Read about Alex Rodriguez

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Mark Stewart

A biography of the slugger from Venezuela, known as the Big Cat, who won the National League championship for most runs batted in and most home runs in 1996.

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Harvey Rosenfeld

Since May 30, 1982, Cal Ripken, Jr., of the Baltimore Orioles hasn't missed a game - a marathon performance during which he has won the 1982 Rookie of the Year Award, two American League MVP awards, an All-Star Game MVP award, two Gold Gloves, and a World Series title. Now Cal is about to topple baseball's most unbreakable record - Lou Gehrig's incredible streak of 2,130 consecutive games played. Iron Man chronicles Junior's ascent to superstardom. What was it like playing baseball with a father as manager and a brother as a double-play combination? How did his father's firing and his brother's trade affect him? What made him choose the strike over the Streak?

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Lou Sabin. Illustrated with photos

Records are the heart and soul of baseball. In over 100 years of major-league history, a long list of remarkable records have been written -- and rewritten -- by the game's hard-throwing, hard hitting and hard-running superheroes. This book is about the breaking of records and the men who broke them. Here you'll read about super-hurlers like Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale; batting champs like Henry Aaron, Willie Mays and Ted Williams; and champion base-stealer Lou Brock. - Introduction.

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Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising

Late on the afternoon of June 29, 1905, Archibald Graham bolted out of the New York Giants' dugout and took his position in right field for the first and only time as a major league baseball player. He played only an inning and a half. The Giants made their last out as Graham waited in the on-deck circle. The 27-year-old journeyman, who was affectionately known as "Moonlight" because of his off-season occupation as a medical student, was sent back to the minors and, presumably, into permanent obscurity. In the mid-1980s, nearly 20 years after Graham's death, author W. P. Kinsella stumbled across a single line entry in the Baseball Encyclopedia while he was researching a book about Shoeless Joe Jackson. It was the name Moonlight Graham that first caught Kinsella's attention, but the fact that Graham never got to bat in the majors made him even more interesting to a fiction writer. Graham became a secondary character in Kinsella's book, Shoeless Joe. In 1989, Hollywood director and screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson decided that Graham deserved a larger audience. In Robinson's cinematic classic, Field of Dreams, Academy Award-winning actor Burt Lancaster played Doc Graham in what would be his final screen appearance. The once little-known country doctor from Chisholm, Minnesota, became an international icon---a man whose longing to bat in the majors became a reality on the dream-inspired diamond near the town of Dyersville, Iowa. More than a million people have since traveled to the corn-framed movie set in hopes that some of Graham's baseball magic might be channeled into their own lives. He became so well known as a ballplayer that a film crew traveled from Tokyo, Japan, to do a documentary about him and a California company trademarked his name for its line of baseball-themed apparel. But what's the real story of Moonlight Graham? Why did a quiet North Carolina native, whose family was well known throughout the state, spend the bulk of his adult life in an isolated Iron Range community not far from the Canadian border? In Chasing Moonlight, the authors follow Graham's life from his youth spent with his younger brother, Frank Porter Graham, who became the president of the University of North Carolina and a United States senator; through his career as a medical student in Baltimore and New York while he played baseball at the same time; through his minor league successes in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In Graham's Minnesota years, the authors reveal a man whose pioneering research on children's blood pressure is still used at institutions such as the Mayo Clinic and whose quiet philanthropy made him beloved in his community. Although the line between fact and fiction has been blurred with respect to the events of Graham's life, Chasing Moonlight shows that the real Moonlight Graham was just as iconic and endearing as the fictional character. - Publisher.