by Richard Beverage (2011)
"The Los Angeles Angels won 14 Pacific Coast League pennants and stood as the league's premier franchise. This year-by-year chronicle of the Angels from 1903 to 1957 includes an overview of the PCL and a wealth of statistical information, including an all-time player roster, a list of important team records, lineups, and attendance information"--Provided by publisher.
Zack Hample
The holy grail, the fountain of youth, the golden fleece, and the baseball: rarely do objects inspire such madness. The Baseball is a salute to the ball, filled with insider trivia, anecdotes, and generations of ball-induced insanity.
Peter Morris
The Game Behind the Scenes continues and concludes Peter Morris's superb encyclopedia of the national pastime. The initial volume, The Game on the Field, was called by Library Journal "charming, densely packed, yet entirely accessible.... This is heaven for fans of the game and a required addition to all baseball collections." Endlessly fascinating, impeccably researched, and engagingly written, this treasure trove will surprise, delight, and educate even the most knowledgeable fan by dispelling cherished myths and revealing the source of many of baseball's features that we now take for granted. Together, both volumes of A Game of Inches contain nearly a thousand entries that illuminate the origins of items ranging from catchers' masks to hook slides to intentional walks to cork-center baseballs to the reserve clause of baseball's Basic Agreement. The volume on The Game Behind the Scenes concentrates on ballparks, fans, marketing, statistics, the building of teams, and other related aspects of the game--but this is much more than just a reference guide. Award-winning author Peter Morris explains the context that led each new item to emerge when it did, and chronicles the often surprising responses to these innovations. Of few books can it genuinely be said that once you start reading, it's hard to put it down, but A Game of Inches is one of them. It belongs in the pantheon of great baseball books, and will give any reader a deeper appreciation of why baseball matters so much to Americans. - Publisher.
Ronald M. Selter
"This work seeks to address an often ignored factor in the study of early 20th century baseball, namely, what was the ballpark like? The author uses original research to answer this question"--Provided by publisher.
John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold
This book provides the first full overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic events from 1896 to the present day. It contains 20 specially commissioned and original essays written by a team of distinguished authors from the UK and overseas. Blending critical conceptual insight with grounded case study, "Olympic Cities "explores the historical experience of staging the Olympics from the point of view of the host city. Its contents are divided into three parts. The first provides overviews of the Olympic events from the inception of the modern Games to the present, with parallel but complementary chapters on the progress of the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games, and the cultural and artistic festivals. The second part comprises systematic surveys of five key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: financing the Games; place promotion; accommodating spectacle; tourism; urban regeneration. The final part consists of chronologically-arranged portraits of host cities: St Louis (1904); London (1908); Berlin (1936); Montreal (1976); Los Angeles (1984); Barcelona (1992); Sydney (2000); Salt Lake City (2002), Athens (2004). A substantive introduction and afterword by the editors supply the context for the different chapters and draw out the key lessons to be learned.