Genuine fans take the best team moments with the less than great, and know that the games that are best forgotten make the good moments truly shine. This monumental book of the Los Angeles Lakers documents all the best moments and personalities in the history of the team, but also unmasks the regrettably awful and the unflinchingly ugly. In entertaining—and unsparing—fashion, this book sparkles with Lakers highlights and lowlights, from wonderful and wacky memories to the famous and infamo...

The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly includes the best and worst teams and players of all time, the most clutch performances and performers, the biggest choke jobs and chokers, great comebacks and blown leads, plus overrated and underrated players and coaches.

Genuine fans take the best team moments with the less than great, and know that the games that are best forgotten make the good moments truly shine. This monumental book of the San Francisco 49ers documents all the best moments and personalities in the history of the team, but also unmasks the regrettably awful and the unflinchingly ugly. In entertaining—and unsparing—fashion, this book sparkles with 49ers highlights and lowlights, from wonderful and wacky memories to the famous and infamo...

Forget Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and Jerome Holtzman. According to author Steven Travers, Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times was the greatest sports columnist who ever lived—period. Known for his highly descriptive metaphors and phrasing—a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart, so painfully honest he could spot George Washington two answers in a lie detector test, the only pitcher I know who thinks of Homer as a Greek poet and not a lucky swing by a banjo hitter—Murray was a p...

In 1975, after his two Godfather epics, Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines to film Apocalypse Now. He scrapped much of the original script, a jingoistic narrative of U.S. Special Forces winning an unwinnable war. Harvey Keitel, originally cast in the lead role, was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen, who had a heart attack. An overweight Marlon Brando, paid a huge salary, did more philosophizing than acting. It rained almost every day and a hurricane wiped out t...

Nineteen sixty-two—it's been called “the end of innocence,” as America witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the following year saw the Kennedy assassination and the early stirrings of Vietnam.In baseball, 1962 was a thrilling season. Five years prior the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had migrated west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, leaving New York to the Yankees. In 1962, those same Giants and Dodgers faced off to see who would advance to the World Serie...

From their origins as the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1884, through their departure from their beloved borough in 1957, to their record-breaking popularity in sunny Los Angeles, the Dodgers baseball team has been an unstoppable force in professional baseball for well over a century. The franchise has captured a record 21 National League titles, won six World Series championships, and produced dozens of Hall-of-Famers. The Dodgers revolutionized the sports landscape with the signing of Jackie Rob...

The Rivals marks the first joint project from the top sports writers of New York Times and the Boston Globe--and what better subject than the two baseball teams whose crossed fortunes obsess and define each city.**A Struggle for the Ages. . .BOSTON GLOBE JANUARY 6, 1920RED SOX SELL RUTH FOR $100,000 CASH--------Demon Slugger of American League, Who Made 29 Home Runs Last Season, Goes to New York Yankees--------...

The story of legendary Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball, is recounted in this title.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Season Inside presents a thoroughly entertaining and deeply reflective examination of America’s greatest sport: baseball.What makes baseball what it is—the good as well as the bad? Who are the game’s heroes, and who its villains? What roles do managers play, and umpires and announcers and mascots and the media? What is the game’s future?To answer these questions, renowned sports journalist John...

While baseball is touted as America’s favourite pastime, everyone will know the score with this grand slam of Q&A that’s sure to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Doug Lennox hammers it out of the park by filling us in on who’s won the most Cy Young Awards, what the Green Monster is, and the five ways that a player can be called "out." In this treasure trove of baseball lore, you’ll learn all about the leagues and teams that have come and gone, the players who are legends, and the achieve...

TAKE THEM OUT OF THE BALL GAME–PLEASE!From star running back Bryon “Bam” Morris’s interesting (and totally illegal) sideline career to the 1950s Kansas City A’s sneaky relationship with the New York Yankees; from French golfer Jean Van de Velde’s epic choke on 18 at the 1999 British Open to the infamous Cleveland Ten-Cent Beer Night riot of 1974; from Hungary’s bloody 1956 Olympic water polo match with the Soviet Union to the definitive analysis of basketball coach Larry Brown’s sa...