1947 when Joseph Burke, ex-Marine, ex-husband, ex-somebody–is hired as a bodyguard to protect Lauren Roach, 25 and spoiled rotten. The unlikely duo becomes entangled with Burke’s boyhood hero, color-barrier breaking baseball player Jackie Robinson, in a story that is both thrilling and engaging. It is in the historical character Jackie Robinson that Mr. Parker finds inspiration and Joseph Burke may find his redemption. This is a work of fiction about a real man. Most of what I’ve written I’ve made up. I have, however, attempted to render Jackie Robinson accurately. As he was, or as I imagined him to be, in 1947, when I was turning 15, and he was changing the world. The rest is altogether fiction. It may be more Burke’s story then Jackie’s story. But, without Jackie, Burke would have had no story. And neither would I. Robert B Parker.

The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California, in the 1970s.

Billions of dollars on the line. One irresistible distraction. Adelina Choi is a hacker with a heart of gold and a talent for emptying bank accounts. An MIT dropout with Robin Hood tendencies, she funnels cash from greedy marks to those who need it most. It’s a simple gig . . . until she...

Conor Nash has lived his life with a single purpose - to pitch in the major leagues. He’s been released from professional baseball contracts 10 times over a 16-year career, but he’s overcome every obstacle to finally reach "The Show" when he’s a decade too old. As he faces the specter of injury-forced retirement, he becomes a man neither he nor his wife recognizes. During his career, Conor avoided the trap of alcohol and drugs because his drug was baseball.

Recently widowed and now retired, Billy Bryan is “coming to the end of many things.” Then a long-forgotten scrapbook stirs memories of a distant past - and beckons him and his grown daughter on a reluctant journey to relive his role in history. In 1947 Bryan was playing winter ball in Cuba, his future as uncertain as the island country’s. Then one fateful night Bryan witnessed a young student radical named Fidel unleash an amazing curveball. So begins Bryan's tug-of-war with destiny.

An unlikely team of misfit players, and the coach fighting to hold them all together… The All Nation Team tells the story of the first fully integrated, "post-racial" baseball team, very loosely based on an actual team that played in the years before World War I. In his first season as head coach of the All Nations team, former slave George Grunion must contend with racist crowds, flagging team morale, his own loneliness, and even the ghost of the previous head coach.