"Jalen DeLuca loves baseball. Unfortunately, he can't afford to stay on the travel team. So, Jalen decides to take matters into his own hands and he sneaks into the home of New York Yankees star second baseman, James Yager, and steals a couple of balls. If he can sell them, he'll be able to keep himself on the team. Jalen's scheme goes wrong when Yager catches him. But Jalen has a secret: his baseball genius. He can analyze and predict almost exactly...

The baseball is an amazing plaything. We can grip it and hold it so many different ways, and even the slightest calibration can turn an ordinary pitch into a weapon to thwart the greatest hitters in the world. Each pitch has its own history, evolving through the decades as the masters pass it down to the next generation. From the earliest days of the game, when Candy Cummings dreamed up the curveball while flinging clamshells on a Brooklyn beach,...

Mariano Rivera tells his story for the first time: the championships, the bosses (including the Boss), the rivalries, the struggles of being a Latino baseball player in the United States, and of maintaining Christian values in professional athletics. The twelve-time All-Star discusses what it's like to run up to that mound with the game, or the season, squarely on his shoulders.

Jared Richards is great at baseball video games, but when he loses a bet to his best friend Jared is forced to tryout for his school's baseball team--and finds out that playing the game for real is very different from virtual reality.

This book introduces stories of some of the best pitchers in MLB history.

The knuckleball -- so difficult to hit but also difficult to control and catch -- has been a part of major league baseball since the early 1900s and continues to be used to this day. This remarkable and unusual pitch is the instrument of a special breed of pitcher, a determined athlete possessing tremendous concentration, self confidence, and a willingness to weather all kinds of adversity. Here, Richard A. Johnson provides an informal history of...

In the late 1950s, acclaimed sportswriter Pat Jordan was a young pitching phenom, blowing away opposing batters for his Fairfield, Connecticut, high school baseball team. Fifteen major league clubs offered him a contract, but it was the Milwaukee Braves who won out, signing Jordan to a $45,000 bonus-one of the largest paid to any new player by the organization-and shipping him off to McCook, Nebraska, to play for their Class D ball club. It did not...

Malcolm loves baseball and science, but his teammates are not always pleased with the ideas he comes up with--until he uses science to come up with a winning pitch, the knuckleball.

J.C. is excited to join the new baseball team at the community center and show off his pitching skills, but his enthusiasm turns to disappointment when Vicky is chosen to take the mound first.

The Detroit Tigers pitcher and veteran umpire share their respective views on the June 2, 2010 game that was entered into the record books with what the umpire believes was his erroneous call on the final out, tracing their career stories while imparting the significance of the game in their lives.