Search results for ""Author Ed Linn""
The University of Chicago Press Nice Guys Finish Last
The history of baseball is rife with colorful characters. But for sheer cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win, very few have come close to Leo 'the Lip' Durocher. Following a five-decade career as a player and manager for baseball's most storied franchises, Durocher teamed up with veteran sportswriter Ed Linn to tell the story of his life in the game. The resulting book, "Nice Guys Finish Last", is baseball at its best, brimming with personality and full of all the fights and feuds, triumphs and tricks that made Durocher such a success - and an outsized celebrity. Durocher began his career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees and hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him 'the All-American Out'. But soon Durocher hit his stride: traded to St. Louis, he found his headlong play and never-say-die attitude a perfect fit with the rambunctious 'Gashouse Gang' Cardinals. In 1939 he was named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers - and almost instantly transformed the underachieving Bums into perennial contenders. He went on to manage the New York Giants, sharing the glory of one of the most famous moments in baseball history, Bobby Thomson's 'shot heard round the world', which won the Giants the 1951 pennant. Durocher would later learn how it felt to be on the other side of such an unforgettable moment, as his 1969 Cubs, after holding first place for 105 days, blew a seemingly insurmountable 8-1/2 game lead to the Miracle Mets. All the while, Durocher made as much noise off the field as on it. His perpetual feuds with players, owners, and league officials - not to mention his public associations with gamblers, riffraff, and Hollywood stars like George Raft and Laraine Day - kept his name in the headlines and spread his fame far beyond the confines of the diamond. A no-holds-barred account of a singular figure, "Nice Guys Finish Last" brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball's greatest era to vivid life, earning a place on every baseball fan's bookshelf.
£19.71
Ivan R Dee, Inc The Hustler's Handbook
What is the difference between a promoter and a hustler?" Bill Veeck asks. "Well, let's look at it this way. Neither one of them is an advertiser. An advertiser pays for his space. A promoter works out a quid pro quo . A hustler gets a free ride and makes it seem as if he's doing you a favor." Keep this in mind as Veeck, one of baseball's all–time characters and certainly its best–ever hustler, draws on an apparently bottomless well of stories, anecdotes, theories, and attitudes involving the often bizarre world of major league baseball. And, of course, he's never afraid to speak his mind. The Hustler's Handbook is a rich, hilarious, flagrantly outspoken lesson on how to operate as a hustler in the corporate jungle of modern baseball.
£13.79
Ivan R Dee, Inc Thirty Tons a Day
In between his romances with baseball, in early 1969 Bill Veeck took up the challenge of managing Boston's semi–moribund Suffolk Downs racetrack. "Being of sound mind and in reasonable possession of my faculties," Veeck wrote, "I marshaled my forces, at the tender age of fifty–four, and marched upon the city of Boston, Massachusetts, like a latter–day Ben Franklin, to seek my fame and fortune as the operator of a racetrack. Two years later, fortune having taken one look at my weathered features and shaken its hoary locks, I retreated, smiling gamely." When he took over the track, Veeck had yet to learn that the normal daily output of some sixteen hundred horses (including straw) would amount to so much, or be so hard to dispose of. But that was the least of his problems. In the tough–minded and Tabasco–tongued prose that is his trademark, Veeck recalls the battles he won and lost, the fun he had, and what he discovered about horse racing at "Sufferin' Downs." It's a zesty, complicated story but a relentlessly fascinating one about the inside workings of one of the most popular sports in America.
£12.89
