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As a Major League Baseball player (Chicago White Sox 1949-1950; also played for the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League), Malone designed the Louisville Slugger M110 model baseball bat. That wasn't in itself all that remarkable: while the "M" stands for "Malone", the "110" means he's the 110th player whose name starts with M that designed a bat for the company. The important thing is, his is an excellent design: it's one of the most popular bat designs used by professional baseball players today, according to a spokesman from Hillerich and Bradsby, which makes the Sluggers. Malone died June 1 from respiratory problems. He was 85. From This is True for 4 June 2006 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: By the Staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $19.56 Editorial Review: At last! After 28 years of unfulfilled dreams, Phillie Fans now have a winning team with the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies thrilling victory over the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series. Let the celebration begin! Celebration is exactly what this hardbound, full-color book a beautifully designed keepsake is about: the entire wining season of the Philadelphia Phillies leading up to and including the World Series victory is chronicled by the veteran columnists and sportswriters of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. Champions provides the entire exciting story of a special team and a season that will be remembered by joyous Fightin Phils fans for years to come. Chronicled in all its exciting details by the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, this one-of-a kind story in Phillies history will be cherished as a keepsake now and into the future. Included in Champions is all the background detail that fans seek but seldom receive, as well as a full recounting of the playoff games along with its most colorful moments, behind the scenes episodes, and most memorable players. Featuring an outstanding set of action photos from the 2008 baseball season, this remarkable account is destined to be a baseball classic. Relive each explosive throw and hit with the Phillies taking out the Brewers in four games and the Dodgers in five. Learn about this remarkable team of leaders with a singular focus to become World Champions. Long-suffering fans who have followed the Phillies with love and passion over these many years will be elated with this book of triumph. Sport lovers everywhere will want to join in the celebration of Philly s long-awaited victory.  By: Josh Hamilton List Price: $23.99 Amazon Price: $16.31 Editorial Review: Josh Hamilton was the first player chosen in the first round of the 1999 baseball draft. He was destined to be one of those rare "high-character " superstars. But in 2001, working his way from the minors to the majors, all of the plans for Josh went off the rails in a moment of weakness. What followed was a 4-year nightmare of drugs and alcohol, estrangement from friends and family, and his eventual suspension from baseball. BEYOND BELIEF details the events that led up to the derailment. Josh explains how a young man destined for fame and wealth could allow his life to be taken over by drugs and alcohol. But it is also the memoir of a spiritual journey that breaks through pain and heartbreak and leads to the rebirth of his major-league career. Josh Hamilton makes no excuses and places no blame on anyone other than himself. He takes responsibility for his poor decisions and believes his story can help millions who battle the same demons. "I have been given a platform to tell my story" he says. "I pray every night I am a good messenger."  By: Michael Lewis List Price: $13.95 Amazon Price: $9.50 Editorial Review: "One of the best baseball?and management?books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."?Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard). I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it?before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities?his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission?but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. What these geek numbers show?no, prove?is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Billy paid attention to those numbers ?with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David?Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans. Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe  By: Spike Carlsen List Price: $24.95 Amazon Price: $16.47 Editorial Review: In a world without wood, we might not be here at all. Without wood, we wouldn't have had the fire, heat, and shelter that allowed us to expand into the colder regions of the planet. If civilization somehow did develop, our daily lives still would be vastly different: there would be no violins, baseball bats, chopsticks, or wine corks. The book you are now holding wouldn't exist. At the same time, many of us are removed from the world where wood is shaped and celebrated every day. That world is inhabited by a unique assortment of eccentric craftsmen and passionate enthusiasts who have created some of the world's most beloved musical instruments, feared weapons, dazzling architecture, sacred relics, and bizarre forms of transportation. In A Splintered History of Wood, Spike Carlsen has uncovered the most outlandish characters and examples, from world-champion chainsaw carvers to blind woodworkers, the Miraculous Staircase to the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and many more, in a passionate and personal exploration of nature's greatest gift.  List Price: $21.95 Amazon Price: $14.93 Editorial Review: The 2009 edition of the New York Times bestselling guide to major league baseball that is simply ?the best book of its kind? (Rob Neyer) Now in its fourteenth edition, the Baseball Prospectus annual is the industry leader among annual baseball guides and the rightful successor to Bill James?s legendary bestselling Baseball Abstracts. The 2009 edition contains critical essays on each of the thirty teams and player comments for some sixty players for each of those teams. Each player?s statistics are projected for the coming season using the groundbreaking PECOTA projection system, called ?perhaps the game?s most accurate projection model? (Sports Illustrated). Baseball Prospectus 2009 also contains cutting-edge essays on performance analysis, the likes of which have inspired twenty-nine of the thirty major league teams to hire current and former Baseball Prospectus writers and analysts as consultants. The baseball bible for fantasy players and devoted fans, Baseball Prospectus can be relied upon to once again hit it out of the park. |
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