Mike "King" Kelly was the hard-living, hard-drinking son of a Civil War veteran whose skills at baseball and infectious charm turned him into the game's first hero, and a symbol of what it meant to be a celebrity in America in the 1880s and 1890s. Slide, Kelly, Slide reacquaints baseball fans and scholars with this little-known pioneer of the game. Marty Appel, the author of several baseball books, conducted a thorough search of local archives to bring the story of King Kelly to light and place him in his proper historical context. An innovator on the field, who was not above taking advantage...

Our captain and leader has not left us, today, tomorrow, this year, next ... Our endeavors will reflect our love and admiration for him."
--Honorary plaque to Munson in Yankee Stadium

Thurman Munson is remembered by fans as the fiercely competitive, tough, and--most of all--inspiring Yankee captain and champion from the wild Bronx Zoo years. He is also remembered for his tragic death, at age thirty-two, when the private plane he was piloting crashed in Canton, Ohio, on August 2, 1979.

Munson is the intimate biography of a complex and larger-than-life legend. Written...

If an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball's great umpire baiters, such as Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, and Dick Williams, while ejecting any number of the game's elite-once tearing a hamstring in the process. He was the first Jewish umpire in American League history, and probably the first to eject his own father from the officials' dressing room. But whatever Clark was doing-officiating at Nolan Ryan's three hundredth win, Cal Ripken's record...

From the team's inception in 1903, the New York Yankees were a floundering group that played as second-class citizens to the New York Giants. With four winning seasons to date, the team was purchased in 1915 by Jacob Ruppert and his partner, Cap "Til" Huston. Three years later, when Ruppert hired Miller Huggins as manager, the unlikely partnership of the two figures began, one that set into motion the Yankees' run as the dominant baseball franchise of the 1920s and the rest of the twentieth century, capturing six American League pennants with Huggins at the helm and four more during Ruppert's...

If an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball's great umpire baiters. Called Out but Safe is Clark's outspoken and often hilarious account of his life in baseball from umpire school through the highlights to the inglorious end of his stellar career.