Baseball Memoirs

In Playing Through the Pain, writer Dan Good seeks to make sense of MLB MVP Ken Caminiti's fascinating, troubled life. The story of Caminiti, the player who opened the lid on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, has never been properly told. Caminiti voluntarily admitted in a 2002 Sports Illustrated cover story that he used steroids during his career, including his 1996 season, and guessed that half of the players were using performance-enhancing drugs. Good's on-the-record sources include Caminiti's steroids supplier, people who attended rehab with him, and more.

To many, Walter Johnson is the greatest pitcher of all time. He was a star second to none from the dawn of the game's modern era through the "Golden Age of Sports" of the Roaring Twenties. The playing career of "The Big Train", as the sportswriters called him, spanned the era of such greats as Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Lou Gehrig, and Al Simmons. Johnson knew every President from William Howard Taft to Franklin Roosevelt, and was friends with the likes of Will Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks.

In many sports, the pinnacle is Wheaties-box fame and notoriety. But in the world of pool, notoriety is the last thing a hustler desires. Such is the dilemma that faces Danny Basavich, an affable, generously proportioned Jewish kid from Jersey, who flounders through high school until he...

Childhood for Evan Roberts was defined by outings to the old Shea Stadium with his father, always with a scorebook in hand. What began as a gameday ritual replete with misspelled player names and scrawled symbols turned into an obsession with scoring every game he watched, one which persisted as Roberts rose through the ranks at WFAN. Taken together, those scorebooks form a living, breathing Mets diary spanning 30 years of thrilling—and, at times, tortured—fandom. My Mets Bible is an exercise in memory and nostalgia, and a meditation on the things that stick with us as sports fans.

When baseball fans voted on the top twenty-five players of the twentieth century in 1999, Stan Musial didn’t make the cut. This glaring omission—later rectified by a panel of experts—raised an important question: How could a first-ballot Hall of Famer, widely considered one of the greatest...

Reviled in New York and beloved in Los Angeles, O'Malley is one of the most controversial owners in the history of American sports. He remade major league baseball and altered the course of history in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles when he moved the Dodgers to California. But while many New York critics attacked him, O'Malley looked to the future, declining to argue his case. As a result, fans across the nation have been unable to stop arguing about him - until now.

It’s a tennis story. It’s a family story. It’s a teamwork story. It’s the story of how I got to where and who I am today. I’m only in my mid-twenties, and some might think that’s young to write a memoir. Who does that, right? But for me and my team it’s always been important to...

Picking up where he left off in his acclaimed memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, Steve Rushin brilliantly captures a bygone era, and the thrills of new adulthood in the early 80s. It begins in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a 13-year-old kid staging his own author photo that he hopes will someday grace...

Met and Yankee All-Star pitcher David Cone shares lessons from the World Series and beyond in this essential New York Times bestselling memoir for baseball fans everywhere. "There was a sense about him and an aura about him. Even when he was in trouble, he carried himself like a pitcher who said...

In Derek Jeter: The Inspiring Story of One of Baseball’s Greatest Shortstops, you will learn the story of one of baseball's greatest shortstops, Derek Jeter. Jeter accomplished a great deal over the course of his career. He was selected as an All-Star 14 times, won the World Series five times, and won a World Series MVP as well as five Gold Glove Awards and five Silver Slugger Awards. Needless to say, he retired with one of the greatest resumes of any baseball superstar.

As a co-founder of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, Chris Hillman is arguably the primary architect of what’s come to be known as country rock. He went on to record and perform in various configurations, including as a member of Stephen Stills’s Manassas and as a co-founder of The...

Pete Sampras is arguably the greatest tennis player ever, a man whose hard-nosed work ethic led to an unprecedented number one world ranking for 286 consecutive weeks, and whose prodigious talent made possible a record-setting fourteen Grand Slam titles. While his more vocal rivals sometimes...

Shattered is part sports audio book, because you’ll go on road trips, enter clubhouses, and walk on the fields of professional baseball. It’s part romantic novel, because you’ll journey with two young kids who fall in love and eventually elope, evading not only her family, but the law as well - for she was only 16. It’s also a story of brokenness, betrayal, and burn-out. If you were raised in a dysfunctional family, if you’ve ever had your dreams fall apart, been betrayed by close friends, or hit the psychological “wall” in your professional career, this is your audio book too.

Christy Mathewson was one of the most dominant pitchers ever to play baseball. Posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the “Five Immortals,” he was an unstoppable force on the mound, winning at least 22 games for 12 straight seasons and pitching three complete-game shutouts in the 1905 World Series. Pitching in a Pinch, his witty and digestible book of baseball insights, stories, and wisdom, was first published over a hundred years ago and presents listeners with Mathewson’s plainspoken perspective on the diamond of yore.

A memoir from one of the most admired players in baseball, the captain of the New York Mets, David Wright David Wright played his entire Major League Baseball career for one team, the team he dreamed of playing for as a kid: the New York Mets. A quick fan favorite from Virginia who then...

In time for the 50th anniversary of the Mets' miraculous 1969 World Series win, right fielder Ron Swoboda tells the story of that amazing season, the people he played with and against (sometimes at the same time), and what life was like as an "Every Man" ballplayer. Ron Swoboda wasn't the greatest player the Mets ever had, but he made the greatest catch in Met history, saving a game in the 1969 World Series, and his RBI clinched the final game. By Met standards that makes him legend.

On an overcast September day in 1993, Jim Abbott took the mound at Yankee Stadium and threw one of the most dramatic no-hitters in major-league history. The game was the crowning achievement in an unlikely success story, unseen in the annals of professional sports. In Imperfect, the one-time big...

By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner...

The celebrated memoir from LeBron James - a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives, including his own "A book that will incredibly move and inspire you.” —Jay-Z "A heartwarming story of boys who became men, teammates who became brothers, players who...

Given his legacy, many Americans today believe Jackie Robinson was the first black man to play in Major League Baseball, but that answer is wrong. As far back as the late 19th century, there had been professional baseball leagues that were every bit as segregated as any other aspect of society, but before that, there were, for a brief shining moment, there were teams of black and white men playing with and against each other.