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Baseball: History, Players, & Coaching: 1970s-1980s

A research topic guide on the history and legendary players of baseball.

Nolan Ryan

Nolan Ryan

Johnny Bench

Streaming Films

Perspectives

My Prison Without Bars

PETE ROSE HOLDS MORE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL RECORDS THAN ANY OTHER PLAYER IN HISTORY. He stands alone as baseball's hit king having shattered the previously "unbreakable" record held by Ty Cobb. He is a blue-collar hero with the kind of old-fashioned work ethic that turned great talent into legendary accomplishments. Pete Rose is also a lifelong gambler and a sufferer of oppositional defiant disorder. For the past 13 years, he has been banned from baseball and barred from his rightful place in the Hall of Fame-- accused of violating MLB's one taboo. Rule 21 states that no one associated with baseball shall ever gamble on the game. The punishment is no less than a permanent barring from baseball and exclusion from the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose has lived in the shadow of his exile. He has denied betting on the game that he loves. He has been shunned by MLB, investigated by the IRS, and served time for tax charges in the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. But he's coming back. Pete Rose has never been forgotten by the fans who loved him throughout his 24-year career. The men he played with have stood by him. In this, his first book since his very public fall from grace, Pete Rose speaks with great candor about all the outstanding questions that have kept him firmly in the public eye. He discloses what life was like behind bars, discusses the turbulent years of his exile, and gives a vivid picture of his early life and baseball career. He also confronts his demons, tackling the ugly truths about his gambling and his behavior. MY PRISON WITHOUT BARS is Pete Rose's full accounting of his life. No one thinks he's perfect. He has made mistakes-- big ones. And he is finally ready to admit them.

The Meaning of Nolan Ryan

Who is Nolan Ryan? Might as well ask who is America. After twenty-seven major league seasons in the limelight, the man who has been called the "last true sports hero" stands as a national phenomenon-a phenomenon whose media portrayal tells America something important about itself. Seven no-hitters. Over three hundred wins. Over fifty-five hundred strikeouts. More than fifty major league records. A Texas highway named for him. Forty-six years old at retirement, and still throwing the ball at over ninety miles per hour. The record speaks for itself. A hero. But there's more to Ryan than the record. There's the image. And the business. The portrayal of this future Hall of Famer as a devoted husband, strong father, and off-season cowboy has been used to sell jeans, athletic shoes, pain relievers, and other products. In this fascinating analysis of Ryan's career and the media hype surrounding it, Nick Trujillo examines his significance as a sports hero and celebrity in American culture. Each chapter of the book looks at a different aspect of Ryan's meaning in contemporary society: his meaning to his teammates on the Texas Rangers, his portrayal in the mass media, his status as American hero, his commodification as a commercialized product, and his representation as an image of traditional masculinity and "safe sex." Trujillo shows how Ryan functions as a sort of mirror in which a sometimes jaded nation can see what it wants to see of itself.

Collision at Home Plate

Collision at Home Plate is a dual biography of Pete Rose, an uncouth but great ballplayer who suffered disgrace and imprisonment, and Bart Giamatti, the baseball commissioner so deeply shaken and bruised by the Rose scandal that he died a week after it was made public. This is the definitive book on one of the most traumatic and tragic episodes in baseball history.

Pete Rose

"Kennedy's book on the tarnished and enigmatic Rose is exceptional. Like the best writing about sport--Liebling, Angell--it qualifies as stirring literature. I'd read Kennedy no matter what he writes about." --Richard Ford Pete Rose played baseball with a singular and headfirst abandon that endeared him to fans and peers, even as it riled others--a figure at once magnetic, beloved and polarizing. Rose has more base hits than anyone in history, yet he is not in the Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years ago he was banished from baseball for gambling, then ruled ineligible for Cooperstown; today, the question "Does Pete Rose belong in the Hall of Fame?" has evolved into perhaps the most provocative in sports, a layered, slippery and ever-relevant moral conundrum. How do we evaluate the Hit King now, at a time when steroid cheats appear on the Hall of Fame ballot even as Rose is denied? What do we make of this happily unrepentant gambler, this shameless but beguiling showman whose postbaseball journey has led him to a curious reality show and to the streets of Cooperstown to hawk his signature, his story, himself? Best-selling author Kostya Kennedy delivers an evocative answer in his fascinating re-examination of Pete Rose's life; from his cocky and charismatic early years through his storied playing career to his bitter war against baseball's hierarchy to the man we find today--still incorrigible, still adored by many. Where has his improbable saga landed him in the redefined, post-steroid world? Do we feel any differently about Pete Rose today? Should we?

Pete Rose

Streaming Films