"At forty-four years old, Tim Wakefield is the longest-serving member of one of baseballs most popular franchises. He is close to eclipsing the winning records of two of the greatest pitchers to have played the game, yet few realize the full measure of his success. That his career can be characterized by such words as dependability and consistency defies all odds because he has achieved this with baseballs most mercurial weapon the knuckleball. Knuckler...

"Before Pedro Martínez was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, before he pitched the Red Sox to a World Series championship, before he was named to the All-Star team eight times, before he won the Cy Young Award three times, he was a kid from a place called Manoguayabo in the Dominican Republic. Pedro loved baseball more than anything, and his older brother Ramón was the best pitcher he'd ever seen. He dreamed of the day he and his brother could...

Profiles twenty-seven of the best pitchers in the history of baseball, including Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Whitey Ford, Dizzy Dean, and Cy Young.

Pitchers are the heart of baseball, and John Feinstein tells the story of the game today through one season and two great pitchers working in the crucible of the New York media market. Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina have seen it all in the Major Leagues and both entered 2007 in search of individual milestones and one more shot at The World Series-Glavine with the Mets, Mussina five miles away with the Yankees. The two veterans experience very different...

"Mariano Rivera never dreamed of becoming a professional athlete. He didn't grow up collecting baseball cards, playing Little League, or cheering on his home team at the World Series. He had never heard of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, or Mickey Mantle. One day, that all changed. From a childhood playing pickup games in Panama to an epic career with the New York Yankees, Mariano's rise to greatness has been anything but ordinary. He's the guy...

Baseball's best writer offers an extraordinarily candid and thorough exploration of the inner craft of pitching from one of the game's best, David Cone.
There is no big league pitcher who is more respected for his skill than David Cone.
In his stellar career Cone has won multiple championships andcountless professional accolades. Along the way, the perennial all-star has had to adjust to five different ballclubs, recover from a career-threatening...

The Detroit Tigers, an umpire, a pitcher, and a mistake—one of the “classic, human, baseball stories” (Ken Burns, creator of the PBS mini-series Baseball).
 
The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in over 130 years, it has happened only twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first. Except that’s...

From the humble heights of a Class-A pitcher's mound tothe deflating lows of sleeping on his gun-toting grandmother's air mattress,veteran reliever Dirk Hayhurst steps out of the bullpen to deliver the bestpitch of his career—a raw and unflinching account of his life in the minorleagues. Whether training tarantulas to protect his room from thievingemployees in a backwater hotel or absorbing the gentle mockery of somenot-quite-starstruck schoolchildren,

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Fifty-nine in '84 is award–winning journalist Edward Achorn's riveting history of late nineteenth century baseball and the era's most legendary pitcher.
In 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won an astounding fifty-nine games—more than anyone in major-league history ever had before, or has since. He then went on to win all three games of baseball's first World Series.
Fifty-nine in '84 tells...

For the first time, Dalko: The Untold Story of Baseball's Fastest Pitcher unites all of the eyewitness accounts from the coaches, analysts, teammates, and professionals who witnessed the game's fastest pitcher in action. In doing so, it puts readers on the fields and at the plate to hear the buzzing fastball of a pitcher fighting to achieve his major league ambitions.